Dungeon Lord announced

Ian Hawley, one half of the two-man studio Bovine Software, writes to me with details of his upcoming OUYA dungeon delver Dungeon Lord. (Note that there are no proper websites for these yet, only Facebook pages.)

The premise to Dungeon Lord is straightforward:

[T]his is a tile-based dungeon crawler inspired by Dungeon Master principally, so the story is a relatively typical case of being trapped inside and having to get out. I guess it’s more of an action RPG in today’s terms, because the game is real-time, first person and there is a good degree of skill required to dodge around the various denizens of Darkwurm to avoid having to toe to toe it.

(Note: this game was called Darkwurm right up until Monday, when it was abruptly renamed “Dungeon Lord.”) Anyway! That does indeed sound quite a bit like Dungeon Master; and if anything, this trailer made from footage of the game running on an OUYA only reinforces that impression:

It looks good so far, though I do hope the finished game is a little less spoiler-y. (I have to imagine that by the time we get to “the key is in the alcove,” we’d be able to figure that out ourselves.)

Dungeon Lord is being created in Unity. According to the developers, Dungeon Lord will feature 10+ weapon types and a unified skill system with 50+ skills. They state that their skill mechanics are more modern than the ones from Dungeon Master, with rebindable hotkeys. They also state that they’re using both skill cool-downs as well as energy costs. Thus, “there’s a lot of choice about how to play and whether you want to be that toe-to-toe warrior, a long distance spell caster or something inbetween.”

Hawley tells me that he and Dan McCaul have been working on Dungeon Lord for more than two years now, and that they are now nearly feature complete with a lot of content already in the game. Dungeon Lord is planned for release later this year on the OUYA and iOS (3G S and above), with Android ports to follow.