The game takes place a number of years after the events of EoSD. Flandre?s 500th birthday approaches, and the SDM residents prepare for a centennial celebration. However, Flandre is still accosted by night terrors that prevent her from feeling well enough for the occasion. The player must guide Flandre through the overworld, unlocking dream worlds, and clearing them, in order to defeat the terrors within.
In SDU, you play as Flandre. The game consists of both adventure elements (exploration, interaction, puzzle-solving) in the overworld, as well as more traditional action gameplay in the dream world. Currently, only the first dream world, The Graveyard, is available in the demo. (You can visit the Forest of Magic in the overworld, after completing The Graveyard, but the dream world version is still in development). The game is an overhead 2.5D action-adventure game, originally based on Binding of Isaac. One big difference being that you can save your game after completing a floor, and you can replay previously completed floors. Another one being that the game currently doesn't use any procedural generation (I don't expect that the story mode ever will, but at some point, I would like to make a survival mode that does).
Admittedly, the game is a bit thin on enemy variety; I barely have the drawing skills to do sprites. Also, the first couple of stages are sluggish, since I fit a somewhat exaggerated upgrade curve into the demo. There are a number of extra fire patterns and spell cards that you can unlock; unfortunately, I haven't developed the UI for showing spell/pattern unlocks, but you can get an idea of what's available in the second demo video.
You can download the game (about 10 MB) as well as check out the demo play videos and the manual (PDF) on the site (impulseeye.com).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbJlRa9T62cShortly after I published v0.1 (literally that evening), I got OpenAL-Soft to build from source and link as a static library, so v0.2 will no longer require Visual C++ 2012 redist. The manual should also soon have descriptions of fire patterns & spellcards available.
