Teradoña and the Caves of Nevermind

A long term javascript game project in isometric perspective by me and my brother.

Somewhere in 2016, my brother and I started this game project. The first big since Guac’ A Mole for Nintendo’s Wii U.
We had given up on console release, Wii U was fading, the prices for developer kits and age ratings was too high and the release procedures extremely complicated.
Our next game we planned for PC (and still are), and probably Xbox since Windows apps are possible to play on it as well.

Our first ideas was simply to make an isometric game, with simple platforming and some puzzling. We wanted it to use the isometric perspective to make ”3D” levels. And we got an idea about rising lava, to run from, making it natural and necessary to climb upwards in the levels.
Also, a randomizing of many levels making it replayable as the next play-through would give you mostly entirely new levels.
There are three different zones, green, blue and red, with different graphics and themes, which will be more adverse in the finished version than it is yet.
The rising lava gave us the idea that wooden platforms could start burning and be destroyed before the lava had risen up there, giving the player more timing and speed motives.
We addded spikes with timers, buttons to switch them off, different kinds of falling blocks and a monster in the form of a bouncing skull. Later we made a more evil version of the bouncing skull that kills the player instantly.

The additions didn’t stop. We came up with a lot of stuff and made a lot of it happen. Another monster was added, a sort of stone statue with spinning knives moving around, damaging more, but also with the power to push the player along, ultimately squishing them against walls or pushing them off ledges.
The new things also included several new kinds of switch buttons, timers, alternating or ”moving” platforms, pushable blocks and monsters, more flammable blocks, fire spreading, exploding blocks, growing snake blocks, gas and spikes.
There’s over a hundred levels designed, a lot more including test levels.

We met tough periods, where nothing was done for a while, and we had to reprogram the whole player state machine which took an entire summer, to get rid of bugs.
Eventually we realized that there was too much going on in the game, and had to revise it quite a bit.
We removed the ”3D”-element to make levels smaller, simpler and allow better overview. This made the rising lava problematic, so we had to remove it, thereby removing the natural (and sometimes forced) timer.
We removed a haze that gave a depth to the levels, but it isn’t really necessary when they’re flat. The haze was also simply a crude mask with varying alpha and not at all a shader or any pixel recolouring. That kind of graphic control is extremely slow in javascript. So the haze was actually doubling the amount of objects drawn…
The frame rate is varying greatly from different computers, and frankly, a game in 2D should run at least 60 fps on any computer, even if they’re a little old, so we have a problem there.
All the cut downs fixed the performance issue very little. Most levels became less straining, but we didn’t have consistent high performance exactly.

A long time we have ignored this issue, from time to time we just continued building and adding things to the game, thinking that we will be able to solve it sooner or later.
But tests using webGL for drawing graphics have prooven semi satisfactory. Using javascript and maybe more importantly running the game on canvas in a browser window still seem to pull down the performance.

Here are three youtube videos you can watch if you want to see the game in action:

We will add more videos soon, please take a look at and follow our youtube channel Madskull Creations for updates on this game and future projects.

Work on Teradoña is on a great pause now, because we’ve realized we have to rewrite it entirely in C#, and we will most likely use MonoGame.
I started studying C# and some other things in 2023 and put Teradoña on hold. The school project game Treasure Cave has since taken most of my programming time.

I still have hope for this game, there’s so much work put into it, so many game mechanisms, so much time put into programming the controls of the character and testing, so much graphics made. And I still have so many ideas, and sometimes get really into the idea of fixing some bug or adding that small feature I’ve been thinking of.
It’s a darling I can’t kill.
But even if that would have to be the reality eventually, things I’ve learned during the time coding this has been invaluable, and parts of this game can be used in future projects.