I have been silently following the updates of your game . Playing Eye of the Beholder and Black Crypt on the Amiga , years ago , gave me an appreciation of just how fun these games can be. I spent more hours than I can remember shooting arrows thought metal barred doors or closing doors on the enemies. I, for one ,am looking forward to playing a good dungeon crawler again.
I think the key to these games is the atmosphere. Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, etc all had this amazing immersion - you truly felt like you were deep underground in a dangerous situation. And they did all of that with the simplest graphics and audio. Sometimes with video games, less is definitely more. Recreating the kind of feel that those games had is definitely not an easy task though... Oh wow - I never played Black Crypt in my Amiga days. I'm going to run that up in an emulator and get stuck into it
So holidays are over and, unfortunately, I was way too optimistic about the amount of progress I could make in two weeks. Still, I'm not entirely disappointed as I did manage to get some VERY major stuff done, including a great deal of code soul-searching and rewriting. I'm now working almost exclusively on the environment; building each of the game's locations and working out puzzles, and treasures, and secrets. I'm feeling confident that the end is definitely in sight now, and that the product I'm building is going to be a lot more solid and stable thanks to the work I've put in over the break. I've made some fairly considerable changes to the game lately too, not least of which is in the area of its story and general mood. I have a tendancy to write on the humourous side and then dial it back for fear of people not taking what I've done seriously. I decided to just drop those concerns and go with what my gut was telling me to do. The result is a much simpler, more "pure" RPG story with a lot more heart and (hopefully) a few more laughs. The result feels "lighter" somehow and definitely more entertaining. So that's it. Back to work.
I've been thinking lately that it might be fun to do a time-lapse video of the level creation process, for those that are interested in the journey... not just the destination It happens that tonight I had to build a very small sub-level (Location 9b, to be precise), so I decided this was the perfect opportunity to play with the time-lapse stuff. So, without further fluff, here it is! I'll definitely be doing more of these on some of the BIG levels.
Coldfire Keep looks very promising; I wish there was some possibility this could be played on the iPhone/iPod small screen. As an aside, I know reception to Descend RPG was lukewarm so I'm glad to see the developer is keeping at things.
I'm intrigued as to how this will look on retina iPads. I love low-res, old school gaming, but I can't stand the blurriness of non-native resolutions. I notice it's being made at 1024x768 so hopefully that will double up cleanly.
Actually the game's "native" resolution is 2048x1536. All of the artwork has been targeted to that resolution and it scales down for the 1024x768 screens.
Thought I'd post a few of David's concept sketches for creatures he's been modelling for Coldfire Keep. I think they're pretty neat, and it's a shame for them to go to waste. Getting VERY close to finished on this thing now... pretty exciting stuff!
I finally got around to recording a little bit of gameplay footage for everyone to check out. Let me know your thoughts. Note that this is just running on my Mac - hence the mouse pointer. iOS version is of course touch control.
Hi Geppetto,this looks great love the looks of the dungeons,would like to see more creatures although surprise is one of the best parts with these games.Is it possible to say how many dungeons/levels or what kind of size game we're looking at?
Thanks! The character portraits (and most of the UI) are the work of David Hattori. He also did the creature modelling. Talented guy. Definintely keeping most of the creatures to myself for now. I've tried my best to make them meaningful to the story and environment though with both "introduced", intelligent enemies, and "natural" enemies (like the Giant Rats) that would just inhabit this place. As far as the size of the game, I just don't know yet, as I'm still building it. I basically have this idea of "Locations" rather than just "Levels", so you might visit locations called 8a, 8b, 8c which all exist on the same level but might be explored completely out of sequence because you could enter them from above, or below. Anyway, the point is that in the end I might have maybe 14-15 levels, but that will probably be close to 30 different locations (don't quote me on that, just made up figures). Mind you, some of the locations are very small. If you saw that "Making Of" video I did, that was the complete 9b location, which could be explored in about 30 seconds. Thanks for the positive feedback! I'm looking forward to you playing it too
Hey gepetto, are we going to have to randomly click every pixel to find secrets or are the spots we have to click going to stand out? The spots you click after tearing the banners in the video don't look like they stand out at all, and I don't know about you, but a game where I have to click every spot on the wall quickly gets shelved. Anyway game looks awesome, just hope it doesn't tun ino a wall clicking fest.
