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Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest - turn-based isometric RPG from Grimrock devs

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Woohoo: http://druidstone-game.com/druidstone-reaches-alpha

Druidstone reaches alpha!

We are glad to announce that Druidstone has just reached alpha milestone! Alpha in our terminology means that the game can now be played from the beginning to the end and all major features have been implemented. Sure, there are some rough corners and the fat and variety is still missing (more equipment, abilities and the like) but the main campaign is now there. It’s always a special moment to play through a game in development for the first time, and our very own Juho has been fully occupied with that tasks for the past days. Luckily, he encountered only three crashes (which have been fixed already) and a game breaker which caused all equipped items to get lost in the middle of the campaign (oops!).

Next week we are going to regroup, go through the feedback gathered during the alpha test and form a battle plan how to get Druidstone to beta. We suspect the TODO-list is going to be rather hefty, but this is normal and nothing to worry about.

To celebrate the milestone, below is a new screenshot from the alpha build, featuring Niederdorf Manor, an important location with a darker mood. The level is still missing beta level polish, but it already brings a nice variety to the wilderness and dungeon locations, don’t you think?

screenshot_niederdorf_mansion-1024x576.jpg
 

ArchAngel

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Alpha in our terminology means that the game can now be played from the beginning to the end

can't wait for kingmaker to reach alpha
They just define alpha and release differently.
Release = Date when Publisher says to click Publish on Steam
Alpha = Date when Publisher told the team that date.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Release in Spring 2019, gameplay trailer:



Steam page:



The druids of the Menhir Forest are troubled. Not only has the Archdruid disappeared, a darkness in the form of purple cysts has fallen upon the forest. It is up to Aava, the daughter of the Archdruid and her new-found companions Leonhard, a mysterious man with no past, and Oiko the mage, a dropout from the guild of Red Priests, to rescue the Archdruid and find out the truth behind the sinister events. As if this wasn't enough, a murderous maniac impersonating Leonhard is at loose in the forest....

Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest is a labor of love from the makers of the critically acclaimed Legend of Grimrock series. Druidstone is a tactical, single-player, turn-based roleplaying game, which combines the best qualities of modern RPGs with the elegance of tactical boardgames. Every action, every turn counts as you control your party of heroes through handcrafted, challenging missions with varying objectives.

Druidstone is set in a unique fantasy world, Elo Sphaera, filled with ancient, lush forests, standing stones, snow-topped mountains, deadly creatures and puzzle-ridden ruins. The epic story about love and death is centered around the main characters Leonhard, Aava and Oiko, who will along the way meet up with unexpected companions and villains, each with their unique personalities and abilities.

Get ready to venture forth and uncover the secrets of the Menhir Forest!

Key Features
  • A tactical turn- and tile-based battle system where every action, every turn counts.
  • Upgrade the abilities of your heroes as you see fit using power gems obtained by completing missions and discovering hidden treasures.
  • Challenging, hand-crafted missions with playtimes ranging from 15 minutes to 45 minutes.
  • Solve devious non-combat puzzle levels to obtain rare equipment.
  • A gripping, fantastic story of love and death centered around the main characters Leonhard, Aava and Oiko.
  • A unique fantasy setting combining elements from western RPGs, JRPGs and tactical boardgames in unexpected ways.
  • Play custom missions created by others or make your own campaigns with the upcoming Druidstone Level Editor available as a post release update.
 

Bara

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I think this is the first time I may want a slider to slow down the animations, at least for the first play through.

But that's a good problem to have vs slow animations forever.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://druidstone-game.com/trailer-steam-page-now-open

Trailer out & Steam page now open

Oh, boy! What a week! The release of the first trailer video and opening the Steam store page while juggling with press releases and PR has meant that progress on the development front has been quite erratic this week. Nonetheless, these activities are really important, for what’s a good game worth if only a few people know about it? In this time and age, it’s not uncommon for even big games with big publishers to fight for their place in the spotlight, so for small indies like us getting the word through on the right channels is crucial for success.

That’s why we’d like to ask a little help from you. Please consider wishlisting our game in Steam and telling your friends about it. The Steam page also has a full description of the game along with new screenshots.

Druidstone Editor
We are glad to announce that a very much anticipated feature, the Druidstone Editor, will be available as a post launch update. The editor will be the same tool we are using ourselves for building the missions for Druidstone. We have been amazed several times before by the quality of Grimrock mods, and with the power of the much more versatile Druidstone Editor with WYSIWYG editing capabilities at their disposal, we can’t wait to see what kind of crazy stuff the modders can accomplish this time.



Reinforcements
There’s a saying in game development that the last 10% takes 90% of the time. There’s certainly some truth to it. As you get closer to the finish line, you began to see all sorts of warts and stuff that you have been pushing farther on your to-do list to be fixed “one day”. That’s ok, it’s better to paint the picture with broad brush strokes first. But when that day finally comes and you realize the shipping date is getting closer and closer, the to-do list can slam on your face real hard.

That’s why we have asked our very good friend, Antti Tiihonen, the main level designer of Grimrock games and a man with many talents, to help with finishing Druidstone and luckily he said yes! Everybody, say hello to Antti! Antti’s here with us for the upcoming months polishing Druidstone and adding his magic touches to the levels in the form of more puzzles, secrets and so on.

In closing, here’s the brand new trailer for you to enjoy. Now let’s get back to the grindstone!
 

Latelistener

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Why did they change the name of the company? Is this somehow connected to that canned Grimrock movie?
 

Bara

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From the FAQ

What happened to Almost Human?

Druidstone is developed by Ctrl Alt Ninja, who share many people from Almost Human. Almost Human is still alive but no new games are currently being developed. It is possible that Almost Human returns with another game some day, but meanwhile the Ctrl Alt Ninja team is fully focused on Druidstone. Technically we are a different studio (the ownership and structure of the companies are different). Think of us like members of a band who enjoy this so much that we have a dual membership in another band.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Ooh, a preview: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...secret-of-the-menhir-forest-preview-rpg-hard/

Druidstone: The Secret Of The Menhir Forest is making me take RPG battles seriously

70


The last thing I was expecting Druidstone: The Secret Of The Menhir Forest to remind me of was a deck-builder. Not least because it doesn’t feature any decks. And yet, there’s something about this deeply tactical isometric RPG, from Legend Of Grimrock’s creators, that contains the same spirit of gradually gaining a deeper and more refined understanding of a limited set of tools, through repeated failure, and incremental improvement.

This is at first glance a very traditional turned-based RPG – much as Grimrock recalled the glory days of the first-person dungeon crawler, this visually suggested memories of late-90s BioWare-ish battling. But playing it, it quickly becomes apparent this isn’t going to be a game that lets you spam your most powerful attacks at repeated mobs, but rather something that’s going to demand a lot more planning, a lot more forethought. This is going to be tough.

Gosh, it’s so tough. At one point over the weekend I emailed the game’s creators, Ctrl Alt Ninja, to say, “Ha ha, you got me. This is impossible, isn’t it?” They’d warned me it was hard. “Pretty hard for first timers, so good luck!” they said when first sending me this single level, before deploying a telling smiley face. But, I thought I’d realised, they were teasing me. Because once I’d managed to survive the first two mobs (three attempts), I then took about five goes to get past the third. (This is no rogue-like – the game checkpoints you within a level, although I was soon to learn this is as much a curse as a blessing.) But I did it! I was mastering this thing!

And then the level’s boss appeared, and started conjuring four other utterly lethal enemies every third turn, while at the same time turning the floor on which my team were standing into some terrifying roulette of death. I had a single go at just attacking everything, and that quickly proved suicide. So I thought: tactics! I left two of my three heroes on the other side of the door before triggering him, perhaps sacrifice the one guy while the other two sprint for freedom? Oops, nope, because a) the key to rescue the prisoner we were here for in the first place was in with the boss, and b) it turned out that coming in the way I wanted to escape were approximately 49 billion skellingtons, priests and demons, and they were flipping raising other monstrosities from beneath as they went.

So it was that I sent my you-got-me email. “Oh haha, it’s literally impossible!” I began. “You meanies,” I finished. And yet when their reply came back, it was a list of tips. They were for real. I’m meant to be able to do this. “Now, go and defeat that sick bastard,” Petri Häkkinen concluded. “I’m counting on you!”

Yeah I think I know who’s the sick bastard mumble mumble.



One of the most important points Häkkinen made in his hints was to say,

“If you have wasted a lot of abilities early in the mission (it can easily happen to beginners because they don’t know the basic premise of the game yet), it could be easier to just restart the demo and replay the early parts. You will find the early fights much easier this time.”

Yup, that really was it. Because as I mentioned, Druidstone is a game that makes me think of Slay The Spire meets XCOM 2 before it makes me think of Neverwinter Nights. At the start of this level, each of my characters has a healthy list of abilities, spells, attacks. But a lot of them have little numbers alongside. Aava, a ranged character with a bow, also has the ability to raise a companion from defeat! Except that has a little “1” by it. And that means she gets to do it precisely once this entire level. That’s not per encounter, but per whole mission. Her volley attack that allows me to hit two enemies in one shot also comes with a dreaded “1”. Meanwhile little Oiko, a sort of mage-thief, can stab up close as often as he likes (which isn’t often with his paltry health pool), and fire ranged Forcebolts with alacrity, but his AOE Fire spell only has three charges, and powerful chaining Lightning just the one.

And yes, of course, I’d used them all up when fighting the mob of rats, then the small gang of skeletons, and indeed mopped up any remaining taking on the even more powerful band of druids who appeared after. My cupboards were bare but for the simplest attacks come the big boss, my heals and revives had gone, and I wasn’t in any fit state for anything. And you know what else? He was right. Playing again those earlier fights that had left me so ragged? They weren’t so tough! Without any of the limited abilities, too!

It’s that sense of having a far better understanding of my ‘deck’ from each repeated attempt at each set of encounters, which cards I really don’t want to exhaust, as it were, that made this the case. Except, that is, until the priests and their guards.



Nope, I still need to throw everything I’ve got at them. And then I’m still struggling. Oh this is so hard. The guards have a movement range, and a lunge with a pike weapon, that is one tile longer than Oiko’s Forcebolt range. Which is to say, I can’t put him close enough to attack, without his receiving one hell of a thumping. So put someone else in the way? But by that point I’m getting my melee fighter Leonhard in the range of the other guard too, and both of them attacking one after the other is going to see his five remaining hearts gone in one turn. Do I use a precious heal on him, in order to see him reduced to minimum health after the encounter anyway, just to keep Oiko safe to take a shot? That means another heal, which brings me down to only 3 left, and I’ve still not even reached the door for the boss. Let alone figured out how I’m going to deal with the Red Priest and his Imp that are still in the way…

It’s this sort of detail that makes Druidstone feel like something special to me, because despite the difficulty (and let’s stress again for the sake of my ego, this is set deliberately hard), it’s also astoundingly accessible. There aren’t inventories, I’m not juggling gear, or worrying about which sword someone’s holding. This is about the minutiae of the encounters, about trying to play your pieces with increasing deftness. You aren’t worrying about what load-out you chose going in, but rather how to juggle your sparse set of abilities to survive.



Oh, and I used a barrel of dynamite! Rather than trying to fight either guard, I slowly lured them out of the corridor and into the open space with the barrel, chipping away at them with weakly ranged shots all the time. And by the time they were stood in place, the imp had flown in too, and with one arrow I took them all out. I’m amazing!

To a limited degree. I still can’t complete this. But the important thing is, as someone averse to all things strategic, I really want to! This has that immediate feeling of accessibility, that sense that it’s not the systems, the rules, nor the complexity that’s preventing me from succeeding, but simply that I’ve not yet learned to be good enough at it.



I don’t yet know how all this will fit together as a larger game. Ctrl Alt Ninja tell me this is an example of a much larger level, which is something of a relief, as the playing board is pretty daunting here. How characters will develop, whether we’ll choose abilities, and how much variety there is throughout, is all unknown to me. The game is currently in alpha, still an unknown distance away from complete (“Spring 2019”), yet it must be said this level I’ve played (and played, and played) is utterly solid – I’ve not seen a single bug, glitch or fault at any point.

The writing is nice too. Speech bubble conversations take place before and during the level, giving a decent amount of context to the encounter. And as you can see from the screenshots, it’s a traditional style, but very prettily done. This all looks like it could come together very nicely.



But more than anything else, what Druidstone has already achieved is taking someone like me, who doesn’t relish the more complicated battles in a standard RPG, and had me obsess over just a single one. For many hours.
 

Bara

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Wonder if that means we get to choose where we go and when via the world map or its just a visual for a sense of scale and lore.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://druidstone-game.com/randomness

Randomness

First of all apologies for the long break since the last blog update. Unfortunately the realities of game development, or really the crunch mode where we have been for the past months, has meant that we had to sacrifice updating the blog in order to concentrate fully on development. Now as we are gearing towards beta and finally the launch, we’d like to get to blogging more often… Well, let’s see how that goes!

Ok, that thing sorted out, let’s talk about today’s subject, which is randomness as a game design concept and how it affects Druidstone. Randomness can be found in many places and in many forms in a game. For example, are levels fixed or randomly generated (tried that, didn’t work for us)? Are combat values such as hit chance, damage, damage reduction and so on random numbers or fixed? Are enemies in levels randomized? What about loot drops and items? Is enemy AI based on random behavior or do they follow strict deterministic rules? Each of these questions can be answered independently, so you end up with a design space with a large number of different combinations, each with their own feel and effect on gameplay.

Even if it would be feasible to test every possible combination (it’s NOT), it’s not clear cut which particular combition is the best. So at this point it’s the job of the game developer to put the game designer hat on and apply some good game design principles… which usually really means making “intelligent guesses” based on the game designer’s preferences and experiences!

One interesting thought experiment is how far can you push on the extremes. What if everything was purely random? That would probably be a very chaotic experience, and a poor match for our goal of making a deeply tactical game. A more appropriate question in our case would be: what would a game without any random factors be like, where everything except the players input is basically predetermined? On the surface several games seem to be like that. For example, games like Into the Breach (an absolute masterpiece btw!), chess and Solitaire seem to have no randomness. But looking deeper even these games have randomness. In Into the Breach enemy moves seem to be randomly determined, which leads to surprising moments. In chess the decisions of the opponent, how he or she moves the pieces, while not necessary determined by a random process, provide unpredictability for the other player. In Solitaire the deck of cards is in a random order. The point of randomness in games is to produce unexpected events because unpredictability and being surprised is fun. I believe all games have some sort of randomness built in. If they don’t they cease to be games and become pure puzzles. In fact, a definition of a puzzle could be “a game without random elements” (this definition is problematic though: defining a game is even harder problem).

Ok, what does this all got to do with Druidstone? Hold on, we are getting there! For Druidstone the most important design decisions we have to make regarding randomness are:

1. Are the levels fixed or randomly generated?
2. Combat values (hit chance, damage, etc.): fixed or not?
3. Fixed or random loot?
4. Should enemies follow strict rules or be based on random numbers?

There are others but I think these are the most important ones, which have the biggest impact on gameplay.

Random level generation we have already scrapped and this has been covered in previous blog posts.

For the combat rules, we have actually tried both random and fixed variations. The initial design, following our initial gut feeling, was to make combat values, like damage and to-hit, randomly varying like in most RPGs. But once we tried constant values and set hit chance to always be 100%, the nature of the combat changed. Most importantly combat without random modifiers support planning and tactics better and using hero abilities in combos is more practical because you know the outcome of your actions. Druidstone does not have an initiative system, so you can activate your heroes in any order and interleave actions of your heroes any way you want. This combined with the no random numbers approach to combat rules turns the battles into sort of mini-puzzles, which we find more interesting than statistical approach. Using your limited resources and abilities becomes an integral part of solving these puzzles. For example, the thought process while playing could be “Ok, gee, there’s no way I can defeat that Dark Knight with high armor value… Hmm… maybe if Leonhard first charges and pushes him to Oiko’s range, then Oiko can teleport the Dark Knight on that trap, which explodes at the end of heroes round. But wait! To do that Aava needs to clear these critters first because they are blocking Oiko…” And so on. Written like this it may sound complicated, but with aids such as visualizing the outcome of attacks, enemy statistics being open information and being able to see enemy reaches, it becomes intuitive and natural.

I’ll leave the question on “fixed or random loot” for another blog post because explaining the design process of the items warrants a blog post of its own.

Finally should enemy behavior be deterministic or random? Currently enemy behavior in Druidstone is pretty much deterministic, because of the way how the AI is currently structured. And I actually think this is not ideal and we made a wrong decision somewhere along the way when designing enemy AI. Enemies should do unexpected things (the enemies are monsters, not robots following directives!) and ideally you’d have to react to and change your tactics based on what the enemies do. So this is something we are still going to fix. Fortunately the fix isn’t necessary that involved — adding randomness here and there to the decision making should do wonders. We look at board games for inspiration (more than computer games actually), and many co-op board games use cards to implement their enemy AI. So what we’re currently thinking is a system with a small random deck of monster actions per monster type. Each turn the enemy AI would draw a card for each monster and use that action or tactic this turn. Essentially we already have all those actions, it’s just a matter of making changes to the high level system which chooses when to use these actions. This could be the right ingredient we are missing to make the enemies even more interesting and varied.

This brings me to another great design tool for randomness: cards vs. pure random numbers. Both can be used to generate random values. A random number generator is pretty much like a die: every time you roll the die you get an independent random value. But a deck of cards has memory: as you draw cards the options will be gone until all the cards have been drawn, at which point you shuffle the cards to form a new deck. Most often this is exactly how you’d like randomness in games to work: you don’t want a long stream of misses or a long stream of hits, after all. For this reason, Druidstone is using virtual ‘card decks’ internally for many things.

So there you have it. What do you think? Are these kind of game design topics interesting or are we getting too detailed? Back to the grinder!
 

BEvers

I'm forever blowing
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Has there ever been a bad deterministic game? The rejection of the failed RNG mechanics of the past has emerged as one of the most reliable indicators of overall design quality. I'm going to follow this one a lot more closely now.
 

pm_675

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No
Has there ever been a bad deterministic game? The rejection of the failed RNG mechanics of the past has emerged as one of the most reliable indicators of overall design quality. I'm going to follow this one a lot more closely now.
Not edgy but genuinely curious, has there been a good deterministic rpg, tactical or strategy game?
 

Crichton

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Has there ever been a bad deterministic game? The rejection of the failed RNG mechanics of the past has emerged as one of the most reliable indicators of overall design quality. I'm going to follow this one a lot more closely now.

I'm not sure I'd call it a bad game overall, but the removal of random saving throws in Divinity Original Sin 2 made everything too set-piece and too ultimately too repetitive for me. *Knowing* that knockdown/stun/freeze/charm etc were going to work meant never having to come up with a plan B.
 

cvv

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Has there ever been a bad deterministic game? The rejection of the failed RNG mechanics of the past has emerged as one of the most reliable indicators of overall design quality. I'm going to follow this one a lot more closely now.

I'm not sure I'd call it a bad game overall, but the removal of random saving throws in Divinity Original Sin 2 made everything too set-piece and too ultimately too repetitive for me. *Knowing* that knockdown/stun/freeze/charm etc were going to work meant never having to come up with a plan B.

Yep, a good example. Altho the core of the problem could've been enemy variety/encounter design instead of deterministic combat. If you can pull your favourite combo in 80% of fights because it always works it quickly becomes a robotic routine. But manage resistances and set pieces better and determinism can be fun.
 

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