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[Götz]

SOULSTONE
(working title)

Soulstone is a Dungeon Crawling RPG that we understand as a homage to fanasy board games.
The player has control over a party of 4 heroes that adventure into a dungeon to accomplish various quests.
The party will have to face the creatures that dwell inside the dungeon and random events as they advance towards their goal.

some of the features:

- randomly generated dungeons
- real time combat with time pause
- board game aesthetic

We are aiming for a PC release and if we can get good gamepad controls it will be released also on XBLIG.

Links

Milkstone Studios

As always all critique and comments are wellcome

[kurtkz]

The mockups are terrific! Please tell me you're going to be keeping the hand-painted aesthetic...

[happymonster]

I agree, the art style and characters are wonderful!

[Götz]

thanks!
Yes, we are aiming for a painterly style!

[Götz]

we have just finished the first enemy, with all the animations and some weapon and power variants so on the character side we are working on the heroes again.



Also we are putting together a room editor, as the content of the rooms won't be randomly generated probably.

Here are some screengrabs from the engine

[happymonster]

Looks nice (although I think there is too much contrast with the lighting with each cobblestone)

[mono]

Yeah, I think it's your bump map.

[Götz]

thanks for the comments!

the contrast is intentional, as it's painted on the texture... but yeah, i think we have overdone it.

We are still tweaking the lighting, ambient, and the specular/normal maps, but getting were we feel it's ok will take some time more.

[ericmbernier]

The characters look great. As others have stated, the lighting in the dungeon looks a bit off upon first glance. It's a bit too dark for my tastes too, but that's alright. Keep chugging along!

[Götz]

While we are still strugling with the lighting looking for an adecuate atmosphere, we have been working on the room editor and creating more content.

Currently we have 2 playable characters (from the 6 we aim to have at launch) with their weapon sets.
We are not aiming for a heavy loot driven game, as with the rest of the game we are trying to get a tabletop feel, so there won't be a ton of items to loot.

[Götz]

I have updated the first post to have the latest information.

Here are some screenshots from the game. Without the UI, as we are using placeholders while we make it work as intended.

[happymonster]

Looks great, but very much like a tabletop board game rather than an action style one (I presume that is the intention?)

[jonarkanix]

Very nice, love the graphic style. Will certainly have to watch this grow

[s0]

the boardgame aesthetic is pretty cool. getting strong heroquest vibes from this.

[Chris Pavia]

Looks great, but I'm not a fan of the extremely shallow depth of field effect. Should be more subtle IMO, currently gives me a "This is my first time using image effects so I'm going to go overboard!" impression. Not to mention it looks like it would obscure mid-range enemies too much. Love everything else though!

[Götz]

@happymonster thanks! that's what we are looking for. It's a real time game, but not a hack&slash, so we think the aesthetics and gameplay will match well.

@jonarkanix thanks!

@C.A. Sinner Heroquest is one of our main sources of inspiration, but more than the game in itself, what inspires us is the feelings and memories we have from this games.

@Chris Pavia Thanks! The use of the depth of field is to achieve a tilt shift effect and emphasize the miniature aesthetic, but it's true that in close frames doesn't look good. I think in mid range frames looks better, but we'll have to adjust it.

[spyker]

Hey, this screens looks great!
I love it.

It reminded me one of my favorite games - Dungeon Keeper 2:)

[Götz]

Unfortunately we have decided to stop the developement of the project. We were having some issues with the core concept and decided to stop before we had invested too many time on a wrong concept.
But I believe that we would be able to resume the development sometime in the future.

Thanks for the support!

[s0]

oh man, sad to hear that.

any specifics on what the issues were?

[Götz]

oh man, sad to hear that.

any specifics on what the issues were?

we worked on a really tight scheudle, so we didn't invest much time on playtesting and iteration and keep going with our initial concept.
When we reached a playable state, the game wasn't really fun and we had spent half of our development time.
The main issues were that there wasn't an appealing main objective, the lack of tactical combat and a bad balance between the simplicity and complexity of the "rpg" layer.

As we probably would have surpassed our deadline trying to fix all the flaws, we decided that it wasn't worth the risk and was better to put the game on hold.