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[boovie]

Hi everybody, I'm a member of small independent team Rake in Grass and we are currently working on this game, Rampage Knights.
Rampage Knights is a cooperative multiplayer beat 'em up game for up to 4 players mixed up with non-linear dungeon crawling and exploration. At least that's the plan

Download tech demo here

The game is a mixture of of fast action beat ‘em up game and dungeon crawler. Unlike other beat ‘em ups with mostly linear level design, the exploration, treasure hunting, trap avoiding and other general dungeon crawling will play a big role in the adventure. It’s not just decapitating, it’s also about health potions and lockpicking and secret rooms.

Single player and multiplayer campaign
The game is broken into campaigns you can play alone or with up to 3 other friends. One campaign should take about one hour, similarly to Left 4 Dead for example. During the campaign you obtain better equipment, find better weapons and fight harder and harder enemies until you eventually find the final boss at the bottom of the pit.

Hack and slash combat style
The action in Rampage Knights will be simple yet effective with mechanics similar to legends like Golden Axe. Swords, axes and maces will be the main tools of destruction in this game. If you are not a gaming dinosaur like us, you may be more familiar with more recent takes on the genre like Castle Crashers.

Randomized content
For each campaign the game will randomize the maps, treasures, equipment, bosses and special events and encounters in the dungeon. Every game should be different.

Customizable heroes
You will be able to change the look of your avatar. For the purpose of equipment and magical changes we have the faces broken down to single parts like noses and eyes and ears. Theoretically we could throw in a mass-effect-style character creation menu.

Other features:
- mounts
- wide range of weapons and spells
- equipment that can have impact on gameplay and also change a hero visually
- PC, Mac and maybe Linux (if we get enough support)







Pre-alpha footage showing basic combat in action:


A screenshot from a battle:


Hero riding one of the mounts in the game:


Currently we are testing new dynamic lighting to create gloomy atmosphere:


Everything is still in work-in-progress, but any fedback and comments are welcome!

[Netsu]

The premise seems cool and I like the artsyle you're going with, but the screenshots are broken and do not display in your post.

[barley]

I think you might have hotlink protection turned on or something. You could just host the images externally.

It looks pretty cool though! Also high-five for controller support.

[boovie]

It's weird, I can see the screenshots without a problem and they are hosted on our server. I will try to look into this...

[boovie]

The images should now display properly.
I'm not sure what was the problem, the images didn't work in chrome for some people (but the images did show when chrome was run in incognito mode, so it was not a problem with hotlink protection) so I moved them to different url and it seems they are working fine now.

[Connor]

they work for me, and i say this looks pretty good!

[boovie]

We have just released first footage of the game, showing basic combat in action. It's still work-in-progress with many bugs, but it captures the feeling of the combat.

[boovie]

Hi everyone, just a small update on the progress. We have been working on the combat system to make it less "button-mashing". We have now several combat moves, each being useful in different situations. For example the basic is light attack - just a simple swing attack which can hit two or more enemies at once but is really weak. It is useful when there are many enemies in front of the hero. Another one is heavy attack - it does big damage but can only hit single enemy at once. Useful to finish single enemy while other enemies are still far away. Or spin attack which can push enemies back a stun them for some time etc. More powerful combat moves require "mana" points which are gathered by hitting enemies and by connecting attacks together.

You can watch the overview of the combat moves in this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az51lheIYlo

Right now we are preparing "tech" demo to gather more feedback from people on the combat system and on the overall difficulty.

[baconman]

Kinda gives me a vibe like Castle Crashers meets the old D&D arcade games. Not bad!

[Dayvi]

This looks great!

What engine are you using?

[boovie]

It is our own 2D engine based on OpenGL for pc/mac/ios.

[boovie]

After a long time we have finally made some progress. We now have a tech demo available (you can download it here) as part of our Greenlight and Indiegogo campaign. Many things still don't work in the demo but it shows the core of the game and it is also possible to play co-op online. And it contains hats

To be honest we got stuck with the game for a long time. Usually we added some feature which looked great on paper but in the game it didn't feel right or something was missing. For example we implemented combat system based on light and heavy attack - light attack would attack many enemies while heavy attack would attack only single enemy and you had to use it strategically (a bit) and some enemies required special combos. Testing on people shown that they were ignoring the system after a while and ended up in smashing basic attack (and dying).

So we switched to system with simple attack button (and extra button for magic/items). Different combos are triggered by holding up/down buttons while attacking and it is also possible to press and hold the attack button for dash attack.

Another feature we got rid of was non-linear dungeons and map - backtracking was pretty boring and you ended up searching entire level anyway. Also I think that it is the nature of beat'em up games to progress linearly from left to right up to the final boss, or at least something that is expected. So the levels are now more linear with some lateral rooms with treasures and encouters.

We have also switched rooms to using grid system. The old system used skewed side walls allowed us to make them partially visible. But later on we realized how much this limits what we can do with the rooms. They all had very similar trapeziod shape, chasms didn’t work very well, object placing was quite complicated etc.