Interview Tomes of Mephistopheles Interview at FinalBossFight.co.uk

[Crooked Bee]

Tags: Tomes of Mephistopheles

FinalBossFight.co.uk have posted an interview with Alexander Zubov and Clay Cameron, the developers behind Tomes of Mephistopheles, the first person indie dungeon-crawling ARPG with randomly generated environments that has recently gone alpha.

FBF: Can you briefly explain the concept of the game, for people who might not have read anything about the game so far?

Clay: Tomes of Mephistopheles (ToM for short) is in essence a first person version of an old school RPG dungeon crawler with randomly generated dungeons, and potential for vast world sizes built upon various elements. ToM takes the typical dungeon crawler further by using collision based combat (if you swing your sword or cast a spell and it hits something, it actually hits it, no turn based combat or clunky targeting systems). Not only that, but ToM also allows for destruction of the dungeon with bombs or spells, and even allows AI to destroy walls to get to you. ToM is one of those games that allows the player to play both offline single player or take that same character or world online and share it with others. You can play co-op or compete against other players in PvP combat, or simply team up to manipulate the world and build upon it. You can even run a dedicated server if you want your world to be online, but you don’t want to be online to keep it running.

Alex: To condense it even further, I would say imagine a marriage of Diablo and Hexen in the world of Terraria.​

They also talk about "tailoring spells and crafting items", the importance of going for "the playable alpha model", the developers' "gaming influences" -- that are apparently mostly FPSes with an occasional Zelda, Elder Scrolls and Might and Magic title thrown in -- and finally their plans for future versions of ToM :

FBF: You’ve already begun adding in large amounts through updates, can we get any hints at future plans?

We’ll give you a short list of what was recently discussed in irc:

• social AI, meaning they aggressive with each other
• group spawning AI, with 1 or 2 harder enemies in the bunch
• mage skeletons, possibly a boss or miniboss version that has better spells stats, maybe they dodge more, take less pain, cast more often
• 1 or 2 new room shapes being huge rooms designed for mini-bosses and major bosses
• about 3-5 quests on game start (or possibly endless random quests to keep the player occupied) where you have to kill these big spawns and get a reward such as a spell or weapon upgrade. (These quests will be sort of temporary until we get a permanent quest system with more dynamics designed later.)
• multiple dungeon levels

That’s just a short list of the more major features, there will be many many small updates besides those.​

Personally, I hope we won't be only fighting skeletons in this game! Meanwhile, you can read the interview in full here.

 

[uowaep]

I assure you, there will be more than just skeletons. (And the skeleton model used for the player is a placeholder. The player isn't actually going to be a skeleton.) The nice thing about starting with skeletons is that we have base animations for humanoid models as well as bones to throw around the dungeon for a little decorative spice. We will be adding more AI types as well as variety for everything else as development progresses.

- daemon

 

[Crooked Bee]

Thanks, daemon! Glad to hear those are just placeholders. I like the way your game looks, and hope it's going to shape up into a great title!

 

[uowaep]

Skeletons will be an enemy type. Those models aren't placeholders as far as enemies go, but not all enemies are going to be skeletons either.

 

[uowaep]

Thanks for the comments on the game btw

 

[MisterStone]

This game looks pretty damn promising. I like the lighting and destructable walls so far. One thing I would really love to see in this game is interactive dungeon elements such as what we saw in Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, etc. Not just pressure plates and levers, but hidden switches and dungeon features that you can manipulate, such as putting a torch into a bracket, plugging a gem into a socket or putting coins into a coin slot (I loved that kind of thing in DM) and having that activate something. In short, having a dungeon that is more than a maze.

I wonder, are you guys going to have sophisticated fluid mechanics in the game as well?

To what extent will the game resemble roguelikes in terms of randomness, inventory management, PC customization, etc.?

Also lots of spells that do things besides buff/debuff/go blasto would be cool too.

 

[uowaep]

Dungeon master was a fun game. I would like to achieve such greatness in ToM. By fluid mechanics do you mean better physics for objects that get tossed around, or more fluid combat? I would like to experiment with better physics, but that could take a lot of overhead, so we'll see about that in the future. Combat is still a work in progress, the current mechanics allows for model to model contact so that if you swing your sword, and your sword model touches another model, it gets hit and appropriate damage/velocity is applied.

The game will resemble roguelikes in terms of world and dungeon generation, item generation, npc and ai generation, especially with bosses and minibosses. You will have an inventory, and tons of ways to customize spells. Player customization is something everyone would like to see I'm sure, but I wouldn't look for anything too in depth in that department too soon. Take a look at the WIKI, especially here on the spell page for a lot more detail about custom spells.