Thrall

Good evening Vampire Hunters!

Trying out a new introductory phrase, let's see how that goes.

Well, this month has been pretty productive, honestly. Especially the last half. Life has been extremely busy outside of gammak, so I haven't been able to gammak every day, but I got a lot done in the time that I had. For starters...



Eleston is finished!

Once you've finished the first dungeon (available in the demo), you'll get access to three more dungeons that can be completed in any order. One of them is Eleston, an overrun city swarming with Vampires and their minions. For the last two (three?) months, I've been hard at work developing the maps and cutscenes for this dungeon. This seven floor dungeon has twenty-one maps that comprise it, and each map took on average around two hours to complete, so this dungeon basically took a full work week to map out, plus the time spent developing cutscenes for the introduction, the boss fight, and the return to Hollow Keep, and from four different perspectives at that! Needless to say, I'm pleased that it's finally finished and I can move on to the next one! What dungeon will I work on next? Well, you'll have to wait for the next progress report to find out!

What else is new for the month of August? Well, I decided to add some functionality that I'd been considering, but never fully implemented yet. That functionality is...



Elite enemies! If you've ever played Diablo, you'll be familiar with this concept. To begin, I changed the way that enemies spawn, so that instead of having specific troops with specific enemy sets, there is now one troop for every enemy type. In that troop, you'll have one common enemy of that type (let's say Goblins, for example), then a 50% chance to spawn a second enemy of a random type. That type has a 50% chance of being normal, 10% chance each of being Fire, Ice, Shock, or Weak element, and a 10% chance of being Elite. This then repeats for two more enemies, leading to a total of four possible enemies in any given encounter, with randomly selected elements! Only the second and third enemies can be Elite, however, never the first or the fourth.

Now that we've covered the new way that enemies spawn, what are Elite enemies? Simply put, they're a stronger version of the common enemy. They have all around stronger stats, access to Fire, Ice, and Shock magic, a Weak element physical attack, and no inherent weaknesses. But that's not all. Every time an Elite enemy spawns, they will have a unique affix that affects every enemy in that troop. They could have the Regenerator affix, like in the picture above, which causes all enemies to regenerate 5% of their max HP per turn. Or they could have the Explosive affix, which causes all allies to take damage every time they kill an enemy in that battle. There are six affixes so far, and I can easily add more as I think of them. Also, if two Elites spawn in one battle, they both get affixes, and similar affixes have stackable abilities. With these new enemies, there's a chance that your regular boring old encounter will get much more challenging.

But what's the point, you may ask? Just to make the game harder? Nay. There are rewards for defeating Elite enemies. Normal enemies only have a small chance to drop uncommon or common loot, but Elite enemies are different. Every time you kill an Elite enemy, they will be guaranteed to drop at least one item, and possibly two. And every item they drop will be Rare (Blue) rarity or better. These enemies are now great ways to get some really powerful equipment, or rare and useful items!

That's quite a few really good changes, and some great progress for the month! But is that all? Not quite!

I've also launched a YouTube playlist called the Thrall Developers Showcase. I am by no means an expert at creating videos, and I honestly don't even have a microphone yet, but I plan on releasing at least one video every two weeks showcasing some of the development aspects of Thrall! The first video is already up, and showcases the skill tree of Damien, and especially his Overkill skill. Some of these videos may be showcases of different game mechanics, some may reveal my mapping process, others may actually just be videos of me describing my thoughts as I went into developing this game. If you have any questions you'd like me to answer, send me a message or comment on this blog post and I'll probably answer them in a video at some point. The first video is available in the Media page of this game profile.

Anyway, that's all for the month of August! See you all again mid September!