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[nenjin]

So, I'll start.

Format? The game seems to have a heavy board game inspiration, like Hero's Quest. Is the bulk of what we'll be seeing a torch moving between tiles in a top-down perspective, or was that purely for the trailer?

Are the dungeons procedurally, or at least randomly, generated?

The website says a stable of 16 adventurers. Is that the kind of stable you can refill as you lose adventurers, or is it closer to a game like Krater, where you start with a list of people and that's all you get to work with?

Dovetailing that, is this kind of a persistent world? I.e., you generate it, and endlessly run heroes and parties through the same world, building up a wealth of deaths? Or do you gen a world, and play those guys, and once you've won or run out of heroes, you start a new save?

Basically, as soon as you decided to make a game about heroes falling apart, you got this forum's attention Losing is FUN

[Xantalos]

PTW this aww yeah.

[RedHookChris]

Ok, yeah - the format.

Basically, I wanted to take all my favourite things about rogue-likes, but give them a bit of a facelift.  The top down grid adventures are _awesome_ and I love them, but for Darkest Dungeon, I wanted to get more of a storybook or 'moving image' look going on.  Inspiration came from the Witcher 2 cutscenes, Guy Davis, Mike Mignola, etc.  Intimacy was also a big consideration - the game is built around creating a bond with your adventurers, and becoming invested in their evolution.  A rogue-like camera is practical, but it's hard to relate to the top of someone's head.

So we're going for a hybrid approach:  You've got an old school grid-based map with fog of war in the lower part of the screen that you use to select your desired destination, moving from room to room.  And like the trailer, your movement tracked as a marker moving over tiles.  However, simultaneously, in the main gameplay screen everything is presented in side view, like you saw in the trailer (walking through the crumbling halls, smashing barrels, digging through corpses for food, fighting off horrid beasts, etc) .  The camera is obviously pulled out further in the game, but the steadycam look and feel is there.

This works on a number of levels:  it feeds directly into the positional tactics that make our combat so interesting, it gives a really cool woodcut look to the game, emphasizes the claustrophic vibe, and gives us the retro/easy navigating of a classic roguelike.

Hopefully that makes some kind of sense!  We'll roll out imagery and more official information on this soon.

[RedHookChris]

Your stable of heroes is totally refillable - you'll be hiring and firing guys as you go.  Some might simply become too broken to be of any use, or a really awesome new class might wander into town and you want to make room for him/her.

The overworld is persistent - heroes may come and go, and you'll eventually have a whole mess of tombstones in your graveyard.

Ok, back to work for me!  I'll check back in a bit - thanks again for the opportunity to talk with you guys!

Chris

[nenjin]

So we're going for a hybrid approach:  You've got an old school grid-based map with fog of war in the lower part of the screen that you use to select your desired destination, moving from room to room.  And like the trailer, your movement tracked as a marker moving over tiles.  However, simultaneously, in the main gameplay screen everything is presented in side view, like you saw in the trailer (walking through the crumbling halls, smashing barrels, digging through corpses for food, fighting off horrid beasts, etc) .  The camera is obviously pulled out further in the game, but the steadycam look and feel is there.

Bitchin'. Although that does prompt more questions. When you're being shown images of adventurers in a "non-gamey" way, their appearance and the diversity of it becomes really important.

With the emphasis on story and that emotional connection....will all fighters, plague doctors and the like look identical? So while their names and stats and traits might vary, your fighter is always going to look like the bearded guy in the trailer?

Can you talk a bit more about the combat? When you say your party is represented on the grid map as a single unit, is that how combat also plays out? Your party is one tile and you're positioning yourself to get the least attacks from adjacent, enemy-filled tiles?

Your stable of heroes is totally refillable - you'll be hiring and firing guys as you go.  Some might simply become too broken to be of any use, or a really awesome new class might wander into town and you want to make room for him/her.

The overworld is persistent - heroes may come and go, and you'll eventually have a whole mess of tombstones in your graveyard.

All good and pleasing things to hear.

[RedHookChris]

Ok, one more quick round!

I'd love to explore differentiating instances of the same class, it's definitely on my radar, but we're a small team, and want to build out from the core of the game.  So right now the effort is going into other areas.  That's not to say we won't do it, just that we're early in development, and the Affliction system and getting the combat really fun is eating up our time!

I need to stay a bit tightlipped regarding combat, but yes, your party occupies a tile, and you must clear any monsters from your destination tile before you can move to it.  Again, like we hinted at in the trailer, the exploration camera view seamlessly blends into combat, so you're always getting a cohesive experience.

Cheers!
Chris
 

[nenjin]

I'd love to explore differentiating instances of the same class, it's definitely on my radar, but we're a small team, and want to build out from the core of the game.

Understood, that gets said a lot by indie developers. FWIW, even changing the hair color or the trim color on their clothing can go that one inch farther in making them believably different from each other.

That, or simple text statistics that may not even have an effect on gameplay. (Ex: He is fat. He is middle-aged. Her face is wrinkled. Her beard is braided into twin braids. ect....)

[nenjin]

One last question for now.....is the name of your dev studio taken from the H.P Lovecraft short, the Horror at Red Hook?

[RedHookChris]

You know it!

[Flying Dice]

I'd love to explore differentiating instances of the same class, it's definitely on my radar, but we're a small team, and want to build out from the core of the game.

Understood, that gets said a lot by indie developers. FWIW, even changing the hair color or the trim color on their clothing can go that one inch farther in making them believably different from each other.

That, or simple text statistics that may not even have an effect on gameplay. (Ex: His is fat. His is middle-aged. Her face is wrinkled. Her beard is braided into twin braids. ect....)

Just what I was thinking. Even if the visual of the characters stay identical for members of the same class, DF-esque randomly generated appearance/personality text goes a long way for people who are used to imagining their characters. With that said, hopefully this project will be successful enough that there's time and money to spend creating variation in character appearances. In any case, what we've seen so far looks delightful.

[Neonivek]

Now I assume that unless we pick the worst people imaginable that our heros will at least be made of sterner stuff.

In that we shouldn't be tripping over constant mental breakdowns right?

Also are some enemies more stressful then others?

Undead are always such fodder in most games but I honestly think in reality they would probably be more "Moral draining" then even the more powerful monsters. Especially with the smell.

[Mephansteras]

Looks great so far!

How much customization are we going to get for our people? Or is it going to be more of a 'here is who is available, choose who you take from amongst them' sort of game?

If the latter, do you think you'll be able to have a character generator so we can add a bunch of custom heroes into the game? Being able to add people you have a personal connection to adds a lot to this sort of feel, in my experience. Kind of like in X-Com, where you might become attached to some random soldier you got but you're almost certainly going to be attached to the guy you named and customized yourself.

[nenjin]

You know it!

Probably my second favorite Lovecraft story evar. (The first being The Tomb.)

Now I assume that unless we pick the worst people imaginable that our heros will at least be made of sterner stuff.

In that we shouldn't be tripping over constant mental breakdowns right?

They've really underlined the word "Human" when talking about the game. My take on it is that they're saying humans, not heroes, all have their breaking point. It's also implied that what characters start with is not necessarily what they end up with, that they develop frailties as the game goes on. (I'd hope counterbalanced by their increased levels and capabilities.)

I'd hate for it to be reduced to something like Rogue Legacy, where you're just grabbing the least bad out of a bunch of bad characters. (It really sucked the life out of the game for me when every hero had something "wrong" with them, but not in a way that made for interesting characters.....instead it made for bland mechanical tweaks.)

In fact, I'll just say it: Look at Rogue Legacy as an example of what not to do with character frailties. There needs to be: a) variety. OMG, there must be variety! b) traits with consequences. A colorblind hero doesn't have a meaningful disadvantage, making them the primary choice among characters with more severe flaws. c) RNG that strikes a balance between decent heroes and fuck ups. In the case of Rogue Legacy, every hero had a disadvantage of some kind. Which kind of spoiled the illusion that these were diverse people. If everyone is either going to be flatulent, obese, have gigantism.....you're not seeing these as traits anymore, but as numbers.

[Neonivek]

Well Rogue Legacy's frailties fell apart and were stupid because it was a joke. It was a joke that stopped being funny very fast and eventually became annoying... All before beating the first dungeon.

Which wouldn't have been SOO bad had there been a way to change your genetic pool so you eventually end up with children who tended to be better... but no... It also wouldn't have been so bad had they been rare, but honestly it is rare not to have your family being a bunch of freaks.

But a "hero" and a "Human" are the same thing in my mind. Yet a trained human doesn't suddenly have break downs because he fought rabid dogs unless they have a mind of a twig.

[nenjin]

But a "hero" and a "Human" are the same thing in my mind. Yet a trained human doesn't suddenly have break downs because he fought rabid dogs unless they have a mind of a twig.

I'd disagree here. You and I are "Human." Heroes, as gamers understand them, are larger than life figures. So many games treat the playable character as a hero, a pillar of unshakable awesomeness. (Basically picture your friend's characters in a D&D session, the ones that walk straight into danger because, fuck it, YOLO.) That's why so many sword and sorcery games that spent TONS of effort of aesthetics on scaring or unnerving you fall flat.......because your hero is unflappable. Mechanically and thematically speaking.