The deadline for the IGF – the Independent Games Festival – is a week away, and then the other competition we are excited about, on IndiePub.com, is at the end of the month. So we’ve been working non-stop to get a build out for that. I’m really excited about the new build: It’s got a nice smooth progression, none of this throw-everything-we-have-into-every-level stuff. Instead, it walks you through it gradually, so that each new level adds just one new thing or trick or weapon or skill. It keeps the forward momentum going at a nice pace. My friend Joe, who is a designer at Paragon on ‘City of Heroes,’ mentioned getting sucked into the “Just one more level, I want to see what’s added in this one” mode, which is exactly what we were shooting for! How many levels do we have? A full 24! 7 tile-sets, 6 monsters, 2 traps, one power-up, 4 weapons, and a whole mess of dialogue! There’s still a lot to do for the final game, but I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished so far and how well it holds together.
(Oh, and wait ’til you hear all the new music that Nick’s been working on. It just rocks! (In a Nordic folksy kind of way, of course.))
I found about your game through cgtalk, and your friend from Paragon was right! I kept wanting to see how much harder the next level would be. The difficulty ramps up at a good steady pace.
A little tough to play with a mouse cause of the amount of clicking required but i think working with your finger would be a snap.
Not sure if its a bug, but it took a long time before I finally saw a minotaur break through a wall when trapped.
I like that the kobolds steal the gold, but I don’t really feel like it matters too much. If anything it keeps them off my back which helps me get the other monsters while they are running around getting the gold. Not sure what you could do, but if there was more incentive to collect the gold i think that would help.
Thanks for the game! It must take some time to make each of these levels.
Comment by ryan andrews — October 13, 2010 @ 2:06 am
We have had the gold comment a lot actually, but we have a store coming up where you spend all your hard earned cash on power ups, weapons, traps and sorts of nifty stuff.
There’s a lot of other ideas where you can use the cash for actually, but the only concrete thing we have and that is actually being developped, is the store.
Making the levels themselves is pretty easy. We use Unity for this game, so I wrote a little Editor script where we can easily set up some global parameters for a level like tileset, monsters, weapons, how to generate the labyrinth (procedural or non procedural), where to spawn traps, monsters, Svenn, etc… So creating new levels is a breeze actually; however, balancing them levels, now that takes a while.
Comment by Kristof — October 13, 2010 @ 3:15 am