Category Archives: Development Diary

2nd Weekly Update : Talent System Tuning

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Rain of Fire Burning Imperial Guards

Rain of Fire Burning Imperial Guards

Here we go with the 2nd weekly update !

So last week, I mostly worked on adding abilities & talents to our party members. You can see the new Elemental Mage ability in the picture above : the Rain of Fire. It’s a AoE spell, to deal with a whole group of enemies at once.

I also did a small re-haul of the talent system ; so far, it was close of WOTLK system, but I had 2 problems :

  • when you select your 1st talent in a tree, you get a significant bonus that types right away your Toon ; for example, a health bonus for the Tank, or a damage bonus for the Dps ; as you could freely choose the 1st talent in other trees, it was possible to get 2 or 3 of these bonus easily
  • the Kick ability of the Tank allows him to interrupt the current ability of his target (some abilities are unstoppable, though) ; it’s a very important ability, and you’ll have to use it in most important fights if you don’t want your Party to die ; the Warrior tree is divided in 3 specializations : Protector (tank), Man At Arms (dps), and Paladin (mostly dps, with a bit of tanking) ; so it was also possible for a warrior dps to get the Kick ability, and thus greatly unbalance the game

To avoid these 2 issues, I moved the Kick to be attributed when getting the 1st Talent of the Protector specialization, and now the 1st Talent of all the other Specializations is locked out once you have chosen your 1st Talent for your main Specialization, but you still can select Talents from other Specializations as soon as your get your 2nd Talent point, so it’s kind of a mix between WOTLK and Cataclysm systems.

Here a screenshot to illustrate all that :

Warrior Talent Tree (Work in Progress)

Warrior Talent Tree (Work in Progress)

In bonus, you can get a sneak peak at the 2nd environment : the Abandoned Palace !

I also added the possibility to reroll (ie: reset) all your Talents, but it will consume 1 Reroll Point, and you’ll get 1 of these only every 4 Levels (or maybe even less).

So now, everything is done, I just need to test the 4 new levels and their deadly creatures, and I’ll be able to send the Beta 2 to the Beta Testers. Hopefully, it won’t take long, but for the Beta 1, I had to spend 1 week and half of tedious work to fix a bunch of things before every worked smoothly. This time, there’s less new game mechanisms, so it should be faster ; the main points will be to tune the Bosses fights to be sure they are challenging without being impossible to win !

I’ll post a series of screenshots of the Beta 2 when it’s done !

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1st Weekly Update : Bosses & Talent Trees

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Boss casting hell fire spell.

Boss casting hell fire spell.

 

Here we go with the 1st weekly update ever..!

So last week, I worked on 2 things : finishing over the Levels 5-8’s bosses and starting to complete our party members’ talent trees & abilities so we could play till level 8.

Bosses

It’s always delicate to design bosses. It’s important to get a hard fight, which is also somewhat original, so it’ll bring variety to the game experience, but it shouldn’t be too hard nor too puzzling. To avoid that, 1 of your party member will usually provide you advices before the fight, so it’ll help you to figure out what to do. But even so, you’ll likely die at least once or twice if you play on hard difficulty, so it will still feel challenging. And you can also easily skip the advices if you like to figure things on your own, and then come back to them later if you really can’t figure by yourself what to do.

So I try to give every boss some unique ability, and most boss fights will require some legwork to avoid to be obliterated by some powerful spells or spawned minions. A few boss fights will be basic tank & spank fights, but they will still test out your survivability and your damage dealing rate !

Talents & Abilities

Your party members (AKA: Toons) will get 1 new talent point per level gained. Choosing where to spend these talent points will be the biggest way to mold your Toons in the game (n°2 will be the gear choices you’ll make every time you find some new loot).

So far, I have been working only on 4 specialization trees, but in the final game, it will have 12 : 3 per class, with 4 classes. So now, we have these specializations half done : Protector, Man at Arms, Druid. I still need to do the Elementalist, and the Beta 2 will be done (once everything will have been tested!).

That’s all for now, see you again this week-end for the next weekly update ! :-)

The Story So Far

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Beta 1 Screenshot

It all started back in end of 2008, when I grew tired of developing tennis games. I then thought of a list of games I could create. Several games came to mind, but my real favourite was an Ultima Underworld style of game (ie: an RPG with a single playable character in First Person View, in a dungeon). But I also thought about a classic square based Dungeon Crawler ; it seemed to be a good choice as the square by square movement and simpler settings made it possible for a 1-man team to create it.1

Time & years passed by, where I created updates & extensions for my tennis games, and also later on, I created a couple of game prototypes. One was a simple multiplayer RTS game, and another one was a puzzle game. Both didn’t motivate me too much, even if the RTS one had some interesting concepts in it, I felt I didn’t have the fire in me to spend 2 or 3 years working on it.

In the meantime, I also played a lot at World of Warcraft (the most popular subscription-based MMORPG ever at this date) and had been fascinated by its gameplay mechanisms, especially the tank/damage dealer/healer interaction & its replay value, and really thought it could work well in a single player RPG party game. I looked for a game like that, and couldn’t find any back in early 2011 (except for Dragon Age, but the concept wasn’t really similar as there was almost no healing during combat, nor any strong threat mechanisms).

So the idea of the Dungeon Crawler came back to me, but this time with a combat system inspired from World of Warcraft. My vision was even more enforced after I had discovered Legend of Grimrock (LoG) in middle of 2011, who was also a Dungeon Crawler inspired by Dungeon Master (but with many fundamental differences with Dungeon Guardians, we’ll probably come back to that in a future post). I thought the cautious way to proceed was to wait for LoG to be released and see if its sales were any good, but after a few months waiting, I had finished all my current work, and grew really excited by the idea of creating my own Dungeon Crawler, so I started to work on it on February 2012, just a few months before LoG release which turned out to be quite a success and confirmed that my choice of game was relevant (yes, I hope to sell it, I’m trying to make a living here ;-) ).

A few months of work passed by, which brought a lot of good stuff : a powerful map editor,  a prototype with basic gameplay ; everything was going smoothly and falling into place, and the concepts I wanted in my game were playing nicely together. In October 2012, I had finished an “Alpha 0″ which was containing most of the dungeon mechanisms (door, trap, etc…) and was ready to move on more advanced gameplay parts of the party management.

Unfortunately, some (bad) stuff happened in end of 2012, so I had to put the development of the game more or less on pause for almost a year.

I got back to it on end of 2013, motivation came back strongly, and on end of December, I released the 1st Alpha for public testing2 to be sure the game had a chance to be fun for other people than myself ! :-P

Feedback was good, but as the game was still lacking some important stuff, I did a 2nd Alpha a few months later, in April 2014, with almost all the game features (but missing most of content), which shown that the gameplay direction was good.3

So since then, I have been mostly working on adding content to the game : levels, creatures, loot, abilities, etc… A 1st Beta featuring 4 levels was tested by a few selected Beta testers, although it was not a real Beta, as only a small part of the game was actually near Beta state.4

Now, the Beta 2 of the game, featuring 8 levels, is almost done, and it might be released within the next few days. Stay tuned as I’ll be looking for a couple of additional Beta testers !

  1. The complete list of games can be seen in this Forum topic ↩

  2. some of the 1st Alpha test report has been done in this topic ↩

  3. 2nd Alpha can be found in this topic ↩

  4. Beta 1 screenshots can be seen in this topic ↩

Welcome to The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians

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Adventure is calling you!

Adventure is calling you!

This is a Dungeon Crawler game, inspired by 80’s & 90’s classics like Dungeon Master or Might & Magic series, but also by combat mechanisms of more recent MMORPGs, more specifically the triptych tank/damage dealer/healer.

This blog will tell the tale of its development & its author, which happens to be myself..! ;-)

My real name is Emmanuel Rivoire, but I’m better known as ManuTOO.

The main purpose of this blog will be to keep a trace of the development I’m doing every week. I’m hoping it’ll help me to keep my motivation high and also not lost my way in the uncharted seas that always come when approaching the final stages of development. In the process, I’ll try my best to post interesting notes & events about the game and its creation process !

It’s all for this 1st post, but more will come soon. Meanwhile, you can read more details about the game in the “About” page.