Hi again guys!
Work on assets takes time. We still have a lot to do - final objects for the second style of dungeon, various objects for next styles, some 2d graphics. We're nontheless moving forward at a steady pace, even though it could be a bit faster.
A new monster was finished this week, but you will probably need to wait for the next gameplay video to actually see it! Quite a few weapons were finished as well. Items look really nice lying on the ground or on various shelves in the dungeon.
Below's an example of a set of armour on the ground, ready to be picked up and used by front line characters of the player's team. Of course each of twenty planned characters has different preferences regarding offensive and defensive items.
Now to the main set of screenshots.
While assets are still being produced, our coder finishes other systems of the game - questing, inventory, et cetera. He's also experimenting with lighting and shadows, tweaking values of different graphical effects to achieve the best possible results.
Darkness is an important part of gameplay. It's used in a manner of ways. We want the darkness to be all around so the player feels he really is stuck inside a long forgotten dungeon, filled with creatures so nasty that sun refuses to shine on them.
Long shadows cast by cages and cells greatly influence the visuals.
In dungeon crawler games the view is more or less fixed. Shadows help by adding even more movement to the scene whenever monsters appear on the screen.
The game becomes really interesting during fight against several monsters. They're able to curse player characters and have special attacks that hit the player even when he isn't located on the neighbouring square of the grid. This makes it much more difficult to dodge them.
All the above screenshots show how shadows and darkness currently look in the game. There are two main sources of light: torches (which can be held by PCs or mounted on the walls) and fixed lights (affected by the player only indirectly, for example by using levers or killing a special monster). More light sources will most probably be added later, we plan a few items other than simple torches.
Light produced by a torch is finite. After some time you will need to find a new one. This will be probably sometimes used to enrich the gameplay options. Basically, it will be possible for the player to find himself or herself in a completely dark part of a larger level. Such areas will require players to bring their own light sources to fully explore them. There won't be many of those, and it will be a good idea to do it.
Anyways, while we want the game to be dark, we don't want it to bother the player. It should be perfectly possible to finish the game without having to put a single torch into the hands of player characters.
We will continue our experiments with darkness, but we feel we almost achieved results we really want. But, like it was said in the beginning, there's still a lot to do.
