Q. For starters, can you provide a brief synopsis of who you are and what your role is with Killing Floor 2?
A. Howdy everyone, it's a pleasure to meet you all! My name is Jonathan Betancourt, and I'm a Junior Game Designer at Tripwire Interactive. I work on creating fun, engaging experiences, and this is broken up into multiple roles that touch on different aspects of Killing Floor 2. I adjust values to balance old and new game systems, craft concepts and gameplay elements for future updates, observe and note feedback from our community, work with our community team to address major gameplay concerns, and much more. It's a highly communicative role that requires a lot coordination with my fellow developers. We all work together to present something enjoyable to our community!
Q. How long have you been employed at Tripwire?
A. I'm currently at 4 years and 10 months. I started as a QA Tester for 3 years. Then, I shifted to a Senior QA Tester role for another full year. After that, I was promoted to Junior Game Designer.
Q. Take us through a typical day of work at Tripwire for you, what is it like when you show up at the office?
A. Sure thing! Let's see, a typical day starts with me having Killing Floor 2 on one of my monitors and an excel sheet full of numbers on another. I check out concerns from the community, adjust values to help improve the feeling of our systems and weapons, and sometimes, I have to attend a meeting or two that sprout like mushrooms out of nowhere. Sometimes, I'm the one making those pesky meetings! But yeah, I check over a task list and tackle each one throughout the day. While I'm working on gameplay elements and figuring out solutions, it's a constant back and forth with my brain on how to address a problem. I'm usually tinkering with data sheets and KF2 from the start of the day to the end of it! I don't think I've ever had more than 2000 hours on a game in my life until Killing Floor 2. Steam says I have 4538 hours now...
Q. How did you get started in the Games Industry?
A. It all started at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I worked towards a degree in Computational Media, and this degree was unique because it was the first of its kind at the institute at the time. I was basically part of this degree experiment, and it was like a marriage between programming, user experience, and game design philosophy. There was a lot of writing and a lot of programming...and a lot of program writing. Then, on my final semester of college, I received a QA Tester internship with Cartoon Network at their Turner Broadcasting location in Atlanta. It was literally a 5 minute walk to their office from my dormitory, so that was AWESOME. After I completed my internship with them and graduated from college with my Bachelor of Science in Computational Media (people still ask what this thing means), I phoned Tripwire Interactive and was brought aboard as a QA Tester. It was then that I continued onward to where I am now!
Q. What accomplishment are you most proud of while working in the Games Industry?
A. I remember a time as a QA Tester where we had this infrequent crash that happened during Killing Floor 2 gameplay around the time the Katana was first being introduced. We were getting prepared for a huge debut of Killing Floor 2 at a gaming event, and unfortunately, the team was unsure what was causing this random crash. It was a potential marketing nightmare since if this crash happened on the game floor, it crashes all other players on the server. it would make things rather silly to explain. So, I play a lot as the Berserker Perk, and the crash would normally happen when I played as a Berserker with our other QA teammates. This crash affected all other players, causing them to crash too. So, we couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was. I had a habit of randomly swinging my weapons against walls and columns while I waited for Trader Time to end, and it was during one game that I noticed the crash happened right as I hit a column with the Katana. Long story short, I spent a few days on hyper speed mode swinging my katana at columns and walls to generate this crash reliably, and it turned out that the impact FX played from a Katana could cause the crash to happen when it spawns on a specific point on an environment object. It felt so good to find the cause of this, and once we fixed it, that was one massive relief moment for our debut!
Q. What hobbies do you enjoy outside the workplace?
A. I've gotten into Magic the Gathering last year and have been very much into that. I play a format called Commander, and I head to the local venues to play and enjoy the time with other players. Aside from that, I'm an avid gamer. I play games almost every night with other friends. Recently, I've been enjoying Overwatch, Dead by Daylight, and Monster Hunter World.
Q. What was the first game you worked on? What other game titles were you also a part of?
A. I think the first game I've ever worked on was Ben 10 Slammers, and this was at Cartoon Network back when I was a budding QA Tester. While there, I also worked on Adventure Time Battle Party, Ski Safari : Adventure Time, and Gem Bound. After that, I joined Tripwire Interactive, and the games I've helped out on have been Red Orchestra 2 : Rising Storm, Killing Floor 1, Killing Floor : Calamity, and Killing Floor 2.
Q. What is your all-time favorite video game and why?
A. Oh man, this is a tough one because I love A LOT of video games. Parasite Eve II, Don't Starve Together, Pokémon Puzzle League, Mario Party 3, Conkers Bad Fur Day...the list goes on. I don't have an all-time favorite, but rather, I have a list of games that I thoroughly enjoyed and learned a lot from when it came to fun, unique gameplay and stories.
Q. What KF2 system that you worked on are you most proud of? Is there something about this system that players should know about, but perhaps don't?
A. Hmm, this is another tough one. I'd have to say the cross-Perk weapon system. Originally, Perks stuck to their own weapon sets, and their list of weapons was not as expansive as it is now. Also, a lot of our weapons shared qualities that other Perks could definitely benefit from. So we're like, "What if the Demolitionist could use the Pulverizer?" or "A Support with the HMTech-301 Shotgun could be interesting as it would give them a healing option to help the Field Medic". So, we worked towards implementing a system to properly handle a weapon belonging to two or more Perks. And thus, the cross-Perk weapon system was born. Our intent with this system was to expand the weapon choices of a Perk and give hopefully more interesting options to help with different situations. An interesting thing to note is that we only have one weapon that is a cross-Perk weapon to three different Perks. It is the Spitfire, and it currently belongs to the Gunslinger, Firebug, and Sharpshooter. Technically though, it belongs to the Survivalist too, so it would make it a 4-way cross-Perk weapon hah!
Q. Could you give us a glimpse of what you’re currently working on now in Killing Floor 2?
A. Most certainly! I'm currently working on the panic system and two new future weapons. I'm adjusting values and trying to alleviate frustrations with the panic system. As for the weapons, I can't say too much about them, but I can say that one will be a unique combination of two game mechanics while the other has a gameplay element we've wanted to pin down since launch.
Q. What are you most excited about in the coming update and why?
A. I'd have to say the Killerwatt weapon. I love charging it up and releasing a beam of pure destruction on the Zeds. It's quite satisfying to use!
Q. Do you have any personal tips n’ tricks when you play KF2 that you’d like to share with the community?
A. I'll gladly share some! Spatial awareness and good positioning are an important aspect of Killing Floor 2. Always keep an eye out on your surroundings so you don't accidentally back into a corner and become Zed food! Also, note where any potential exits are so you can vault off if things get too hairy. It can be easy to lose track of the environment while you're fending off Zeds so it's a good habit to take a quick snapshot of any area you're holding out on so you have a better plan of maneuvering around. Also, remain close to anyone who is healing the team, such as your Field Medic, and protect them whenever you can. It's a lot of fun to run off and kill Zeds around corners, but remember, Field Medic weapons require you to be in their line of sight to heal. So, try your best to stick to your team and help healers do their role easier.
Thanks for checking out our 14th devblog! We’ve released the initial 0.9 build to our default branch on Steam. We've had some feedback, issues found are being worked on. If you're testing 0.9 please share any issues you find on our tracker or come share on our Discord.
We're working on a load of great features, fixes and additions for .10+ feel free to check out our changelog. You'll be able to keep track of development and see all the features in the works for the next build. Below we'll go over a couple of features that are currently being worked on.
UI Improvements Coming in 0.10.x +
For some time now players have asked and the team has wanted a clean way to provide the player with general stat information. In 0.9 we introduced some UI changes in the way of a new notification and hint system, if you missed it there's more info on hints/notifications here. The notification and hint system is far more dynamic than our previous system. We'll also be introducing new player stat notifications and tabs. Currently the player has to open their inventory to get a clue as to how they're doing. Calories, overall health, ammo all of our stats have no on screen UI. We like it this way, we do however realize it's not at all ideal. We're now introducing a visual system however it will only be on screen when called by the player on a button press or when a stat is affected either positively or negatively. If the player takes damage the health notification will display, if they're hungry the consuming icon etc. Overall we feel they don't take away from the clutter free GUI and at the same time provide the info that's needed. Let us know what you think. If the community sees it fit after testing our next builds perhaps we will make the UI and new hotkeys a toggleable option.
Player stats displayed on button press. If wanted we could make this toggleable in the future
New UI damage tab displayed as the player takes damage
Mental health stat icons being developed
New Tab Menu (coming in 0.10.x +)
The tab menu has had a revamp. It's cleaner and easier to read now, we've also introduced player gameplay statistics. In future updates we plan on adding both player and global gameplay stats to the games main menu.
New tab (player) menu now with player gameplay statistics
Next Week's Devblog (Fortification Improvements)
We're making some big improvements to window frames along with improvements to door fortifications. Next week we'll speak in depth about these new features. Thanks much for check in on our development of Survive the Nights and as always thank you for the continued support. The project has come a long way and we're excited for the coming months leading up to our public alpha release!
Hello all, exciting things are on the horizon! More people have joined the team, meaning that development can continue even faster. Specifically, 3D art and animation are now in the works! Let's look at what we've been working on:
The Comic Book Menu™
Gumball now features an innovative new menu in the form of an interactive 3D comic book. Using a cursor or VR controllers, point and click on different panels to move between pages, change settings, or go into the game (or comic?). Only a few pages have been made, and there's still plenty of work to do, but it'll be worth the effort in the end.
Animation and Art
Gumball can actually run and swing around now! It's not much for now, and we're working on more advanced animation as well as aerial tricks and other fun stuff. Many animations work in VR as well!
We also now have a concept artist creating dozens of city block layouts and building designs, and someone to model it all in 3D. The roads finally have markings on them, and things are starting to look pretty good.
That's all for now, but more is on the way! The next update might have NPCs walking around on the street. As soon as the menu has more functionality and more city blocks are created, you will be able to swing around in this new city and be a part of this game's development. Until then, we'll be hard at work.
We know we haven’t been as active as you expected us to be, but trust us, we are working as hard as we can on the game so that you could play it as soon as possible!
Meanwhile, while you’re waiting, we will give you a sneak peek of a few modes you’ll be able to choose from in the game:
Deathmatch - the main game mode for 1-4 players. The objective is to eliminate each other (or bots) by throwing the opponent outside of the level area - until only one winner remains
Team Deathmatch - a Deathmatch mode variation where two teams battle each other until there are no enemy players left
Story Mode - a mode featuring 14 missions to complete. The story tells about a tournament, where the participants fight to the death to acquire the legendary Mask of Fury, and about the dark powers that are also trying to get a hold of it
Time Attack - a single player mode; the player has 30 seconds to defeat the enemy bots, and each defeated enemy will add some extra time.Try to stay in the game as long as possible!
Mask of Fury - a mode for 1-4 players. The stage will feature a special item, Mask of Fury itself, which when obtained increases the player’s physical strength and size. The objective is for the players to fight for the Mask and to try and hold on to it for as long as possible while fighting the other players
That’s all for today folks! Hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!
As I have been saying before, Beta 8 has reworked most of the game's codebase, which means the game will run faster than ever. BUT! This also means there may be new bugs, crashes and glitches we haven't encountered yet.
The new programmer that I hired thanks to the support of our hundreds of patrons, lazyeye, has been working on a new error report system. Whenever the game crashes, you will have the choice to send us the crash report from inside the game itself:
Please make sure to send us all the reports! This is now much quicker and easier than having to take a screenshot and sending me the report through email or Discord.
Reworked entire codebase, making the game run at constant 60 fps even in the late game.
Added support for Ubuntu (In Beta).
New Main Menu System with FREE unlockable extra content.
Rods may now be upgraded at the Spirit Crystal structure into super strong end-game versions. (Ex: Fire Rod --> Meteor Rod).
Several items and buildings have their price increased. This will hopefully re-balance the mid to late game to make it last a little longer, and make it so getting new Gear upgrades and droids feels more rewarding. (Sage Scrolls, Lighthouses and Droids in particular should be much more expensive now).
New music tracks have been added.
Discord rich presence added.
Rebindable key support added.
New error reporting system added.
Vaults now display mini-icons of the items they contain.
Architecture skill now also increases the inventory slots for Vaults.
Humble Bundle's logo when the game starts is now animated!
Fox character may now dab. This is objectively the best update of the game, ever.
The camera system has been reworked to be less nausea-inducing and to stick to the game world's limits.
Bugfixes:
144hz monitors play the game at higher frame rates.
When hitting a bridge more than a tile away with the Obliterator, instead of damaging the bridge it drops infinite landfills.
The Obliterator doesn't instantly destroy Bridges.
You can get infinite Landfill by using the Obliterator to "destroy" empty water tiles outside the map.
Spirit Orb menus can be abused by clicking a bunch of times to get the same reward multiple times.
While using a controller and selecting stats to upgrade from a Spirit Orb, the cursor seems always stuck on Max Energy.
Shovel upgrades seem to dig half of the AoE at a time instead of all at once.
It's impossible to place stuff on the tile adjacent to Factories.
Necro Rod can summon skeletons outside the map limits.
Obliterating terrain tiles with the number clues for that one volcano puzzle doesn't get rid of the clues.
Water Shovel stops you from making progress towards the Irrigator Feat.
Getting a new Gear item while the Spirit Orb menu is open may cancel and consume the Spirit Orb without providing a bonus.
Using landfills on a biome border tile will consume the landfill item even though there is already a tile there.
When assigning all droids on buildings, the cost to craft a new one goes back down to 1.
Froststrike skill description doesn't display unlocking of the Spirit Crystal.
Resizing the window to anything but 16:9 could potentially bug the UI.
Savefile images are sometimes bigger than the saveslot frame.
If you move the cursor quickly after clicking to place a building, the building will be placed where the cursor is, not where you initially clicked, even if that space is blocked by something else.
I am grateful to everyone who wrote me comments, I write down all of them in the TODO list and will do it as soon as possible.
I just uploaded the following improvements:
Fixed bug with the JoyPad, it is working again
By the numerous demands, I added the ability to change the ZXC default buttons. So far, only these 3 buttons. This is a quick fix, so those who do not have a standard keyboard can play. When changing control buttons please consider: 1. Letters can be entered only in English (case does not matter) 2. Since at that moment (I will redo it) when you add skills, all the buttons on the keyboard are involved. By this, when you change one control button/letter to another, you will not be able to use some skills, because you already use letters which manage them on the other skill. Hope you understand what I mean :) If you will have any questions of issues with this please send me a message.
I am still working on new levels and improvements: - attack, defend, and hp boost pick ups - things to collect as well like notes when u break a certain item telling about the girls lives and how they got to where they are now - settings for each personage, like hair on the head and in intimate areas, makeup, eye color, manicure, pedicure ... - clothing option. Dressing room with outfit tabs like boots, gloves, hats, masks etc - fixing the bounciness of the boobs - shift and ctrl for addition attacks - VSync - Local multyplayer - online multiplayer so you can 1v1 with friends
I am doing my best to make a good game, with nice graphic and interesting functionality and I really need your help and feedback, I need help of my community. Only you know what exactly you would like to have in this game. May be some functions are not enough good or are missing something important. I would appreciate your feedback and advises. Feel free to create new discussions and post comments )
This week was the time to close and finish all the things that will go to 0.17.0.
Not all of the things that we originally planned to be done were done (surprise), but we just left any non-essential stuff for later so we won't postpone the release any further. The plan is, that next week will be dedicated to the office playtesting and bugfixing. Many would argue, that we could just release instantly and let the players find the bugs for us, but we want to fix the most obvious problems in-house to avoid too many duplicate bug reports and chaos after the release. Also, some potential bugs, like save corruptions, are much more easily worked on in-house.
If the playtesting goes well, we will let you know next Friday, and if it is the case, we will aim to release the week starting 25th February.
After release plan
Since there are a lot of things we would like to do before we can call 0.17 good enough, we will simply push new things into the 0.17 releases as time goes on. Even if 0.17 becomes stable in a reasonable time, we would still push things on top of it. We can still make experimental/stable version numbers inside 0.17. Most of the things shouldn't be big enough to make the game generally unstable. I've heard countless times a proposal to make small frequent releases of what have we added, this will probably be reality after 0.17 for some time.
The smaller releases will contain mainly:
Final looks and behaviour of new GUI screens as they will be finished.
New graphics.
New sounds and sound system tweaks.
Mini tutorial additions and tweaks.
This is actually quite a large change to our procedures, and there are many ways we will be trying to maximize the effectiveness of smaller and more regular content updates.
The GUI progress
There are several GUI screens that are finished. Others (most of them) are just left there as they are in 0.16. They are a combination of the new GUI styles and old ones. They sometimes look funny and out of place, but they should be functional.
Blueprint library
The blueprint library changes have been split into several steps. The reason is, that there was a big motivation to do the integration with the new quickbar (final version introduced in FFF-278) in time for 0.17.0, while the other changes can be done after. The thing with the quickbar is, that it is quite a big change to one of the most used tools in the game and people generally don't like change even when it is for the better. To minimize the hate of the change, we need to "sell it properly". By that, we should provide as many of the positive aspects of the new quickbar at the time of its introduction.
So the change that is already implemented and working for 0.17 is the ability to put blueprints/books into the quick bar in a way that the quick bar is linked directly to the blueprint library window, so you don't need to have the physical blueprint items in your inventory. The other change is, that picking a blueprint from the blueprint library and then pressing Q will just dismiss it, instead of silently pushing it to your inventory. This works the same as the clipboard described in FFF-255. You can still explicitly insert the blueprint from the library to an inventory slot, but if you just pick it, use it, and press Q, it goes away.
In addition to this, other changes related to the blueprint library will follow soon after 0.17.0. The first thing is the change of how the GUI looks:
We will also allow to switch between grid and list view. It mainly provides a way to nicely see the longer names of the blueprint. We noticed that players try to put a large amount of info about a blueprint in its name, so we are planning to add a possibility to write a textual description of the blueprint.
The last big change is to allow to put blueprint books into blueprint books, allowing better organisation. Basically like a directory structure. Whenever a blueprint/book is opened, we plan to show its current location, so the player knows exactly what is going on.
The hand
Has it ever happened to you, that you have robots trying to put things into your full inventory, while you pick an item from it to build something, and then you just can't put it back, as the diligent robots just filled the last slot in your inventory by whatever they are trying to give to you? Wood from tree removal is the most frequent thing in my case.
This was annoying in 0.16 from time to time, but with the new quickbar, it started to happen even more, as now, you have only one inventory, and no reserved slots in the quickbar. To solve that, we just extended the "principal" of the hand. When you pick something from the inventory, the hand icon appears on the slot. As long as you hold the thing in your cursor, the hand stays there, and prevents other things from being inserted there. This way, you should always be able to return the currently selected item into your inventory as long as you didn't get it from external source like a chest.
The hand is protecting the slot from the robots.
Terrain generation updates
Everyone has different opinions about what makes a good Factorio world.I've been working on several changes for 0.17, but the overarching themehas been to make the map generator options screen more intuitiveand more powerful.
This was talked about somewhat in an earlier FFF (FFF-258) regarding ore placement,but since then we found more stuff to fix.
Biter Bases
In 0.16, the size control for biter bases didn't have much effect.The frequency control changed the frequency, but that also decreased the size of bases,which wasn't generally what people wanted.
For 0.17 we've reworked biter placement using a system similar to that with which we got resource placement under control. The size and frequency controls now act more like most people would expect, with frequency increasing the number of bases, and size changing the size of each base.
New preview UI showing the effects of enemy base controls.In reality the preview takes a couple seconds to regenerate after every change,but the regeneration part is skipped in this animation to clearly show the effects of the controls.
If you don't like the relatively uniform-across-the-world placement of biters,there are changes under the hood to make it easier for modders to do something different.Placement is now based on NamedNoiseExpressions "enemy_base_frequency" and "enemy_base_radius", which in turn reference "enemy_base_intensity".By overriding any of those, a modder could easily create a map where biters are found only at high elevations,or only near water, or correlate enemy placement with that of resources, or any other thing that can be expressed as a function of location.
Cliffs
We've added a 'continuity' control for cliffs. If you really ike mazes of cliffs, set it to high to reduce the number of gaps in cliff faces.Or you can turn it way down to make cliffs very rare or be completely absent.
Changing cliff frequency and continuity. Since cliffs are based on elevation,you'll have to turn frequency way up if you want lots of layers even near the starting lake.
Biome Debugging
Tile placement is based on a range of humidity and 'aux' values(humidity and aux being properties that vary at different points across the world)that are suitable for each type of tile. For example: grass is only placed in places with relatively high humidity, and desert (not to be confused with plain old sand)only gets placed where aux is high. We've taken to calling these constraints 'rectangles',because when you plot each tile's home turf on a chart of humidity and aux,they are shown as rectangles.
It's hard to make sense of the rectangles just by looking at the autoplace code for each tile, so I wrote a script to chart them. This allowed us to ensure that they were arranged as we wanted, with no gaps between them,and with overlap in some cases.
Rectangles.
Having the humidity-aux-tile chart is all well and good, but doesn't tell the whole story,since tile placement also depends on a noise layer specific to each tile type,and could also influenced by user-adjustable autoplace controls (e.g. turning the grass slider up).So to further help us visualize how humidity, aux, tile-specific noise, andautoplace controls worked together to determine tiles on the map,there are a couple of alternate humidity and aux generators that simply vary themlinearly from north-south and west-east, respectively.
Using 'debug-moisture' and 'debug-aux' generators to drive moisture and aux, respectively.
This map helped us realize that, rather than having controls for each different type of tile, it made more sense to just control moisture and aux (which is called 'terrain type' in the GUI,because 'aux' doesn't mean anything).
Sliding the moisture and aux bias sliders to make the world more or less grassy or red-deserty.
A pet project of mine has been toput controls in the map generator GUI so that we could select generatorsfor various tile properties (temperature, aux, humidity, elevation, etc) atmap-creation time without necessarily needing to involve mods.This was useful for debugging the biome rectangles, but my ulteriormotive was to, at least in cases where there are multiple options,show the generator information to players. A couple of reasons forthis:
It was already possible for mods to override tile property generators via presets, butwe didn't have a place to show that information in the UI.So switching between presets could change hidden variables in non-obvious waysand lead to a lot of confusion.
I had dreams of shipping alternate elevation generators in the base game.
So in 0.17 we're restoring the default elevation generator to one very similar to that used by 0.12. Which means large, sometimes-connected lakes.
The water 'frequency' control was confusing to a lot of people including myself.It could be interpreted as "how much water", when the actual effect was to inversely scale both bodies of water and continents, such that higher water frequency actually meant smaller bodies of water.So for 0.17, the water 'frequency' and 'size' sliders are being replaced with 'scale' and 'coverage',which do the same thing, but in a hopefully more obvious way.Larger scale means larger land features, while more coverage means more of the map covered in water.
New Map Types
In order to ensure a decent starting area, the elevation generator always makes a plateau there (so you'll never spawn in the middle oft he ocean), and a lake (so you can get a power plant running). Depending on what's going on outside of that plateau, this sometimes resulted in a circular ring of cliffs around the starting point,which looked very artificial, and we wanted to reduce that effect.
In the process of solving that problem I created another custom generator for debugging purposes.This one simply generated that starting area plateau in an endless ocean.I don't actually remember how this was useful for debugging, but at one point I directed Twinsen to look at it to illustrate the mechanics behind generating the starting area.
The rest of the team liked that setting so much that we're making it a player-selectable option. So in 0.17 you'll get to pick between the 'Normal' map type, which resembles that from 0.12,and 'Island', which gives you a single large-ish island at the starting point.There's a slider to let you change the size of the island(s).
Maps with multiple starting points will have multiple islands.
PvP islands!
And speaking of scale sliders, we're expanding their range from ± a factor of 2 (the old 'very low' to 'very high' settings)to ± a factor of 6 (shown as '17%' to '600%'). Previously the values were stored internally as one of 5 discrete options,but as the recent terrain generation changes have made actual numeric multipliers more meaningful in most contexts(e.g. the number of ore patches is directly proportional to the value of the 'frequency' slider,rather than being just vaguely related to it somehow),we're switching to storing them as numbers.This has the side-effect that if you don't mindediting some JSON,you'll be able to create maps with values outside the range provided by the GUI sliders.
Mods will be able to add their own 'map types' to the map type drop-down, too. If you really liked the shape of landmasses in 0.16 and want to be able to continue creating new maps with it, please let us know on the forum.
High-res accumulators
The design of the accumulator has been always good. The 4 very visible cylinders, looking like giant batteries, Tesla poles and the electric beams perfectly telegraphed its function in terms of style and readability. That’s why for the high-res conversion we were very careful about keeping this entity as it was.
The only thing that was a bit disturbing (for some) are the poles crossing to each other when more than one accumulator is placed in a row. So we decided to fix it (or break it). The rest of the work was making the entity compatible for the actual look of the game. But in essence accumulators are still the same.
As always, let us know what you think on our forum.
There are three distinct archetypes within the Daughters of Othercide, each one of them with their own strengths and weaknesses. Today let's take a better look at our monster slayer: the Blademaster.
Nizar and Alexandre, Game Designer and Art Director on Othercide Lonely Blade In Darkness
Nizar: As Game Designers, we were at the origin of the Blademaster conception. Early in the development process, it appeared to be clear that we wanted a triumvirat of Daughters. To increase players’ strategic decision making, each daughter must have unique strengths and weaknesses: we didn’t want to create subtle variation of a single archetype.
Alex: Creating a class in Othercide is a crucial step: in addition of being the main characters of our players, each class must represent a clear function gameplay wise as well as follow the guidelines of our art direction. Building our classes was a long ongoing process, with a lot of iterations and questioning!
In my point of view – and this is applicable in multiple situations – a character rises from a couple of strong ideas. Those main “impulsions” don’t need to be very original, but must be clear and definitive, so that they can resonate along the creative process.
