SHADOWKEEPER: Eye of the Beholder inspired Dungeon Crawler

Here is a small teaser for the official teaser to be released in the coming weeks



Best
Andreas & Martin from WargByte Entertainment

 

Only good? Need more detail?

 

Original storyline: Yes
Universal: Yes

 

We are early in development, we know what the engine can do and that actually very much influences how the story turns out.

We wont waste all the work on a game that plays less takes 10 hours to beat, but at a planned $3.99 or $4.99 we wont be able to produce a Skyrim.

We are planning and making decisions right now and will announce a release date when we are done, but if 2012 at all, it will be rather late.

 

While Andreas is busy implementing a level editor (adding, removing and decorating dungeon walls while running through the dungeon is fun) we made a few decision where we are heading. Some might sound a little disappointing for the hardcore RGP crowd, many are just obvious or not very original and most are a mixture of our personal preferences. Even if they are not all hardcore (looter) friendly we think they still offer quite some room for customization and good replay value:

- Game will have a party of four and the plan is to make finding your "teammates" part of the story. So there will be no classical character generation, but every of them has two class pathes so you can either specialize on 4 classes of your liking or go for an 8 class all-rounder party. And no resurrection of PCs, one of them dies = Load saved game.

- There will be quite some weapons, armors and items, but we dont want to send a bunch of pack rats through the dungeons. Instead of changing your weapon every two (dungeon/character) levels they will have upgrade pathes (either light or dark) and every character will through the game own like 1-3 different weapons (with different efficiency in different parts of the world), probably 0-2 shields and 1 armor that he hopefully builds a releationhship with. So the smith will be the most important NPC - although we wont have any weapon degradation.

- The Mage character will be able to choose between dark and light magic or a combination of both. The cleric type will either depend more on the gods or the powers of nature, which both will be very different in efficience depending on the environment. We have some nice ideas for the Thief/Assassin type character, which often is just an afterthought in RPGs. He will be important in combat and puzzle solving (beyond just lockpicking and dagger throwing). In general we are rather aiming for a few dozen meaningful spells and skills instead of a few hundret of which you mostly use the same handful.

- The world will have lots of different locations, from the first hostile city (which in the best case feels a little like a medieval silent hill and that might turn into a safe haven later) through dark woods to cryptas, sewers and dungeons (in the classical sense of prison/torture chamber). It will be a very dark world and so most monsters are creatures of darkness from the dead that wander the streets to creatures that worship the moon or the Shadowkeeper.

- There will be no "random encounters" where the monsters pop up in front of you. Creatures roam the dungeons and outerworld and you can see them coming and need to fight in realtime. We thought long if we want to have "Wiedergangers", which we are usually not very fond of. So we decided that dungeons can be cleaned (by restoring them to their "light state") while the woods will never be a safe place until the end of the game. Traversing the woods will be quite a dangerous (and so an EP-rich) venture every time.

- NPCs and PCs will drive the story and there will be a very basic dialogue system, some simple "fetch quests" and a touch of Point&Click adventure. Some minor decisions can be made story wise, but your goal is to fight the darkness, not to join it...even if you might to a certain degree decide to use it's own weapons.

- The Shadowkeepers Lair will be the central dungeon which is rather puzzle oriented like LoG but with many puzzles based on light and darkness. Players can either clear it level by level throughout the game or complete the whole dungeon at the end. The other dungeons will have puzzles too - whereever they fit the settings - but these will mostly give you extra items, spells, skill boosts or achievements.

- As this is an iOS game from the start there will be quite some achievements and leaderboards too, which will cover long term stats and specializations as well as some rather "local" competitions. We know the question of (cooperative) multiplayer and level editor will sure come up and we can say "Absolutely, definetily...if the game is successful enough to justify investing more time". We might have some interesting stuff about this in our official press release later this month.

And the answer to the next question: No InApp purchases for items, ingame credits etc. Everybody has to beat the game with what he finds in the dungeons. We might add content after release, maybe a new sidestory or addendum with new dungeons. But that will be on top of the 12-15h we target for one walkthrough of the base game and wont happen before we have told the original story.

 

Thanks for the positive feedfack

Our twitter account has just hatched: https://twitter.com/#!/wargbyte

We'll try to tweet daily instead of pushing this thread too often - so the mods won't get angry with us.

 

Sorry for no updates lately, but we are really busy implementing a toolchain to get our assets into the Editor (and so in the game). As we don't use a ready to use engine like Unity building the infrastructure really takes us some time.

Reading the "Forgotten Memory" thread and them not supporting lower than A5 devices (which I can understand if the lighting is an integral part of the gameplay) I thought I share our plans and latest info from programmer Andreas on performance:
Per object we will have a maximum of 4 soft shadow casting lights on iPhone 4S and iPad 2/3. All Devices below (3GS minimum requirement) will either have less lights casting shadows or will cast hard shadows (probably the second, as quite some puzzles will be centered around light). Or maybe AO will be removed for slower devices.
iPhone 5/iPad 4 - we'll see, there are always options to increase visual splendor when it comes to volumetric fog and particle effects

On the gameplay side, we have a clearer vision on how the characters use their abilities. There will be the classic EotB controls where you touch the sword and the character attacks or you get a spell list when touching the mage's magic wand/scroll.

And there will be swipe controls where you use gestures to attack or block when in close combat. In ranged combat the guesture controls will switch to the thief/ranger and mage characters. The one can use ranged weapons and some special moves that are beyond what this style of game usually allows. The mage will have abilities that are basically magic but not of the "choose spell from list" type, rather very direct, mostly defensive magic like swiping away missiles or knock enemies off their feet with telekinesis, building an instant but short-duration magic shield or maybe cast a slowdown spell onto an incoming fireball.

Depending on how much you prefer classic controls or the more action-packed style you can concentrate on developing either your standard spells/stats or these special abilities.