They sent out a few updates to backers. I'm not convinced the project is dead, it looks like the next best thing to bacon, tho.
Plenty of eye candy
Greetings to all RPG lovers and fans of Dungeons of Aledorn. After a longer pause, we gathered enough material to release a new update. Although it’s far from finished, the project is still ongoing and right now we are aiming for a beta in the summer 2017. The beta should contain all core game mechanics and the main storyline including quests, equipment and battles. Please be patient as it is our first really big project and that is why our promised time schedule is more a guess than anything else.
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Back to the content of this update. We have finished a new location called “Voland”, the second largest city in the game located on an archipelago, specifically on The Sandemar’s Island. You can look at some awesome screenshots below. We also added short videos - the first one shows a cycle of day and night in the game, the other is introducing one of many dungeons.
Town of Voland
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Town of Voland 02
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It is the first bastion of men who settled on these islands. A large seaside city with harbor, full of sailors and fishermen. Deeper in the city there are lots of craftsmen and merchants as well.
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Town of Voland 03
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The city structures and facilities are pretty common as you are used to from the other RPGs. Blacksmiths, vendors, alchemists and tons of NPCs who bring the world of DoA to life and offer the player many opportunities for interaction.
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Town of Voland 04
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Town of Voland 05
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The major part of the character progression lies in the guilds. There are six different classes and each of them can be trained in the appropriate guild.
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Town of Voland 06
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The day and night cycle graphics demonstrated on Condra, the pirate hideout shown in the previous updates. Condra only needs to be populated with NPCs and treasures to become our first fully completed location. However, this final step requires a specific location editor which should be finished until February.
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Video - the day and night cycle in Condra
Condra is going to introduce a wide range of quests including some non-linear missions that can be completed differently based on choosing one side or make a different decision. After all, groups of pirates are an unstable society and you never know what to expect.
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The last featured video focuses on exploring an yet empty dungeon which will be used in the upcoming beta version - full of monsters and treasures, of course. Dungeons will be populated by the same editor that was mentioned before.
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Video - crawling through the empty dungeon
And how does the work continue? Our leading programmer Arbiter has just finished an sub-program capable of dividing any designed location into combat hexes. Now he is working on the location editor for adding NPCs and active objects.
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Generated hexes
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How it looks in the game
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We have promised on KickStarter that the artificial intelligence (AI) would be very challenging aspect of the game, especially on the highest difficulty settings and we intend to fulfill that promise at all costs. The work on the AI has also begun and you can look forward to various behaviors and interesting battles. Some monsters will act smarter when a higher being or commander is present such as Spectre who is able to command hordes of undead minions and form them into a well-organized army. However, if you snipe the Spectre out of the combat, the lackeys will start acting chaotically without slightest signs of cooperation.
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Our newest team member Johan Justoň is working hard on main story plot and dialogues. The low quality of dialogues was the most criticised matter after the alpha version and we hope that Johan brings the required improvement.
Thank you for your endless support!
by Nefarit
on behalf of Team 21
Radowan (EN)
Update #26 Jan 17 2017
Plenty of eye candy
Greetings to all RPG lovers and fans of Dungeons of Aledorn. After a longer pause, we gathered enough material to release a new update. Although it’s far from finished, the project is still ongoing and right now we are aiming for a beta in the summer 2017. The beta should contain all core game mechanics and the main storyline including quests, equipment and battles. Please be patient as it is our first really big project and that is why our promised time schedule is more a guess than anything else.
.
Back to the content of this update. We have finished a new location called “Voland”, the second largest city in the game located on an archipelago, specifically on The Sandemar’s Island. You can look at some awesome screenshots below. We also added short videos - the first one shows a cycle of day and night in the game, the other is introducing one of many dungeons.
Town of Voland
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Town of Voland 02
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It is the first bastion of men who settled on these islands. A large seaside city with harbor, full of sailors and fishermen. Deeper in the city there are lots of craftsmen and merchants as well.
.
Town of Voland 03
.
The city structures and facilities are pretty common as you are used to from the other RPGs. Blacksmiths, vendors, alchemists and tons of NPCs who bring the world of DoA to life and offer the player many opportunities for interaction.
.
Town of Voland 04
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Town of Voland 05
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The major part of the character progression lies in the guilds. There are six different classes and each of them can be trained in the appropriate guild.
.
Town of Voland 06
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The day and night cycle graphics demonstrated on Condra, the pirate hideout shown in the previous updates. Condra only needs to be populated with NPCs and treasures to become our first fully completed location. However, this final step requires a specific location editor which should be finished until February.
.
Video - the day and night cycle in Condra
Condra is going to introduce a wide range of quests including some non-linear missions that can be completed differently based on choosing one side or make a different decision. After all, groups of pirates are an unstable society and you never know what to expect.
.
The last featured video focuses on exploring an yet empty dungeon which will be used in the upcoming beta version - full of monsters and treasures, of course. Dungeons will be populated by the same editor that was mentioned before.
.
Video - crawling through the empty dungeon
And how does the work continue? Our leading programmer Arbiter has just finished an sub-program capable of dividing any designed location into combat hexes. Now he is working on the location editor for adding NPCs and active objects.
.
Generated hexes
.
How it looks in the game
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We have promised on KickStarter that the artificial intelligence (AI) would be very challenging aspect of the game, especially on the highest difficulty settings and we intend to fulfill that promise at all costs. The work on the AI has also begun and you can look forward to various behaviors and interesting battles. Some monsters will act smarter when a higher being or commander is present such as Spectre who is able to command hordes of undead minions and form them into a well-organized army. However, if you snipe the Spectre out of the combat, the lackeys will start acting chaotically without slightest signs of cooperation.
.
Our newest team member Johan Justoň is working hard on main story plot and dialogues. The low quality of dialogues was the most criticised matter after the alpha version and we hope that Johan brings the required improvement.
Thank you for your endless support!
by Nefarit
on behalf of Team 21
Radowan (EN)
There are six different classes and each of them can be trained in the appropriate guild.
Hello friends of oldschool RPGs and fans of Dungeons of Aledorn. After some weeks of silence, we bring you fresh information from development. As always, you can see some new graphic art and we will show you a little bit of level and game design. So, let’s start with visuals.
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Story will bring our heroes into the shadows of ancient trees of Dark Forest. As you can assume by it’s name, this won’t be bright woods full of colourful birds and cute friends of Bambi, but a deep dark forest with gloomy atmosphere. That is in hands of our visual artist Daniel Nezmar and his first version of Dark Forest is on screenshots below.
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Dark forest 01
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Dark forest 02
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Dark forest 03
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Dark forest 04
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Next point is town Voland in the night. You can take a look, how day and night system works in current version. In older videos, you could see earlier versions, but our programmers were working on improvements, so now everything looks much more real and natural. This not final version for sure but even now we can say that locations looks pretty in night and lights and shadows can make neat romantic or scary scene. On screenshots you can see, how it looks when you take a walk around a Voland when night is up and street lights lit on.
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Voland - Night 01
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Voland - Night 02
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Voland - Night 03
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Voland - Night 04
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Yeve, which take care of 2D art of DoA, is not sleeping either but she works on spell icons. We want to present you at least 30 different spells at beta version, and every one of them should be easily recognizable, so we need different art for all of them. For example this is how art for spell Water ward, looks like. With this defensive magic, your character temporary gains defence against heat and has higher chance to succeed in dice rolls against fire based traps.
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Spell - Water ward
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If you are curious about level design, we made short video (with English subtitles of course), where we’ll present you tool we work with. You can two of our in-house developed editors, one is for creating data objects, second one for game design. You can see how these tools are linked together and how creation of game environments looks like from our point of view. So if you are interested, don’t hesitate and take a look.
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Till few weeks ago, we didn’t have finalizes system of debuffs, and after lots of internal discussions, situation has finally changed. So we have a system, where each of magic schools is using different types of debuffs, when some of them can create synergies and some of them cancel each other.
For example we can look at debuff conductivity. This debuff is not doing anything on its own, but it’s a property of every metal based equipment. If some character will wear three pieces of metallic equipment, level of conductivity debuff will be 3. If someone will cast a electric spark spell on this character, it will gain some basic damage and +2 of additional damage and -1 initiative for every level of conductivity debuff. So if you have some Iron-man in your party, he should be careful about lightning, because it will not just hurt him a lot, but he will even react really slowly.
Debuffs will have two types of effects, first one is have/don’t have, that says if debuff is affecting that character. Second one is based on level of debuff. You could see one example on conductivity, but to make it clearer, here is some other example. If character if affected by staggering debuff, its art of fight is lowered down by constant value (have/don’t have). But level of staggering is lowering down evasion by some constant multiplied by level of staggering. So it really matters if you have staggering level 1 or 8. So don’t get used to much to spending your time in taverns.
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For location creation we started to experiment with Unity plugin called “Landscape Auto Material”. That should make our process much faster, because till now, it took really enormous amount of time. But on the other hand, we now have some issues with huge amount of polygons in implicit assets and incompatibility with all Unity versions. Sometimes live just give you lemons So we haven’t decided yet, if we will use that plugin or not.
Last point is about random encounters, which can happen randomly during your travels (similarly to old Fallout games). We need to create locations even for the, so we will create one huge location, and if you have random encounter, you’ll get piece of this location, we will generate hexes and it’s done. Right now we made forest (using plugin we noticed earlier) and how does it looks like is on screenshots below.
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Forest - random encounter 01
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Forest - random encounter 02
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We would like to thank to all backers and fans for your favor and see you in next update!
Team21
Nefarit a Lukáš
I really hope they fix the framerate though because it looks just as bad as the kickstarter demo.
CZ version here
Hello dear backers and oldschool RPGs lovers,
after a really long time, we bring you fresh news. We will show you progress in development and we will be touching several topics. As always, you can expect fresh portion of visuals, some insights into game desing and some information about whole beta content.
So, let’s not waste any more time.
We are beginning with introduction of new location, a temple located in caves. Players will be led to this location by main storyline, but we don’t want to say too much and spoil your surprise. Whether it’s only first version of this temple, and we will work on in in the future, we think, that it’s worth of sharing.
Cave temple_01
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Cave temple_02
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Cave temple_03
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Cave temple_04
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There is going to be several caves and dungeons (there is word “dungeon” in name of this game, you know), so if you like narrow spaces and walls covered in moss and spider nets, you will like love it a lot. You can take a look on few screenshots below.
Cave_01
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Cave_02
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Cave_03
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Cave_04
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Cave_05
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Cave_06
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Beside new locations, we are also working on updating a optimizing of current ones, you can see Manto for example.
Manto_01
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Manto_02
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Next topics is focused on herbs (ingredients for alchemy). In Dungeons of Aledorn, there is several biom types a in each of them, there can be differnt kinds of herbs. We have three levels of herb rarity: common, uncommon and rare. Common and uncommon will be randomly generated into predefined zones. Sometimes you can spot even rare one, but amout of them is strictly limited. Reason of that is to lower amount of grinding, because rare herbs are pretty useful and valuable, and they have huge impact. So in real game, it will work like this: location has 10 zones, where herbs can appear, random amount of common and uncommon herbs and precise number of rare hers will be generated in those zones. How it looks form designers point of view is shown in video below.
And how will skills look like? You can see a bit of it in sceenshots under this paragraph. Basic info is shown in inforamtion box a if player need additional data, he can take a look at detailed view. Players can even set amount of information, that will be shown, so it’s up to you, how much you want to read.
Skills
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And what content you should expect in beta? You can experience exploration of several dungeons and some exterior fights. You can visit few towns, loads of interiors, working skills and leveling system. Then you can try simplified camping system and we have bunch of quests prepared as well.
The capital - Lim
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On following diagram, you can see visulization of in game grouped visual content,that will be DoA. We don’t show you full detail on purpose, so you won’t miss all the fun, but just to explain a bit, in blue and pink areas is content, that will be beta, in rest of the diagram you can find content that will be in final release.
Graphic road map for beta
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And before we say goodbye, you can take a look on one more location, home of one “naughty’ alchemist.
Horkas Fortress_01
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Horkas Fortress_02
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Horkas Fortress_03
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Horkas Fortress_04
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Thanks for your favour and see you soon at next update post.
On behalf of Team 21
Nefarit a Lukáš
First Steps After Alpha Version
October 5th, 2016 by Ladislav Štojdl
Greeting to all the RPG and Dungeons of Aledorn fans. Some time has already passed since our last news. Although we had been working even during the summer it did not go as fast as we wanted. However, now we are able to bring some news regarding both the project and our team.
Unfortunately our main translator Honza Říha has left our team due to personal reasons and we were forced to look for a new one. His work was completely overtaken by Radovan Mikš, the brother of our lead programmer. Radovan should orignally join our team later when the work on AI begins, but now we can also use his experience in translations.
We have also read carefully your opinions and feedbacks after the alpha version and our biggest problem according to you was the poor quality of dialogues. In this matter, we reinforced our team with Johan Justoň who already did a good work on video games before such as Inquisitor. We hope that his help will push Dungeons of Aledorn to higher levels.
The level design has already made a significant progress and we can show you a few screenshots from a brand new village of Condra, the infamous hideout of the pirates in the middle of swamps.
You can also look forward to various underground dungeons and tombs full of hostile undead monsters. Not only skeletons and zombies will cross your path during the main storyline but also many powerful higher beings and bosses.
We have also greatly developed our designer tools. Both DoA Editor and UniEditor have undergone many improvements that enhanced our abilities to design in-game locations and script events. We have already shown a few screenshots from our self-made software and in this update we add some more. New features include a container designer, an item editor and a text editor.
In the future we want to develop a universal editor to fully create any in-game scene including event scripts. Just load a 3D scene, place a chest full of pre-defined items, add some texts and define all events that may occur after looting the chest. Finishing DoA will be simple as that.
Last but not least we have to mention new sidequests that have been finished since the alpha version. We are slowly shaping our previous quest blueprints into real in-game quests. In the final release there will be more than 100 quests to complete during the gameplay. There is also a special quest category consisting of 42 quests that are available only to specific hero classes.
That is all for now. Thanks for your everlasting support!
On behalf of Team 21
Nefarit (CZ)
Radovan Mikš (EN)
ESTIMATED DELIVERY: Feb 2017
We'll see if Wolves or greater contributors will have access to this internal beta as expected according to the pledges rewardsHi, we are preparing an internal beta version. Of course, some update will be, but it just takes ...