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[HalfTower]

We’re a team of four student developers from New Zealand, working on a 3D isometric roguelike. This is our first public devlog, and we’re looking forward to getting some feedback and sharing our work with like minded people. Souls is a working title, we’ll hopefully come up with a better name!

We’re hoping to have weekly builds available to play, check the links below to download the latest.

The souls of the undead are in danger, hordes of corrupted monsters have invaded the underworld to capture and eat them. Play as Delilah, a reluctant witch, and journey through the underworld to kill the corruptions and free the souls. Finding and rescuing a soul will earn it’s gratitude, and it will bestow you with a new magic skill. But remember, the underworld is an unforgiving place with death around every corner...

Features

• Randomly generated skills for unique combat challenges each playthrough
• Hordes of enemies to encounter, evade and exterminate
• Defeat bosses to unlock new areas
• An expansive world to progress though

Our progress so far

At the moment we have a rough prototype, with most of the features we want in the final game. The player can collect souls to learn new abilities, fight off hordes of enemies and explore the underworld.

Within the next week we want to overhaul the movement and refine the combat. A brand new, world is being designed and will be built out for future weekly builds. New bosses and mobs are being made to add to our existing enemy types.  

Links

Follow us on Twitter @HalfTower
We sometimes stream our development over at http://www.twitch.tv/halftower
Download the latest build at //builds.halftower.com


(The pictures below are from our prototype, the current downloadable build looks quite different)

[Ulydev]

Wow ! Awesome ! I don't know if that was intended, but it actually sounds like Dark Souls. And, that's a really good thing.

I'm curious to see what mechanics this game is going to feature.

[dancing_dead]

pls change name, for your own sake. as a from souls fan, I am more turned off than on by the name you've chosen.

[jctwood]

The animation of the big guy is really slick! I am looking forward to seeing this progress. I have to agree the name seems a little too easy and not very descriptive. Something like Undead Dungeons gives more sense of the game. Not a great suggestion but I'm sure you understand what I mean.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

Snowball Souls

[SrGrafo]

#First

[HalfTower]

Wow ! Awesome ! I don't know if that was intended, but it actually sounds like Dark Souls. And, that's a really good thing.

I'm curious to see what mechanics this game is going to feature.

Thank you! Fun fact: For the very very early prototypes we did have more one-on-one combat similar to Dark Souls, but changed it to focus more on horde combat.

pls change name, for your own sake. as a from souls fan, I am more turned off than on by the name you've chosen.

As we said in the original post, this is simply a placeholder name, nothing final.

The animation of the big guy is really slick! I am looking forward to seeing this progress. I have to agree the name seems a little too easy and not very descriptive. Something like Undead Dungeons gives more sense of the game. Not a great suggestion but I'm sure you understand what I mean.

Everyone seems to love the knights animations! 

[oldblood]

#First

"...and then something magical happened: SrGrafo suddenly began to understand why people used to harass him about his game's name..."

...In all seriousness. I know you said it's a placeholder but using the term "Soul" in your game-name is the equivalent of adding the letter "Z" at the end of it. If you could only understand how many devlogs begin on TIG with the tentative titles like: "Souls", "Souls 2D" or "Souls 3D" you'd begin to understand why you can get met with eye-rolling... So bear with the comments.

All that being said. Looks like you're off to a great start with your prototyping. Best of luck on the project.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

the problem with using souls even if it's a placeholder name is that people come here with higher expectation and most of the time it's just a big meh, another souls clone wannabe and devlog being ignored.

For the moment, this looks generic and doesn't reach the Souls standard. 


the knight is cute though , reminds me of Dragon Nest

[SrGrafo]

@oldblood: not really, we understood that a while ago, still thinking its highly unwelcoming 

just found funny to see the name, not for acting like another darksouls butthurt but cause it was used before, the name.

magically leaves and actually wish good luck to this game cause it looks nice

[HalfTower]

Back again for our weekly update!

Most of the progress we made last week was on the programming side, so no pretty pictures to show 
We do have hordes of skeletons to play around with though, and you can download the latest version of our game here. We really appreciate any feedback you leave via the in-game form or in this thread.

This week we're working on implementing user defined controls, to see what people like best. We're still trying to figure out the best control scheme, it's definitely something important that will make or break the game's combat.

We have the levels designed and blocked out, now we need to get them working in game. During prototyping we couldn't decide on how we wanted the levels to work. Should they be entirely procedurally generated? Pre-made levels that are ordered randomly? An entirely hand built level? We left this decision quite late in the development process, and it would have been much better to sort out as sooner rather than later. Level and environment design should not be left until the last minute.

We also have another boss to add to our lineup, no prizes for guessing who this guy is     

[HalfTower]

With another week comes another post. First off I would like to apologise for being so quiet as of late.   I (Aiden) take absolutely full responsibility. Lets not let that stop us though; onward and upward!

To help end the silence the team has decided that over the next week each of us will bring you a post a day to fill you in on what exactly it is that we have been working on the past couple of weeks.

My main goal for the past few weeks has been solely around the player; making sure that you have an enjoyable stay with us, here in the devilish underworld. This has involved some pretty exciting things such as a new shiny inventory system!

That you are able to fill with our lovely little soul friends, that will help you along your quest to rid the underworld of the monsters that torment it.

Unfortunately being a programmer, there isn't too much in the way of things that I can show off, short of unexciting code snippets. As the week goes on, I can trust that my fellow Half Tower members will bring you some mouth wateringly juicy posts to satisfy your cravings!


Links

Follow us on Twitter @HalfTower
We sometimes stream our development over at http://www.twitch.tv/halftower
Download the latest build at http://builds.halftower.com/latest

[HalfTower]

Hi all, Joel here. First time posting for the team, I'm one half of the artists. Among my miscellaneous tasks, I've thus far been mostly responsible for modelling, texturing & animating some enemies - namely bosses, including that Great Knight pictured originally. He's now (mostly) textured and battle-ready. In our latest build we've also introduced the Cathedral Guardian (and he's fairly ruthless!)











Those skeletons from earlier are my creations, and also now adequately textured until we can get to polishing... and they have new friends!



I'm also currently working through the GUI. You can see the first passes of the HUD & inventory in-game, but there's still a lot of work to be done on it. I've currently got my sights set on revamping the title screen (especially since the name change). But more on that later...

[HalfTower]

Hey all, Aiden (@HalfAiden) here!

Just wanted to drop by to let you know the news... WE'RE BACK! That's right, we have had a few weeks off for a mid semester break at university, but we are officially back at it and more motivated than ever!

You may have picked up on it before we left, but here we are to announce that Souls is now officially called Gothical! With this change Joel (@SuperPangolin) has made an awesome new logo for us!

As I said before we are all super motivated to get you an awesome game to play over the next couple of months! We've all been working incredibly hard to add as much polish as we can in this time. Victoria (@TheLadyVictoria) has been putting a lot of effort into making the environment super awesome with a whole new terrain and a lot of really cool trees!

And if you are anything like me you can have an awesome render of the trees as your background, found here: http://i.imgur.com/iCeOplj.png


As well as our awesome new logo Joel has been a busy bee putting in new particles into the game, making it feel a lot more satisfying to take down all of those pesky skeletons!

He has also made everything shiny and new, but still being dead, because they are in the underworld of course.

As for Ethan (@EthanMcQuarrie) and I, we have been busy squishing all of the pesky bugs that we have found over the last term; adding a pinch of balance; and importantly a whole bunch of polish so that you really know your true power when playing Gothical! We have been really channeled our inner Vlambeer with lots of screen shake, increased attack speed, and lots and lots of fun!

We don't have a stable build with all the new juice available, but keep tuned over the next week for the new build to play and enjoy!

Links

Follow us on Twitter @HalfTower
We sometimes stream our development over at http://www.twitch.tv/halftower
Download the latest build at http://builds.halftower.com/latest

[HalfTower]

Hello, it's Victoria here! (@theladyvictoria)

We're down to the last few weeks of our production, and we're hurrying to get things finished. Two weekends ago we showed Gothical off at Armageddon, New Zealand's largest pop culture expo. It was great to see people enjoying our game and we got lots of good feedback.

We've been adding in the particle effects for all the random spells you can collect, and polishing the enemies hit reactions.

The Great Knight has a new look and some new friends - you might find yourself being cornered by those purple wisps if you're not careful!

The environment is also coming together. There's been some new props and textures added to rubble and walls to replace any lingering placeholders.

We're a few weeks away from our final release on the 20th November, but you can play the latest build at builds.halftower.com