Wow that looked better than expected, the mobs are really great. So if they have an auto-map system does that mean i don't need to draw my own? I have mixed feelings when i think back to those days. I still have a giant sized sketch pad behind my desk with tons of drawn maps for all those old games, not sure i'd want to go through that torture again.
Amazing. HD Dungeon Master? Now, please. I can hardly believe this exists. Of all the indie developers that do those "pre-order now and get immediate access to the alpha" type deals, I wish this one did!
For what it's worth, the only game that's really scratched my itch for real old-school tile-based first-person dungeon-crawlers in recent years was actually this incredibly good Nintendo DS game called . It was unforgivingly difficult, had amazing music and really stylistic graphics, and perhaps best of all, it had an option to toggle the entire presentation to a on-the-fly. Highly recommended for any DS owners who are looking for a proper dungeon-crawler to pass the time until Grimrock is out.
Correcting people since 2007 even if they're not wrong.
Almost completely redesigned UI, first ever gameplay video, over 60000 youtube views in less than 48 hours, lots of high profile gaming sites noticing us, web servers crashing (thanks to Notch )… Wow. What a week!
The amount of traffic and contact requests we are getting is simply mindblowing. We are trying to read every email we get and every comment on the blog but it’s impossible to respond to everybody, otherwise we would not have any time to work on the game at all. All this is really humbling. We were already 100% committed to making the best dungeon crawling game ever, and now we are even more jazzed up. Thank you everybody for spreading the word and please keep doing it!
Here’s a small status update of what has happened after the video release and what we are going to do next:
+ it’s harder to interrupt monster’s attack sequence by hitting them (done)
+ monsters do nasty counter attacks if you keep doing the forward, hit, backward routine too much (done)
+ improved monster death effect (done)
+ super secret new monster (done)
Next:
+ improve missile logistics – we know picking up ammo from the floor after every combat gets really tiresome fast
+ prettier mouse cursor
+ and of course more levels, items, monsters, puzzles, spells and other goodies
This week has been a lot busier than normal and considerable amount of time has gone to discussing the business side and various publishing options. We have received a ton of email and I think we have answered to everybody now – if you haven’t please check back with us! Because of this we haven’t had as much time as we would have liked to write blog posts. Sorry about that, folks! Anyway, here’s a short summary what has happened on the dev side this week:
+ Missile auto pickup has been implemented. Basically prisoners holding missile weapons will automatically pickup new missiles of the same type when you walk over them. Also if a prisoner runs out of missiles (but does not pickup another weapon in the meanwhile) the prisoner will fill the hand automatically with any missiles from the ground.
+ We have a cool entirely new graphics set for a new type of environment (or “wall set” as we like to call them internally). It really adds a lot of variety to the environments.
+ We have a new armor set and some new first tier melee weapons.
+ Work on save games has started, 50% done now.
+ Prettier mouse cursor.
+ New secret monster has been animated.
+ First three levels are now in beta quality.
+ Juho, our 3D artist who doesn’t have any earlier programming experience, has learned basics of level scripting (wohoo!)
Looking at it from a developer angle, something that I thought particularly impressive was the fact that they’re actually capable of making changes in the levels in real time. Petri demonstrated it for me — he was standing in a corridor, switched to another window, and with a few quick keystrokes he could alter the way the corridors twist around, or add features to the dungeon walls. Interestingly, the interface was not graphical as such; rather, it was a file he had open in a text editor. It included an element like this, reminiscent of NetHack:
<ascii map that, for some reason, breaks when pasted on this forum>
The # characters indicate walls, the empty spaces indicate corridors, showing the basic configuration of the maze. Below that were additional lines of script, with which he could then add features to specific points in the map simply by inputting the coordinates that were visible on the bottom of the screen in his game window. To be clear: he was playing the game (albeit with developer tools enabled), and the changes he made in the other window were immediately reflected in the game without any need to reload the level!
I want this game so badly. I hope the devs leave on-the-fly editing stuff unlocked when they ship the game.
The game looks great, the feel of the game is great too, now they only need to make interesting levels. Puzzles, mazes, good bosses, etc. Though I kinda feel a game like this should have turn based combat.
I replayed the Dungeon master remake earlier this year, that could keep some of you occupied and even more excited about this. Not to mention it's still awesome to play all these years later. Dungeon master on the atari st was the mutts nuts, and I remember playing sierra adventures at the same time.. Good times
Apologies for the infrequent blog posts lately. We have been extremely busy with getting the game to alpha stage where we can play through the game from start to finish. Not quite there yet but getting closer every day. Anyways, some avid readers have requested a status update so here it goes (we’ll try to post these weekly from now on):
+ Save games (big change which took much longer than I had thought!)
+ Main menu and in-game menus
+ Intro sequence when starting a new game
+ 7 dungeon levels are now in alpha
+ 11 monsters are now in alpha
+ Four new item classes: cloaks, amulets, gauntlets and bracers
+ Elemental damage resistances
+ A ton of smaller improvements
Since things are getting more hectic here we have also decided to start working one hour earlier every day. That’s 8am which is a little scary to me personally because I haven’t been waking up that early for work for years. Let’s see how this works out!
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