Vapourware Aledorn (formerly Dungeons of Aledorn) - Realms of Arkania-like RPG

[Morkar Left]

Sure looks nice!

And they are actually the ones with the most interesting rule set going on.

 

[Alchemist]

A bit too much of that hazy bloom / post-processing for my liking - but it looks decent. Also medieval doesn't always have to mean monochromatic.

 

[Darkzone]

This czechs make me more and more proud to have supported them. Now with GURPS like rules and weapon groups and synergies they go in the right direction.

Team 21
If you game comes out and will be a financial success, then drink a beer and make a toast for all the codexers who believed in your team. But till then keep up the good work and continue to improve on your game.

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

Looks great. I still am not a fan of skill points. I think a more unique system that does away with them is far more creative, if you can stay away from pure number crunching--something such as the skill tomes in Diablo would be a great idea. That, or only award them at the end of quests.

 

[hemtae]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...aledorn-old-school-hardcore-rpg/posts/1353429

Spoiler

DoA’s development update July - September 2015
Hello there, friends, backers and fans of Dungeons of Aledorn.

CZ version here

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The summer-time is over and with it also the holidays and numerous paralysing heat waves, that made our processors sweat like crazy.

Luckily, we´ve all survived the above mentioned development obstacles and we´re all well rested and back in the game on 106% production capacity level. But even during this summer most of us didn´t just stay idle and made quite a progress on all the “battlefronts” of creating DoA.

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Our estimations about delivery of alpha version at the end of this year seem to have been pretty accurate. You will get your hands on a fully functioning first-person exploration and interaction user environment with dialogues included. Most of you are already familiar with our combat GUI, but it has also undergone some nice changes which will be of course not excluded from alpha. All that will take place in two bigger areas with several sub-locations and several quests for you to complete. That all should hint you the approximate vibe of our game-to-be. Everyone on TEAM21 can´t already now wait your reactions to our first playable build. Speaking of reactions, we´ve another great news for you.


Small forest near Manto
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Many of you have stressed repeatedly, that you´d like to communicate with us on more regular basis and share your ideas about DoA on better platform than the KS-page comment section or in private e-mails. Your pleas have been thoroughly considered and we´d hereby like to announce a creation of DoA´s forum that will be available before the end of this month. Our forum was actually a part of our backers privileges, which means that it will be mainly accesible for them, but only backers of “Zombie” tier and those higher will be allowed to post their comments. These rules are just contemporary as many of our fans found about us after the end of KS so be sure to expect some changes to this matter in a future as the actual release date of DoA comes nigh.

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Now, what´s exactly new in the game itself?

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The last time, we wrote about creating and mostly finishing our game editors. Connecting the dialogues, quests and items proved to be more challenging and time-consuming than we´ve initially expected. Our dialogues´ system was originally supposed to run on an external software called Chat mapper. Sadly, it´s implementation into other editors would be more demanding than a creation of our own custom made editor, which was inevitably the way we had to go. This small setback was actually a great decision as it left us with more effective way of introducing all of the intended gameplay aspects with an unexpected ease, so the time invested has in the end paid off multiple times.


Dialogues in our software

Example of a dialogue

A focus on part of the dialogue, including keys
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Our graphic designers have finished their work on exteriors and are now busy with interiors. That´s for the purposes of alpha mainly various city buildings´ interiors and a cavern for exploration and questing purposes.

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The second team of graphic designers is occupied with character visualisations depending on their actual active equipment. Our goal is a creation of a user friendly environment where you might switch your gear and be immediately able to see the corresponding graphical change. You are now maybe thinking that´s not such a big deal at all, but fitting one model on a several constitutionally distinct being is a story for itself. Still, the graphic leader stays optimistic about this, supported by the latest outcomes of his team.

Our latest programming progress was an implementation of our NPCs´ AI. Inhabitants of our world now walk around, react to your presence both physically and verbally and generally enhance the feeling of a living and interactive world.

There´s still a lot to do this year and even more in the next one, but your comments, suggestions, former backing and continuous donations to our Paypal account have shown us that there´s an undeniable demand for games like DoA that keep us motivated to bring you the best we can. Prepare your questions and ideas for our future forum and get ready once more for a regular updates about the development of DoA. Thank you all for your faith and support,

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for Team 21,

Nefarit

Translated to English by Dr. B.

 

[AbounI]

Oh man!! I was looking everyday for a new update, and the day I forget to check if there is one, it's coming.

 

[Morkar Left]

It's shaping up nicely and it looks like they have a dialogue tool that's similar to what Obsidian has.

 

[grimace]

"You will get your hands on a fully functioning first-person exploration and interaction user environment with dialogues included."

Excellent.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Good update, lots of screenshots, backer forum up now, alas, Alpha has been postponed till 2016.

The last news is rather a bitter one. Because of a higher occurrence of unforeseen development complications and setbacks in the last month, you´ll get your hands on the alpha not this year as intially planned. We´re have to postpone the release to an earlier Q1 of 2016. We hope that you understand and that you won´t hold this delay against us in the future - we just don´t want to release a crippled bastard of what we´ve promised.

Spoiler

October - November 2015 - what´s going on in TEAM 21 and development of Dungeons of Aledorn
Posted by Martin Zboril (Team21)

Greetings friends.

CZ version here

We´re bringing you another update from the development of Dungeons of Aledorn. As always you´ll get to hear where we made progress, what´s been added recently and what are future plans are.


Giant chameleon
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First and for many also the most important news is the long promised launch of our backers´ forum. You may find it at HERE . The forum is open to everyone, but only Zombie tier (and of course all tiers above) backers will have the rights to post replies and create new threads as well. The main goal of this forum is a more straightforward and better communication with You, our backers, as this game is first of all being made for gamers like you.


Backer's forum
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Those backers who fulfil the prerequisites as stated above should right about now get an extra mail with registration and login instructions. For those of you, who should have been entitled to a backer forum rights and from some unknown reasons didn´t receive the mail or something else got wrong, stands our e-mail address team21@aledorn.com at disposal. Write us what´s wrong and we´ll do everything we can to fix your problem.

As our KS campaign didn´t reach all possible backers and community members in time, we´re considering adding a special add-on to our paypal account. It would cost about 9 euro/dollars and would enable all Skeleton tier backer´s to upgrade to the Zombie tier, making them a full-pledged contributors of the backers´ forum. Would anyone of you welcome this offer? If yes, send us a message and we´ll try our best to enable the upgrade for you.

Enough about the forum. What´s new about the game?

The new screenshots reveal the latest addition to the area of Manto village. It´s a small forest area at the edge of Manto and perceptive adventurers may be able to find several hidden secrets, quests and fights between the many "bark-armoured giants" of this mysterious place. It will be of course already included in the alpha.


Small forest near Manto
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Small forest near Manto 02
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Small forest near Manto 03
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Small forest near Manto 04
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Small forest near Manto 05
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Small forest near Manto 06
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Small forest near Manto 07
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Small forest near Manto 08
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Small forest near Manto 09
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Small forest near Manto 10
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Those interested in a process of game design might find the other picture quite interesting. It´s a look at the "bare bowels" of our updated "pod-engine". It´s still not completely perfect and will need some more improvements, but nevertheless we managed to create a fully functional and non-linear quests in it. The graphic shows just one smaller quest which you´ll be able to try out in the upcoming alpha. A small legend to the paths and colour differentiation follows: Yellow cells represent the very parts of the quest - "sub-quests". The green cells than show how you might fulfil them, call them e.g. "quest-paths", the path which leads you forward in the quest. The red cells are also solutions to the quests, but not a successful ones. These usually represent a dead-end states of the quest and won´t lead you any further in the quest-line. And finally the purple cells than contain various developer information about the quest.


Engine for quest making
The last news is rather a bitter one. Because of a higher occurrence of unforeseen development complications and setbacks in the last month, you´ll get your hands on the alpha not this year as intially planned. We´re have to postpone the release to an earlier Q1 of 2016. We hope that you understand and that you won´t hold this delay against us in the future - we just don´t want to release a crippled bastard of what we´ve promised.

Thank you all for your devotion to our game,

for the TEAM 21

Nefarit

Translated to English by Dr. B.

 

[Lhynn]

Good shit bro, cant wait to play that game.

 

[Morkar Left]

Yeah, it's the oldschool rpg I'm really looking forward to! (besides charles dungeoncrawler)

 

[AbounI]

It seems that we're not yet able to change the pseudo-name on the forum, instead of displaying the user mailing adress.

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

Saw these pics this morning.

If anyone doesn't mind, can someone explain the gurps system to me.

 

[Alchemist]

Saw these pics this morning.

If anyone doesn't mind, can someone explain the gurps system to me.

GURPS Lite is free and covers the rule system in general : http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/
If you don't want to bother registering here's a direct link to a slightly older version (3rd Edition) of that: http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/3e/gurpslite.pdf

 

[Crooked Bee]

This one's based on GURPS? I wonder if Grunker is aware of that.

 

[Infinitron]

It's "GURPS-like": http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/dungeons-of-aledorn.97683/page-14#post-3977082

Last time, we were promising some news about the skill mechanics and rules. After long discussions and extra testing we´ve chosen the GURPS rules as the leading inspiration for our game´s skills and abilities system.

 

[Grunker]

This one's based on GURPS? I wonder if Grunker is aware of that.

I did not, in fact, know this, though I've been tangentially interested in the project (it seems that the older I get, the more of a combat- and dungeon-fag I become). Colour me intrigued. No documentation of the system yet I can peruse, is there?

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

This one's based on GURPS? I wonder if Grunker is aware of that.

I did not, in fact, know this, though I've been tangentially interested in the project (it seems that the older I get, the more of a combat- and dungeon-fag I become). Colour me intrigued. No documentation of the system yet I can peruse, is there?

All my backer email states is that if you have a skill in one weapon, it transfers down a weapon tree. However, skill in one weapon does not automatically mean skill in another.

I am paraphrasing through memory.

I also dug their talk about illusionary rooms. These guys seem on top of their game.

 

[Watser]

This one's based on GURPS? I wonder if Grunker is aware of that.

I did not, in fact, know this, though I've been tangentially interested in the project (it seems that the older I get, the more of a combat- and dungeon-fag I become). Colour me intrigued. No documentation of the system yet I can peruse, is there?

All my backer email states is that if you have a skill in one weapon, it transfers down a weapon tree. However, skill in one weapon does not automatically mean skill in another.

I am paraphrasing through memory.

I also dug their talk about illusionary rooms. These guys seem on top of their game.

That kind of skill progression is based on the logic that if you are a master swordsman, it doesn't make you skilled with using an axe, but you are faimiliar with close combat weaponry and therefore shouldn't be treated as being complete unfamiliar with a new, but similiar, kind of weapon.
I really like that because it makes a lot of sense

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

I'm glad you translated, my words rambled on pretty long. You damn near repeated word for word what the devs had said.

I would really dig an interview with these designers, if only to ask if you can manipate objects in first person to create your own cover.

 

[Grunker]

This one's based on GURPS? I wonder if Grunker is aware of that.

I did not, in fact, know this, though I've been tangentially interested in the project (it seems that the older I get, the more of a combat- and dungeon-fag I become). Colour me intrigued. No documentation of the system yet I can peruse, is there?

All my backer email states is that if you have a skill in one weapon, it transfers down a weapon tree. However, skill in one weapon does not automatically mean skill in another.

That kind of skill progression is based on the logic that if you are a master swordsman, it doesn't make you skilled with using an axe, but you are faimiliar with close combat weaponry and therefore shouldn't be treated as being complete unfamiliar with a new, but similiar, kind of weapon.
I really like that because it makes a lot of sense

Though such an aspect is certainly present in GURPS, it is in many other systems as well. Not really what defines GURPS as a thing. Core aspects of GURPS are universality, genericness, real systemic construction of systems (so that the system isn't a collection of subsystems but rather a unified whole where all parts function in the same way), generalization of terms and bell-curve probabilities.

Taking the concept of "skills defaulting to similar skills" and calling your system GURPS-like seems a bit like introducing a leveling system to your RPG and calling it D&D-like.

 

[grimace]

The last news is rather a bitter one. Because of a higher occurrence of unforeseen development complications and setbacks in the last month, you´ll get your hands on the alpha not this year as intially planned. We´re have to postpone the release to an earlier Q1 of 2016. We hope that you understand and that you won´t hold this delay against us in the future – we just don´t want to release a crippled bastard of what we´ve promised.

Thank you all for your devotion to our game,

for the TEAM 21
Nefarit

Any updates on Aledorn?

Seems the devs have moved updates to a forum http://forum.aledorn.com/ and the English forums are empty. Anyone care to translate from Polish?

 

[t]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...aledorn-old-school-hardcore-rpg/posts/1496039

Alpha almost here. Actually pretty psyched for it.

 

[grimace]

The release date of DoA´s alpha version
As we´ve promised in December, so will it be. The czech version of DoA might be available a bit sooner then the english one, but you should be able to get your hands on the alpha no later than on31.3.2016. The sparce amount of updates has made several of you a bit upset, but we hope that you´ll understand, when we apologize ourselves for a communication for the sake of delivering a polished alpha version.

For the TEAM 21

Nefarit

This video has English annotations on YouTube! Thanks TEAM 21!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua17q8QFHQI

 

[agris]

New update

Greetings friends, gamers and backers. The alpha version of DoA should have been released by today, but most of you probably have already found out that it didn´t come true...yet. We had to postpone this release because of some still unsolved bugs that our troubling the current version of DoA.

The playable version from the early months of this year did undergo some heavy testing which has resulted into a fifty pages long bug report list. The whole team is working their backs off while chewing through the list in order to bring you a polished gaming experience, that you all deserve for your kind support and patience.


at least a small taste of the alpha version

It´s hard to even approximate the new release date, so I rather won´t blindly promise anything other than an author gameplay video in one of the following weeks, so be on a lookout for some serious teasing before you get your hands on the game itself. Thank you for your trust and patience - the game shall surely be worth it.

With sincere regards,

for TEAM 21,

Nefarit

That screenshot is giving me Oblivion vibes.