As always, it is a pitty to see this things abandoned. It seems that this game not only has been finished and released, but it is algo a nice hit.

Yeah, with the release (and the crunch time) I totally forget to update it and didn't want to revive the old thread. I have updated the description and completeness status, thanks for reminding!

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.

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

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




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

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.

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.

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...

[The game is now available on Steam]

Hi everybody, I'm a member of small independent team Rake in Grass and we did finally finished our game Rampage Knights.
Rampage Knights is a cooperative beat 'em up game mixed up with randomized dungeon crawling and exploration which you can play alone or with a friend online.

The game is now available on Steam

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
You can play the game alone or with a friend (it supports both local and online co-op for 2 players). Sigle run 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







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:

Hi everybody!

My name is Petr and I am a member of our small independent studio Rake in Grass (currently three people) located in Czech republic. I'm the coding guy so I'm developing the engine we are using, porting our games to Mac and iOS and other platforms and of course coding the games :) You may know our shmup game Jets'n'Guns or 2D platformer Archibald's Adventure. My gaming experience started long long time ago in the zx-spectrum era with games like Knigt Lore or Sir Fred and I'm a gamer since then.

2) Sounds - there are many sound systems (alsa, oss...) but no one just works. I don't know how this is possible in 21th century...

The cross-platform PortAudio library is a specific solution to this problem for win/mac/linux.  You may also be able to use OpenAL.  In any case, I don't think best practice for linux involves coding directly to alsa/oss anymore.

Yes, but for example even if we used custom OpenAL build, we got crashes on some ubuntus using default driver, we had to manually override this.
I'm not against linux, I just think that if you are new to porting to mac or linux, I would recommend mac first because from our experience we run into more technical problems on linux. But probably it's all about how do you know each system.

But maybe it would be more interesting to know some sales reports rather than technical issues when deciding whether to port for linux or not, how well is shareware selling on linux compared to windows and mac...

Hi,
Most of our online sales of our last game goes from mac (70%). It's more easy to get noticed by apple user (featured on apple works really well), while pc sector is stuffed with billion casual click-me games.

Porting to Mac is not hard, if you have some experience with it and use portable libraries. The main issue is endian difference between powerpc and intel, but once you get past to it your are almost done Also note that graphics cards on Macs are usually not high-end so that can limit you if going 3d.

Porting to linux is pain because
1) You never know what version of libraries are installed (stdlibc++, vorbis, etc), there are so many distributions. What we ended up was just compiling our own versions of all libraries we used.
2) Sounds - there are many sound systems (alsa, oss...) but no one just works. I don't know how this is possible in 21th century...
My advice - create game for windows and mac, and let the linux users use Wine

Hi,
Personally I use the Bass library, we used it for two 2d games so far, it has simple api and it always worked fine under Windows and Mac OS X (and now even even for iPhone). Regarding money, it's almost same like fmod, free for noncommercial.

Note that it is just simple sound library, like fmod 3, so it doesn't have voice management and other stuff, you have to implement it on you own (or use new fmod), but that's fine for me.
I choosed Bass instead of Fmod just because it looked more friendly and more indie to me

Few years ago I also tried
- sdl_mixer: There was much noise in the output, also choosing the right update period was not easy.
- openal: Crashes on windows if not using software driver or own build. OpenAL is not part of Mac OS X 10.3, so you have to distribute the library along with your app if you need to target this (probably not an issue anymore). Also we had some OpenAL crashes under some version of Mac OS X 10.4. (was fixed by newer updates).