We are just back from Cologne, with a hangover and 2 new games revealed. The first one that we announced a couple weeks ago was Dungeon of the Endless (DOTE). That game was never planned, it was just a love story between a concept and a bunch of drunk designers. During our weekly Beer2gether, Meedoc, Skamaks and I were talking about the roguelikes we were playing, and we thought "what about if while you explore your dungeon you could own the rooms you cleaned and then have to defend them against their former occupants"... and someone who had way more beer than the others added, "duuuuuuuuude it must be coop!"
After spending secretly the whole week end on it , we already had a game design overview and a prototype when we were back on Monday. We presented that to AmpliMath who loved it right away, and although it was not planned at all, he agreed to hire some very talented guys to help us do it. Never in my life have I had the chance to have a game in full production in such short notice after the original idea.
When we started it, business wise we decided to not put any pressure on us: Although we hope that you guys will support us, the only goal of that project was to do something fun and refreshing for us. Jeff, our writer is allowed to do anything he wants with the character stories and dialogs, art wise we are working on mixing 2D pixel art with 3D graphics, and gameplay wise, well, we expanded far beyond our original pitch... More to come soon in that aspect!
We started presenting our gameplay documents to the VIPs a few weeks back, and we hope to reveal them to you soon enough to start the discussions, just before we start and early access Alpha testing of the game before the end of the year.
Now one of the things that was beyond the door, on top of those poor little orcs just living their simple orcish life, was our next 4X game: Endless Legend. If DOTE is great fun, we are 4x games fans, and from the very beginning of the company, we knew that our next 4x would be in a fantasy world. This has been for too long that we were waiting for a real fantasy civilization building game. A game where you would evolve your people over a thousand years of history and giving you all the tools as an emperor to rule your people of the fantastic world.
The game will occur on Auriga, a planet devastated a long time ago during the civil war of the endless. This planet happens to be the one where the Dungeon of the Endless crew crashed... The few survivors hid in the depths of the planet or wherever they could, for so long that no one could recall when the cataclysm really occurred. The people you rule after discovering that the planet surface seemed to have recovered from the cataclysm start again colonizing it, like every other surviving tribe. Yet, you all soon discover that your planet has incredibly harsh and long seasons, which makes you realize that are all on a dying planet. How will you save you people will be up to you, and we'll give you all the tools for that!
If you are familiar with Endless Space, expect to be able to control all the aspect of your empire for your economy, Science, Military, construction etc. Yet we hope to have learnt a lot from endless Space, and that experience combined with your early feedback will lead to an unprecedented game in the genre.
Now there is one major thing that is very new in our game: the terrain. The randomly generated terrain has to be at the center of the game, both for your economy and the tactical game. As you can see on the pictures it is a 3D hexagonal terrain.
So Altitude will be very important: your cities built on high ground will tend to be better for an industrious player while on the lower levels they will be better population hubs. Expanding a city between high cliffs can block off the access to a region.
When you armies meet other armies, they will deploy on the same terrain as the one you see, and therefore you will need to plan ahead, try to ambush or choose the right moment to attack. This gives a real sense of continuity for our world, and really favors tactics as well as immersion.
One last thing regarding our screenshots, our terrain is pre pre alpha rendering wise, there is some much more to come to bring it to life.
Now if anyone is wondering about Endless Space, we still have a team on it, and if we did not announced any sequel, is mostly because creatively we must refresh our minds, which when we come back on Endless Space will allow us to see it from a different angle and keep improving it from all the experience made on Legend.
Thank you all for your support; we can't wait to share more details on the games with you guys. Stay tuned for more info!
Spacetroll