For the month of January, 2025, I enlisted in Infinity27's Design Bootcamp to learn game development in a professional, functioning, studio. Over the bootcamp, our work was being produced within a separate source control strand of Samsara. Topics covered include Level Design, Quest Design and Dialogue Design. This resulted in my quest, The Poison Arrow.
Samsara is an action-adventure souls-like video game inspired by Tibetan Buddhism. With reincarnation being a big factor in Buddhism, Samsara has a unique feature of respawning the player as one of six avatars totally dependant on the player's choice through their previous life. Basing the game off of Buddhism gives a vast array of inspiration for core features and stories within the game. My quest, 'The Poison Arrow' is based on the similarly named parable 'The Poisoned Arrow'.
To summarise 'The Poisoned Arrow', the parable describes a man injured by the poisoned arrow, yet he denies any treatment. He demands specific details about the shooter and the weapon before he allows any help. These details include the archer's name, ethnicity, height, and the material of the bow. Ultimately, the man succumbs to the poison never learning information on the archer. A detailed description can be found here: https://w.wiki/D7Hx
My quest, The Poison Arrow, follows Rdo Rje's pursuit of finding information about the archer who shot him with a poisoned arrow. The information he requires include the archer's mask colour, the food the archer eats, the wood used on the campfire, and the archer's dominate hand. The player must navigate a large cavern, solving puzzles that range from platforming to riddles. After each puzzle, the player can locate one piece of information. Two of these puzzles include a dialogue system that I believe does not exist anywhere else in Samsara, an investigation dialogue. This is where the player has a range of items that they can analyse through dialogue selection, giving a description of an item and letting the player select another if it is not the information they need. This system is akin to classic text adventure games and adds a well needed break between the puzzles and combat that fill the level. Upon finding each piece of information, the player can return to Rdo Rje and inform him of the findings, however, when returning with the last piece of information, the player returns to find Rdo Rje deceased. If the player finds all information before talking to Rdo Rje, special dialogue options appear, enabling the player to reveal all information found. If the player has found all information and navigated through all the dialogue upon speaking to Rdo Rje for the first time, Rdo Rje will pass away. There is no outcome where Rdo Rje survives. There is one twist, upon completing the quest, the player is awarded an Bilva Fruit, a healing item from Samsara. This reveals that Rdo Rje could have healed himself all along.
Soon I will be transferring The Poison Arrow to the main branch of Samsara's source control, this means it is possible that it could be in an upcoming update! A post about my experience on this will come once it has been completed.