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[tonytaoz]

Hey everyone

I am Tony from NEXT Studios based in China. English is no way to become my advantage here, but still I'd like to share our ideas about the game we have been working on for more than a year——Crown Trick.

Crown Trick is a roguelike dungeon-crawler based on synchronous turn-based strategy. Check out the gameplay video here:




Procedurally generated maze

Our game has retained the core feature in a classic roguelike game, which is the procedurally generated maze. Of course it's to make sure you can have a different experience every time you enter the dungeon. But unlike others in an open map, Crown Trick locks you down in a small size of dungeon room, with a couple of monsters. Yeah...you are not alone and you don't even have an entire world to run. In other word, you have to fight.



Synchronous turn-based strategy

When you move, your enemy will move too. Or when you stop, they won't do anything either. That means you will have a lot of time to think about what to do next, to move a step, to blink away from a trap, or to cast a skill. In order to kill the enemy, you'd better to make a plan before taking action. Yes, move slow and smart.



Cast your skill on the elements of the terrain

When you explore the dungeon, you will easily find some fancy terrains with special visual effects. They are not just water, but elements that can react to the skill you cast on them. Cast a fire on the oil and turn it in flame, or cast a lightening on water and the water will make anyone into it get a shock damage... A lot of interaction between skills and elements to explore.



Learn skills from your enemy

A lot of monsters spread into the dungeons and they are not just different in shape. There will be a few elite monsters just behind the door in front of you. Don't miss it since if you can kill it, you will learn some unique skills from it. And we call them Familiars. These Familiars, if you beat them, will give you more skills to choose from when you build up the deck of skills in preparation for the next level.

Of course Familiars are not the only way you can learn new skills, we also design many weapons and relics to provide you even more diversified battle experiences, which I would like to hold it for my later update here on TigForum.

Why not you guys try it first?

Get to know more about Crown Trick from our Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1000010/Crown_Trick/

You are more than welcome to download a demo for free from below:
https://nextstudios.itch.io/crowntrick
https://gamejolt.com/games/crowntrick/413083

If you have any ideas or suggestions to our game, feel free to reach out to us on:
twitter: https://twitter.com/CrownTrickGame
discord: https://t.co/DGJDGW2xt4?amp=1

[tonytaoz]

I guess some of you have played the chapter one of Crown Trick in our last Alpha test. Not until recently, we have finished the second chapter. In the meantime, we are also working on more chapters where our character will encounter new monsters and bosses with new battle styles.

I will post more materials about new chapters here once they are near completion. Before that, I would like to show something that you may need to be careful when you will run in the dungeon.

DOOR!



Yes, Crown Trick has a lot of rooms in the dungeon and they are home to hundreds of monsters. Some of them are just normal, but some others are elite that can deal higher damage with stronger skills, and of course bosses will be even harder to beat. And we use different decoration on the door for different monsters behind, that's to say if a room home to normally strong monsters, the door of this room will look normal, while if it holds elite monsters or even a powerful boss behind, the door will look garish with some more decos And that means the player can get a kind of warning by just looking at the door before stepping into a room and then decide if he wants to open it now or later.



Last week was busy not only because the polishment for old chapters and building up for the new ones, but we also have some talk to game publishers about the game. They gave us some really interesting suggestions. And there are still a lot of works to do, we continue to improve the controls on the character's move, skill effect and overall difficulty curve. We are lucky that everything still remains on schedule.

[tonytaoz]

A couple of new monsters have been added to the game. Here we have corpse flower, Gaea Dragon and Soul Reaper... they are only tentative names. Their animations were just finished, you will see them in the full version.


Corpse flower



Gaea Dragon



Soul Reaper


These three monsters are part of our newly-finished chapter in Crown Trick, so... we are in consideration about a closed beta test probably next month. Besides new contents, we improve the control experience, number of enemies, the system to make up rooms, etc. So we need some feedbacks to verify if these changes work out.

The date for the test is not decided yet, as it depends on the overall progress. For sure, I will post it here once we decide whether or not we do a test and when.  

Before that, you are more than welcome to play a demo for free from below:
https://nextstudios.itch.io/crowntrick
https://gamejolt.com/games/crowntrick/413083

Wishlist it on our Steam page if you like the demo:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1000010/Crown_Trick/

Stay tuned...    

[tonytaoz]

As promised, these are two elite monsters recently added into the game:





As mentioned in the previous post, you will see a specially decorated door before stepping into a room with an elite monster living in. They are much stronger than normal monsters, but you won't regret if you can beat them down with a carefully built skill deck as you will receive weapons in much higher quality and a lot more coins.

On your way deep into the dungeon, you may get surprised when you open a door with a merchant behind it. With the coin you collect from the monsters you killed, you can purchase stronger weapons and items from the merchant.


 
Now Guessing!

There will be an unexpected surprise in this trading room as shown above. Tell me what it is by leaving your words in the comment area.

I may show you the answer in my next log. Have fun!   

[tonytaoz]

I just re-organized the opening story a little bit to make it easier to show the general idea about the game. So I move the part of weapons and relics into this new chapter. If you have read this part before, you can move back up to the first post to know the game in a larger picture. Thank you.   

Crown Trick has 9 categories of weapons:

1. Swords: sweep three tiles in front of you with a normal attack power
2. Axes: sweep eight tiles around you, but attack power will be lowered for each hit that lands
3. Daggers: attack enemy right in front of you twice, with high attack power
4. Spears: attack two tiles in a line in front of you. The farther enemy gets higher damage
5. Gauntlets: reach out to attack enemy as far as 3 tiles. The farther the enemy is away, the higher damage you deal
6. Pistols: attack range is 3 tiles and the last shot will deal damage twice
7. Rifles: attack range is 4 tiles and will damage all enemies in a line
8. Shotguns: attack range is 2 tiles. The enemy right in front of you will take full damage. Alternatively, each of the enemies (maximum 3) on the 2nd row will take 1/3 of the damage
9. Staves: low physical damage, but can cast element attacks


The weapon mechanics are illustrated as below:




Together with weapons, Relics are strong and useful items in Crown Trick. If you can collect some of them and build a deck from proper relics, you will deal amazing combo damage to your enemies.



Crit Ring
Increases critical chance by 5% whenever a normal attack scores a non-critical hit. This effect stacks until an attack successfully crits.


This relic helps guarantee a critical hit once in the upcoming attacks. Combining it with other relics whose effect can be triggered by a critical hit is a great idea so your character could deliver to its enemies an awesome burst of critical and high damage output.

Cold Intelligence
+1 enemy Freeze duration


Heart of Frost
+100% Critical Damage against frozen enemies


If you hold two relics at the same time, your ice spells will get overwhelmingly strengthened. Before casting a spell, all you need to do is collect as many frost scrolls as you can.

White Orb
Max HP is set at 1. All HP is converted to Shield, and Shield effects no longer have turn limit.


This is a core relic for the shield-based combat style, and it was one of the most popular relics based on the feedback from our recent Alpha test. The relics can change the overall gameplay. You can’t live long without a shield if you choose this playstyle, but as a trade-off, you are equipped with many strong shield-related effects as you carry a relic of this kind. High risk, high reward!

[Suttebun]

My goodness, this is spectacular.
The steam-woman is upsetting, the witch board is uncomfortable, and the gameplay looks quite fun!
  Good job and best of luck on the release guys/gals!