Auro announced

Following up on yesterday’s interview with developer Keith Burgun of Dinofarm Games, here’s my official announcement post about Auro, a turn-based single-character dungeon crawler with permadeath and randomly generated dungeons. (You might be tempted to say that Auro ticks all the boxes to qualify as a roguelike, but Burgun insists that this isn’t one.)

Putting aside the question of its genre designation, here’s the premise:

The story of our game starts with a spoiled young prince named Auro. He’s tasked with a simple quest: go down into the sewers and unclog one of the drainage pipes that he clogged earlier in one of his childish pranks. On his journey, Auro carelessly unleashes an ancient evil on the kingdom, and now he’s the only one who can save the world…which is bad, because Auro’s a real jerk and has no idea what he’s doing!

Auro strips out a lot of the elements commonly found in roguelikes (items and most character stats don’t make the cut), replaces the grid with hexes, and focuses obsessively on spatial positioning and tactics. In lieu of conventional character leveling or class selection, you’ll advance through a skill tree with abilities from three schools: ice (specializing in terrain transformation), wind (specializing in mobility and traps) and fire (specializing in blowing stuff the hell up).

Here is the most recent trailer, showing bits and pieces of the game in its beta state:

In addition to single player story mode, the game will feature a multiplayer mode where folks can compete to beat a level with the highest score.

Burgun mentioned in our interview that he plans on an August 2013 release. “Initially it will be iOS and Android, and soon after, PC, OSX, Linux, OUYA, and more.”