I hadn’t posted about Auro yet, in part because I wasn’t entirely clear what the deal was with the game. At first, I simply thought it wasn’t coming out, as it had a failed Kickstarter–but then it came back again and succeeded not long afterwards. But I still wasn’t totally clear on what Auro was. It looked to me like a roguelike, but it used hexes, and nowhere did the developers themselves ever actually refer to it with the word “roguelike.”

What is this thing, anyway? I wondered. After a bit of digging, I took it upon myself to get in touch with Dinofarm Games developer Keith Burgun and find out.  The interview follows.

For those who don’t know you, please introduce yourself and tell me how you got into game development.

My name is Keith Burgun, I’m a game developer from Westchester, NY.  I’ve been working on games ever since I can remember, really, but I got really serious about doing it as a career when I got the opportunity to do 100 Rogues.  I’d say that the iOS App Store really is one of the things that spurred me to get into game development.  The other thing is that since about 2006 I’ve been writing for various blogs on the topic of game design, and I feel like I really have something special to contribute in this arena.  This is in contrast to say, music composition, which despite the fact that I feel very competent at it (I studied composition in college, it’s what I’m actually trained in), I don’t feel like I have as much to contribute, probably because there has already been such a rich and developed history of music.  Games are new, and I feel like I can make a much bigger impact.

You put out 100 Rogues not that long ago. Are you satisfied with that game (creatively, commercially, etc.)?

Yes, I’d say so.  Creatively, I’m quite proud of 100 Rogues.  Of course if I could do it again today I would do many things differently, which certainly any creative person would say about anything they made 5 years ago.  But, I really think the spirit of 100 Rogues is really charming and attractive, despite a lot of flaws.  Commercially, I’m also quite satisfied with how it went.  That’s not to say that I personally made much money from it, but simply that it really did for me what it was supposed to, which is show the world that my lead artist, Blake Reynolds and I know how to make a fun and attractive game.  Because we made 100 Rogues, we were able to make AURO, so that’s a success in and of itself.

AURO’s original working title was actually “The Roguelike” – this was sometime in 2011.  At that time, I originally wanted the game to be the “most pure” expression of the Roguelike genre.  Unfortunately, what I discovered is that Roguelike games are actually such a convoluted mess of a number of conflicting “core mechanisms”, and you can’t simply boil them down.  What I

realized is that I’d have to take just one of these large core mechanisms and focus hard on that, if I wanted to create an elegant design.

I chose “tactics” as the core mechanism:  positioning yourself against arrangements of monsters in a favorable way.  Once I decided that, though, a cascade of other issues started to pop up.  What do “items” have to do with tactics, really?  What about stats?  I was also making some really huge realizations about game design during this process too, particularly due to my exposure to designer European boardgames, much of which is documented in my book.  For instance, I’ve realized that if you have a skill-based game, having your tool (your avatar) grow in power during the game is actually quite often a bad idea.  The player is getting better at the game, so why does his tool also become better?  It makes balancing vastly harder and I can’t see why — it seems to me to be one of the vestigial elements from D&D that has just sort of stuck with us. AURO is now almost finished, and I’m happy to say that it really is just a pure tactics game, and I’m really excited to get it out there.

(more…)

Luis Zuno writes in to tell me about his up and coming side-scrolling action RPG Elliot Quest.

The premise:

Elliot Quest is an adventure / exploration Zelda style game. Defeat all 4 Elements Guardians and acquire their powers. Explore Urule Island in search for treasures and artifacts, earn money and experience by defeating enemies.

So yeah, there’s not much to talk about on the plot front right now. Luckily, this game has a free early demo that you can play; I gave it a shot and quite enjoyed myself.

I can confirm that the developer is not joking around when he says that you can “expect a lot of Zelda 2 in this game.” Elliot Quest is very much in that vein, although it starts you off with a short-range bow and arrow instead of a sword, which means that combat begins less fiddly and frustrating than it does in The Adventure of Link.

Here is a trailer showing off a bit of the game’s variety of abilities and locales:

You can pre-order Elliot Quest for $4.99 via Paypal or via the new Paypal competitor Gumroad. I mentioned the demo–you can try it out right here if you want to see how you like it before pre-ordering.

Rhythos RPG Builder is a free, open source RPG creation program “inspired by RPG Maker” being developed by David Maletz.

Indeed, Rhythos seems aimed right at the RPG Maker demographic, with an accessible interface and built-in support for both visual event scripting (for those who don’t want to code) and direct code access (for more advanced users). Maletz writes: “New game developers will be able to make their first games in Rhythos and grow, while experienced game developers will find a lot of flexibility and extendability to create what they want!”

It’s not just an open source RPG Maker clone, though. Some of the things that make it stand out:

• It’s cross-platform: you can make Windows, Mac and Linux builds of your game, or even build a Flash version that will deploy to browser. (Maletz has indicated that building to HTML5, iOS, Android, and Ouya may end up being possible as well.)
• It supports coding in HaXe, which is sort of a do-everything wonder-language.
• It’s easy to extend; the program supports plug-ins to extend it with “more export targets, battle systems, assets, and much more.”

Rhythos currently uses a real-time combat system with exclusively one-on-one fights; there’s a demo posted showcasing that system, which I gave a few minutes of my time yesterday. It’s not entirely to my taste, to be honest (particularly so because the characters currently lack visual cues that would allow me to easily establish a successful rhythm of attacking and defending). Luckily, however, Maletz confirms that a proper turn-based battle system will be coming to the software in a future version.

Rhythos is still early in development, but there’s already a video up already showing off some rather impressive map editing capabilities:

Now, although it might seem odd for me to be posting about Rhythos two days after its Kickstarter failed, Maletz has confirmed to me that development is going to continue despite it not reaching the funding goal. He writes:

Right now, my plan is to continue expanding the community and keeping the current backers interested, and continue working on Rhythos on the side until I have a runnable demo people can try (hopefully by early next year). Then, my plan is to start another campaign next year, and hope with the expanded community, the demo, and more interesting backer rewards, it’ll have a higher chance of success.

So development is going to take him a while, in other words, but this project strikes me as quite promising. I’ll be keeping an ear to the ground on this one.

Teddy Lee of Cellar Door Games writes in to tell me about Rogue Legacy, a side-scrolling “geneological” action roguelike-like with permadeath and an interesting character generation system.

The premise:

You are entering a castle for reasons unknown (to the player).  When you die, your children avenge you. This goes on for a couple hundred years. (couple thousand if you suck).

I say “character generation” rather than “character creation” because you don’t have a say in your characters’ attributes; the game randomizes them for you. This is where the “geneological” part comes in:

When you die, you die for good.  You will be avenged by your children.  Each child is born with different genetic traits.  So one child could be colour-blind, and another might have tourettes.  Or you could be born with dwarfism.  Along with this, each child has a class preference.  So it’s not up to the player, they must accommodate the game instead.  As you progress in the castle, when you die, whatever treasure you found is brought back home which you can spend upgrading your manor.  Giving each child a step up on the others.

As in any roguelike (or roguelike-like), the world is procedurally generated anew every time you start a new character. You can see how this all fits together in the game’s trailer:

Rogue Legacy will be released on June 27th. If you can’t bear to wait the whole week until release, you can wet your beak with the game’s free demo. You can also pre-order the game for $10 via the Humble Store. (The price will rise to $15 tomorrow, so pre-ordering now will save you about 33%.)

Rogue Legacy is currently for Windows. Per the developer, “Mac and Linux builds will arrive a little later.”

Looking back on the campaigns that ended since we ran our last Back to Back, Tinykeep made its goal, as did Stonehearth and Ghost of a Tale. Sadly, Reobirth: Magic’s Awakening did not, nor did Remnants of Twilight. Going down to an especially disastrous defeat was TBT: The Black Tower, with less than 1% of the game’s funding goal met by the close of the campaign.

There’s a lot of newcomers to the crowdfunding field this month–let’s give them a looksie, shall we?

• Combat Cats — with a bare minimum of actual RPG elements on display, this sci-fi, cat-themed Puzzle Quest clone nonetheless just barely manages to hang onto the lip of RPG-dom by the tips of its kitty claws. Look and judge for yourself if you’d like to contribute the roughly $114 Combat Cats needs to hit its goal.

• Frontiers — an Elder Scrolls-style first person survival game / action RPG explicitly patterned after Daggerfall. It’s doing well, too–Frontiers is just over halfway funded with 27 days to go.

• Frozen State — a top-down, real-time survival horror RPG set in post-apocalyptic Siberia. (Smartly, the devs have made footage of the alpha prototype available so we can see roughly what they’re aiming for.) Frankly, it looks a little shooter-y.

• King Voxel — I know what you’re thinking: “the campaign for this is still going on?” Yes, folks; 19 days remain to fund this 3D voxel-based Zelda-alike (previously covered here).

• Old Legend — this 3D first-person dungeon delver has 7 days to go and just shy of $15,000 left to raise.

• Our Darker Purpose — an overhead action RPG roguelike-like that reminds me more than a little of the Binding of Isaac. It has 8 days to raise another $21,000 if it is to hit its $40,000 funding goal.

• Rising Evil — a horror-themed action RPG being created in RPG Maker. It has surpassed its £750 funding goal.

• Soul Saga — you may recall this as the 3D jRPG I covered under the suspicion that development had stopped, only to recant when I learned that it had merely transformed into a 3D roguelike. Well! Now it has reverted to a 3D jRPG once more, and is doing rather well on Kickstarter.

• Unrest —an RPG in development by Pyrodactyl Games (whom you might remember as the developers behind A.Typical RPG, an ambitious title that I found wanting in its execution). Unrest is set in ancient India, and is funded many times over with two days left on the clock.

Unfortunately, I’ve missed my window to talk about Rhythos RPG Builder, an open source RPG creation tool intended to rival the likes of RPG Maker. It has now finished its campaign with only 14% funding. It’s a shame: the tool sounds impressive, although I question the wisdom of choosing to have it ship with a niche rhythm-based combat system rather than something more mainstream.

Rhys Furlow of Eclectic Gaming writes in to announce Sharpened Steel, a single player open world RPG currently in development.

I was given a plot summary with what I can only assume are massive spoilers, so here’s a redacted version:

You wake up in a store with no memory whatsoever, so you head out to find an apothecary who can help, completing side-quests along the way if you wish.

(There’s a lot more after that, but again: spoilers.) Setting-wise, Furlow states that Sharpened Steel is “set in the world of Stratom, where you can do as you see fit from the word go, you can change the world around you, and go on many quests with hundreds of different characters.”

Sharpened Steel features real-time combat. The graphics are a bit rough, but it looks decent enough in motion:

Sharpened Steel is in beta for Windows, though Furlow plans to port the game to iPhone as well. The game is free; you can download the current beta for Windows right here.

It’s come to my attention that there is a new side-scrolling aRPG by Spanish developer Francisco Téllez de Meneses out on Steam.

UnEpic is inspired by Konami classic The Maze of Galious (which you may also know as the inspiration behind the legendarily difficult indie title La Mulana).

You play as “Daniel, a normal guy from recent times: a great videogame player, big sci-fi movie fan, novice player of role playing games, pot-head and overall, horny due to a mysterious lack of success with girls.” During a bathroom break while playing D&D with friends, Daniel finds himself suddenly transported to a mysterious castle.

Once inside the castle, Daniel is inhabited by a mysterious shadow. This dark spirit can communicate with Daniel, but not control him. The shadow has a simple goal: to escape from the prison of Daniel’s body. There’s a catch, though– the dark spirit can only escape if Daniel perishes.

Struggling against enemies in the castle, with the dark spirit attempting to murder him at every turn. Daniel finally discovers his goal: to kill Harnakon, the master of the castle, and free the Pure-Spirits who are trapped within. While the stage seems set for a typical role-playing adventure, Daniel will soon discover that everything is not what it seems…

Here’s a trailer:

You can buy UnEpic direct from the developer at a variety of prices (the “base price” is 9.5 euros) via either Paypal or BMT Micro. You can also buy it on Gamersgate for £6.95, on Desura for $9.95, or on Steam for $7.99 if you’re cool with the developer seeing less money for his work.

It’s Windows-only for now, although you can donate via Paypal to support an ongoing Linux port.

Here’s another one for the “I thought I posted about this already, but apparently not” files. Knights of Pen and Paper is a mobile title by Brazilian developers Behold Studios that was released back in October 2012.

Knights of Pen and Paper is designed to make you feel like you’re playing a pen-and-paper RPG. (In case that wasn’t obvious.) The devs state:

The player gets to control the playing characters AND the dungeon master, and you choose what battles to fight. Put together a bunch of monsters to make it a challenging fight and your rewards will be equally great!

From what I can tell, it’s basically a game in the “succession of turn-based battles” vein, but with some ability to customize the experience as you go. You can add all kinds of passive bonuses to your party by customizing the number of enemies in each battles, customizing the players playing each character, and even customizing the room you play in. It’s pretty meta.

If you’re having a hard time visualizing this, give the trailer a look:

Hopefully that helped.

This game was quite well–received by the gaming press on release, which is good considering that there doesn’t appear to be a demo anywhere. KoPnP is out for iOS for $1.99, and Android for $3.03. It is also planned for release on Windows and Mac, but that hasn’t happened yet.

(One final note: weirdly, Google Play lists the developer for Knights of Pen and Paper as “Paradox Interactive.” I assume there’s some sort of distribution arrangement going on there, not a publishing deal. Which is to say, I am giving this game the benefit of the doubt that it was, in fact, independently created.)

Terry Cavanagh has brought to my attention the existence of a new RPG Maker chain game: specifically, the appropriately titled RMW Chain Game. (I say “new,” of course, because we saw one of these released last year.)

Created under the auspices of ChainGame.net, RMW Chain Game is basically exquisite corpse conducted via RPG Maker:

The idea is simple: everybody takes turns creating a chapter in the game. When one chapter is finished, it’s passed on to the next person in the chain. By the end, a bunch of people have collaborated on one game.

The game’s authors are, in order of the portions they created: Despain, Clord, Hesufo, Espon, Zetu, Evan G, Lustermx, Seacliff217, Valkill101, Deckiller and Zeuzio. The plot seems a bit disjointed–but of course, that’s to be expected, and actually ends up being part of the game’s charm:

The Four Memory Songs – Sand, Fire, Water, and Wind – were sealed by the ancients to prevent an evil force from obtaining them. These songs only resonate with some people – the Shadowy Being is not one of them! So how does he obtain them? Hmm…

Join Gita, a daring adventuress, on her quest to find the Memory Songs. Along the way, she finds herself being deemed ‘Eric the Silver Reaper’. Why is this? Play to find out!

Do you want to see a few minutes of gameplay? Of course you do!

Personally, I like the real-time trap dodging element they’ve included there. It reminds me a bit of the crypts in Telepath RPG: Servants of God.

If you want to try RMW Chain Game for yourself, you can grab it here for free. Windows only.

I’ve been curious to try out Conclave ever since I got wind of it. Last night, that is exactly what I did. You can see the results below:

I didn’t get too far, as you can see, but Conclave seems to have some real promise–especially if you’re playing it with friends. (That said, I’d really like it if I could just create and control a full party of Conclave characters myself.)

The only real gripe I have about Conclave so far is the interface. It’s not bad on the whole, but I am allergic to confirming every single action I take. The combat in Conclave is slow enough as it is; making me click to advance after every. Single. Thing. Is. Just. Not. Necessary. IMO, Conclave’s pacing would improve considerably if enemy info just popped up automatically on mousing over the enemy, with one-click movement and one-click targeting of attacks.

Development on this seems to be ongoing, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it expands and improves with time. If you want to try Conclave for yourself, head on over to the site–the first 10 quests are free to play, after all. (I wrote up more info on pricing for the full game here.)