Some more gameplay video on the demo! It's coming very close to being ready, just have to do a few finishing touches on the dwarf fortress and a bit of writing work for intros and NPC dialogue. All going well the demo should be publicly available this December!

If you'd like to apply for the beta later this month please use this Google form: https://forms.gle/aKF4MgEkejQ6sp3BA

If you're a Patreon supporter you will already have access to the alpha version and continual updates while I work on the game: https://www.patreon.com/doodstormer

Thanks for your support and I look forward to seeing you all in the Demo Beta soon!

Hey it's been a while without an update so just wanted to show a few screenshots and let you know that there is now a Balrog Discord where progress is being posted more regularly and, of course, it is easier to discuss and ask questions and generally get to know the project! This project has been taking most of my time, hence the lack of other content being posted here. Unfortunately Newgrounds isn't exactly the ideal environment for non-webgames, though I'd like to find more ways to post in here since I really like this place a lot.

Since my last blog post, the dungeon delver has fully evolved into a retro RPG in the spirit of old dinosaurs like Moria and Icewind Dale, with a slavic aesthetic. The goal has been to make something that's both got a retro feel and is friendly to players of all skill levels. The idea is to give the players an adventure, not grind their nuts for no reason.

As of writing this post I have wrapped up the last of the core systemic elements of the game, and am now moved on to working on the more visual aspects of asset production and level design that will both make for more interesting progress shots than a bunch of menus, and also means I am going to be quickly approaching the projected launch of the demo some time near late November to mid December. While I can't really share it through Newgrounds, I will be making a post here as well as on the Discord server just to keep you in the loop.

Patreon backers and close friends have started the testing process, and things are looking pretty good so far! Since I already needed a spot to keep in touch with them and communicate efficiently, I have opened up a Balrog Discord server for the game! I hope to see you there, and I will try to make sure I get some sort of art posted up here soon. If you have any ideas for things that can be posted here as well I'd love to hear it, I'll be making some model sheets in a few weeks likely since my Artstation has also been pretty quiet lately.

EDIT: I forgot Newgrounds always fucks me on the image uploads, hopefully this fixes them.

Been working on something to scratch that old-school itch and get myself back in the game designing spirit (also was curious to see what the Newgrounds blog formatting does to gifs). I have had a bad habit lately of embarking on projects that are just a tad too large, so this is a more reasonable step up from the arcade games I typically make while still having a lot of new and interesting game design challenges.

This yet unnamed game is a dungeon crawling adventure where the player is enlisted by a village to enter the neighboring dwarven fortress, then find and slay the balrog (or rather, the non-copyright infringing counterpart to a balrog) that the dwarves awakened. Players will choose between three classic classes and test their might against the goblins, undead, and demons that have taken residence in the fortress in the dwarves' absence.

Have a little assortment of animated imagery, since I suspect this is more appropriate as a news post than a billion art posts lol

EDIT: lol nice newgrounds, didn't know there was a mystery file size limit (Apparently somewhere below 10MB, I suppose?) Edited to include links to gifs under the gifs.

https://gph.is/g/ZyWQAKE

Learned a way to handle equipment separate from the main character, which was fairly straightforward though a bit annoying to set up (there's still a bit of clipping from the equipment skinning being oh so slightly off)

This gif was taken before I just removed the pixelation filter and instead opted to force the game to just run in the intended 800x600 resolution, as just turning off anti-aliasing is sufficient to create the proper old-school look without going overboard on the noise.

https://gph.is/g/EJxGbAZ

Getting elements to properly fade in and out of the camera's way was fairly simple to make, using a blueprint object that swaps materials based on whether it's being overlapped with an invisible non-colliding duplicate 'underneath' it to maintain the shadows. I've still been fooling around with the capsule that the camera uses to determine this, as it tends to get a bit overzealous for my tastes and occasionally occludes the stairs the character is walking on.

https://gph.is/g/460oY8a

This is also the first time I've gotten cloth physics and plumes to behave on a character and I gotta say I'm loving it.

https://gph.is/g/E3XqNYa

I wanted the game to be controller friendly in spite of still having a cursor, so I've focused on the game resolving things through skill checks and dice rolls which serves a double benefit of slowing things down a bit and making it feel a lot more like a classic ARPG

https://gph.is/g/4bkqoLE

And of course combat! Like the skill checks it's a mostly automated system to free up the player to focus on using abilities/spells/potions while the character takes care of the fighting.

Anyway that's all the gifs I've got for now, I'll definitely post more later as I work on this, and maybe next time the game will actually have a name.

Wasn't really affected by the Tumblr stuff, but thought it would be a nice excuse to finally come back here and start posting stuff again. Don't exactly have anything on this account aside from some ancient reviews and forum posts with my terrible beginner art, so it's basically a clean slate that has been gathering dust for like a decade now. Whoops.

Right now all I have that I can post is my art and probably links to my game projects (I don't make anything atm that's web-playable), but I think that should be plenty to start off with. I do a bit of 3D as well that I'll probably find a way to organize into single images for the format here, but I have to get scouted first so we'll see about that too.

Anyway, that's my obligatory first blog post, looking forward to sharing my exponentially increasing projects and seeing some new stuff and new faces!