A Labyrinth, a Ritual and a Sea of Lava

Planning the Demon Castle

The Demon Castle is the last theme left, so before building anything I planned out all three floors. It’s dark stone all the way through.

The first floor is the castle’s outer defenses. The edge of the map is the outer wall itself. I come in at the middle of the south side, into a ring that runs between the outer wall and the inner wall. The inner gate is right next to where I enter, but a short piece of wall closes off that side, so I have to walk all the way around the ring to get to it. Past the gate is a maze of jagged walls and dead ends, and in the middle of it is the courtyard with the way down.

The second floor is the ritual halls, where the cultists opened the way to hell. The halls near the edges are plain cold stone. Closer to the center, cracks in the floor start glowing with lava, and the way down is a rift in the big ritual chamber at the center.

The third floor is hell. It’s lava plateaus like the Mountain’s terraces, except every plateau is reached by a stone bridge over the lava instead of a rope bridge over mist. The Final Demon waits there. His fight already has five phases and plenty of specials, so the only things of his that might change are his art and his backdrop.

The Demon Castle, step 1: a ring and a labyrinth

I started building the castle’s first floor. The edge of the map is the outer wall, two squares thick. I come in through the main gate in the middle of the south side, into the outer bailey, a ring four squares wide with castle wall on both sides. The inner gate is only a few steps away, but a stretch of wall across the ring is in the way, so I have to walk the whole ring round to reach it.

The first try at the inside was a maze, with branches and dead ends, and that’s not what I drew. What I wanted was a labyrinth: one way through, no branches, winding back and forth until it has filled the whole space. Now the path from the inner gate is a single passage, three squares wide, that snakes through every part of the inner area and ends at the courtyard in the middle, where the way down is. It’s different every time. A third of the passage squares get a corner of wall sticking out, so the walls look jagged instead of ruled. The weapon vault and the chest room sit in the two top corners, each with a single door off the labyrinth. For now it’s drawn with the old castle tiles.

The Demon Castle, step 2: the ritual halls

The second floor is rings of halls around one big ritual chamber. Rooms of all sizes line the edges, each with a door onto a gallery that runs all the way around, and some of them open into the room next door too. The weapon vault and the chest room sit in the side rows, one on each side, anywhere up and down. One door on each side leads from the gallery into the inner hall that circles the chamber, and the chamber itself has only one way in: a great door in the middle of its north wall. I start in the south gallery, so the way to the rift is always the long way around.

On the first walk through there was no reason at all to go into the rooms, since the gallery took me straight around. So now the gallery is cut by walls in four places: on each side of where I start, and low down on each side. Every cut sits at the wall between two rooms, with a door between them, so the only way past is out of the gallery into one room, through to the next, and back out on the other side. The doors into the inner hall moved up near the top of each side, and the vault and the chest room stay up high, so there’s always room below for a cut.

Cracks glowing with lava run across the floor, almost none at the edges and more and more toward the middle; those I can walk over. A few wide fissures of lava cut into the chamber and part of the way across the inner hall, and those block me but not my view. Every fissure is checked as it’s made, and if it would cut anything off it’s taken back out. The rift itself sits in a clear patch in the middle of the chamber. It’s still the old castle tiles for now.

The Demon Castle, step 3: hell

The third floor is a sea of lava with plateaus of rock standing in it, in three bands across the map. The edges of every plateau are worn away into the lava, up to three squares deep, with rounded corners, so none of them look like boxes. Plateaus never touch. The only way from one to the next is a stone bridge, two squares wide.

I start on the middle plateau of the south band. Each band is bridged end to end, but only one bridge goes up to the next band, at its far east or west end, and the next band’s way up is at the opposite end. So the way north crosses the whole map twice. The north band is the Final Demon’s plateau in the middle against the north edge, with a smaller plateau on each side bridged to it, and the way up from the middle band lands on one of those. Two plateaus somewhere along the way are kept roomy enough for the weapon vault and the chest room.

When the Demon flees partway through his fight, he runs to another room, and on this floor the plateaus are the rooms, so he’ll be off on some other plateau across the lava. He used to pick any room I wasn’t standing in, which on this floor could have been the plateau he was already on if I stabbed him from a bridge, so now he always runs to a plateau that’s neither mine nor his. Enemies stand on the plateaus, never on the bridges. It’s still the old castle tiles for now.

The Demon Castle, step 4: dark stone and a sea of lava

The castle got its own tiles. The first two floors are built the same way as the prison keep, with tall walls seen from the front so anyone standing right behind one is partly hidden, but in dark, warm charcoal stone instead of the keep’s cold gray. The outer bailey on the first floor is scorched cobbles, the labyrinth is worn paving, and the ritual halls on the second floor are polished slabs. Getting the stone textures took a few tries, since the first batch kept coming back with a spotlight shining in the middle of every one.

Lava belongs to hell alone, so I took it out of the first two floors. The fissures that used to cut across the ritual chamber are gone, and the weapon vault and the chest room are walled in instead of ringed with lava. The cracks in the second floor’s halls stayed, but now they’re thin, jagged cracks in the stone with a faint red glow coming up from below.

Hell is a sea of lava with the plateaus standing in it, and every plateau has a rock cliff dropping into the lava along its south edge. The rock was the hard part. The first version was a repeating pattern of scales, and a cleaned-up texture still showed a grid, so I had the whole shoreline made again without the old rock to copy. Now the plateaus are an even, dark reddish-brown stone that matches the cliffs exactly. The stone bridges cross the lava between them.

Hell’s lava starts to glow

The lava doesn’t sit still anymore. It slowly breathes: the hot cracks between the crust plates brighten and turn yellow, the dark crust gets a little darker, and then it all dims again, every two seconds or so. The whole sea glows together, the lava along the shore included, so there are no seams where a plateau’s edge meets the open lava.

The plateaus looked like boxes. Partly that was their shape, worn into the lava one square at a time, and partly the shore tiles, which turned every step into a sharp right angle. Now each side of a plateau swells and dips over several squares instead of jittering, the corners are cut round, and a lone square of rock sticking out or a one-square bite of lava gets smoothed away. I also drew the shore over again. The edge between the rock and the lava is a curve, so an outer corner is round and an inner corner is a rounded bite, with a glowing seam along it and a dark cliff face dropping into the lava under every south edge.

The bridges were gray slabs, and since they could cross anywhere the two plateaus faced each other, some of them ran along a plateau’s worn edge and looked like they were lying on the rock. Now every bridge crosses the middle of the gap and only the gap, and each end lands on a short jetty of rock that juts out to meet it. The stone is a dark warm brown to match the plateaus, with the lava’s orange light along the underside.

A pentagram for the rift

The way down on the second floor finally looks like what it is. In the middle of the ritual chamber there’s now a pentagram burned into the floor, five squares across, point down inside a double ring with marks between the rings. A dark tear with a ragged red rim sits at its center, and that’s the way down. The whole thing pulses slowly from a dim crimson to a bright orange glow and back, every line in step. The glowing cracks in the floor stay clear of it.

A dead forest and a cave, started

What lies outside the castle’s walls has been a plain stone pattern up to now. On the first floor it’s going to be a dead forest: when the Demon was summoned, it killed everything around the castle. I made the dead trees, burnt stumps, fallen logs, boulders, bones and cinders in PixelLab, and a script lays them out on gray ash, the trees thick out in the distance and thinning to a scorched clearing of stumps and bones near the wall, with an old road of broken flagstones running from the main gate off the south edge. The objects came back in all sorts of browns and pinks, so the script pulls them all into one ash-and-charcoal look.

The second floor is underground, so its border will be the bedrock the ritual halls were carved out of, with cave pockets I can see but never reach: stalagmites, rubble, a toppled pillar, a dead cultist and his burnt-down candles. PixelLab gave me a crater, a scale pattern and flat navy for the cave’s rock in two tries, so the script draws the rock itself.

I also wrote the prompts for seven new battle backdrops, one for each kind of ground in the castle and one for each boss, and music prompts for hell and for the Final Demon.

No vault in hell

Hell had two of its plateaus set aside for the weapon vault and the chest room, the way every other floor does. I took them out. Hell is the last floor of the run, there’s nothing left to save a new weapon for, so its plateaus are all just plateaus now.

The borders are in

Both castle borders are in the game now. The dead forest looks great. The cave border took so long to draw that it never finished, so I sped it up from hours to about ten seconds. A bug was also keeping every prop out of the cave pockets, so I fixed that too. I made the rock top read as rough bedrock instead of cobblestones, pulled the purple stalagmites into the castle’s charcoal, and added a few more pockets around the edge.

I also wrote prompts for 41 props for the castle’s floors: siege wreckage, braziers and banners for the outer bailey; a gargoyle head, a gibbet cage and a demon statue for the labyrinth and courtyard; candles, altars, idols and grimoire shelves for the ritual halls; and obsidian spikes, charred skeletons and lava vents for hell. PixelLab is drawing them now.

I’ve decided the victory and defeat screens need a look across every theme too: at least one defeat scene for each floor of each dungeon, and new victory scenes where they’d help.

Seven new backdrops for the castle

The castle’s battle backdrops came back from Leonardo, and every kind of ground now has its own: the outer bailey under a red sky, a bend in the labyrinth with runes scratched into the wall, the courtyard with its stairway down, a ritual hall with a horned idol and black candles, the ritual chamber with its pentagram and rift, a plateau in the lava sea, and the Demon’s own plateau with his obsidian throne. The Imp Swarm fights in the courtyard and the Fallen Champion in the ritual chamber. The Demon only fights in front of his throne when the fight starts on his plateau. Once he’s fled to another plateau, the fight happens on plain hell rock. The old castle room and throne room are gone.

PixelLab finished all 41 props. Six didn’t read well (stakes that were barely there, arrows that looked like reeds, battlement stones glowing like ore, a bedroll that was just a red tube, a rune circle much too bright, and a broken sword that wasn’t broken), so I redrew them.

The castle gets its furniture

All 41 props are in the castle now. The outer bailey is littered with what’s left of the siege: tipped-over carts, charred barricades, fallen battlement stones, braziers, weapon racks, war banners, arrows stuck in the ground, and the bones of soldiers who didn’t make it. The labyrinth only gets a little, so the way through stays clear: some rubble, a gargoyle head, now and then a gibbet cage, a rune stone or a demon statue against a wall. The courtyard has real stairs going down at last, with a brazier on each side, a statue in every corner and an old well.

On the second floor every room along the edges is something the cult left behind: sleeping quarters with bedrolls and dropped robes, a library of grimoire shelves and a lectern, a shrine with an altar and idols, or a store room with a cauldron and skull piles. Crimson banners hang along the gallery and the inner hall. Around the rift there are ritual tables, two idols, candles, and a brazier in each corner of the chamber. I recolored the rune circle to the same dark red as the glowing cracks. Hell’s plateaus get obsidian spikes, rock pillars, lava vents, brimstone and charred skeletons, with the ground around the Demon left clear.

I also found and removed some small lava pools hidden in the walls of the first two floors, left over from the old castle. Lava belongs in hell only.

Zooming the bird’s-eye view

The map tester’s bird’s-eye camera shows the whole map at once, which is great for seeing a floor’s shape but too small to check the details. Now the mouse wheel zooms it: scrolling away zooms in a step at a time, down to squares twice their normal size, and the camera follows my character while zoomed in. Scrolling back goes out to the whole map again. bracket-lib threw the mouse wheel away entirely, so this needed one more small patch to my copy of it.

Props in the Sewer’s border

The Sewer keeps going past the edge of the play area, with rooms and tunnels cut into the border so the map doesn’t just stop. Those rooms were bare, though, and they looked fake next to the dressed-up ones I can actually walk through. Now they get the same treatment: pipes, lanterns and slime on the walls, cobwebs, puddles and grates on the floor, and piles of barrels, crates, sacks, rubble, mushrooms and straw along the walls. Since nobody can walk in there, those piles can go anywhere without blocking a path.

Hell gets its fire back

Hell’s props weren’t working. They were scattered evenly over every plateau, and a lot of them were broken swords and bones that had nothing to do with hell. Now there’s more of a plan to it. Jagged black obsidian clumps right where the rock meets the lava, most with a tall rock pillar behind them. The middle of each plateau is mostly open, with a lava vent or two giving off red cracks that run out across the ground, plus hellfire burning out of the rock, black obelisks with glowing red runes, iron stakes hung with chains, puffs of sulfur smoke and scorch marks. The swords, skeletons and skulls are gone.

The libraries on the second floor got bigger too. The old bookshelves were tiny, so now tall bookcases two squares high line the whole north wall, there are reading tables covered in open books in the middle of the room, and books are piled on the floor.

Hell gets emptier, and its bridges turn to rock

Even with a plan, hell felt cluttered, like a campsite instead of a wasteland. It should feel barren and scary. So I cut way back: no more sulfur smoke (a gray cartoon puff on a little cone that looked like a toy volcano) and no more brimstone heaps. Each plateau now gets at most one lava vent, one hellfire and one obelisk or chained stake, and only the bigger ones get any. The obsidian clumps on the rim are fewer and smaller, and there are fewer scorch marks. The lava vent also lost the stiff gray stick of smoke poking out of it.

The bridges were the next problem. They were light gray-brown planks with straight edges, like a wooden boardwalk over the lava. Hell doesn’t have builders, so a bridge there should be the land itself reaching across. Now the bridges are the plateau’s own rock, with ragged edges spilling out over the lava and a hot orange rim where rock meets lava. Under the south side of each bridge you can see the rock’s dark underside, with jagged spikes hanging down into the lava and glowing at their tips. I tried three times to get a new black rock texture out of PixelLab, but it drew cobblestones every time, and the last one looked just like the lava, so the new pieces are drawn by a script from the plateau rock instead.

The grimoire shelf in the store rooms also got fixed. Its frame was almost black, so on the dark floor the books looked like they were lying on the ground. Now it has a brown wood frame and a dark outline.

One fix after that: where a bridge met a plateau, its ragged edge and the underside ran past the end of the lava and over the plateau rock. Now the plateau’s edge is drawn on top there, so the bridge’s edges stay over the lava.

Five new songs

Five more songs from Leonardo are in. The Demon Castle’s first two floors finally have their own music instead of borrowing the dungeon’s, and hell gets a separate track. Boss fights now have their own battle theme, and the Final Demon has one just for him, so his fight sounds different from every other boss. Losing a run plays a short defeat piece once instead of going silent. The only song still missing is the Battle Arena’s.

New faces for the castle

Every enemy in the Demon Castle got a new look: the Imp, the Hellhound, the Cultist, the Fallen Knight, the Demon Guard, the Fallen Champion and the Final Demon himself. I liked all of the new designs, so the job was mostly fixing animations. The Imp and the Hellhound got better hurt animations, and the five ordinary castle enemies finally flinch when they’re hit, like the enemies in every other theme. The Final Demon got a new overhead axe chop, a new double swing, and a new move for his Counter: he raises his axe into a guard and starts to glow, so you can see the counter coming before you swing at him.

The Fallen Champion is a boss now, drawn bigger like the other theme bosses, and he finally has a special. Fallen Strike: he lifts his greatsword high and slams it into the ground in a burst of red, and if it hits, it leaves you slowed.

The Final Demon’s fight has six phases, one for each Blade you stab into him. Before, his six idle animations were supposed to show him getting worse, but they all looked the same. Now his look never changes except for one thing: each stab leaves another gold-hilted Blade sticking out of him, and a script keeps them stuck to his body through every move he makes, from his attacks right through to his death. It could be better, but it works for now.

In a real fight he looked small, so he’s drawn bigger now, the biggest of all the bosses. When he readies his Counter, its icon now shows up under his name with the turns it has left, so you know not to swing at him.

The castle’s first bot run

With the castle finished, I ran the bots through it at five Blades, fifteen runs for each class. The old castle won 37% of the time and I was aiming for about 44%, but the new one came out at 57%. The first two floors almost never kill anyone: only two of the 75 runs died there. Nearly every loss happens on the third floor, in hell or at the Final Demon. His fight didn’t change, so the new floors must be costing much less health on the way down, and players reach him in better shape. The Amazon wins 87% of her runs, while the Barbarian and the Hunter only manage 40%. It’s easier than I planned, but I’m leaving it there for now and moving on.