Bleaktide Part 3: A Tour of Silverglade Village

Note that this is part 3 of a series. In this installment I take you on a tour of Silverglade Village.

Silverglade Village is a central hub where you can talk to townsfolk, collect quests and trade with merchants. You start the game at a wagoneer camp just outside the entrance to the village.

These foreign guards at the wagoneer camp don't speak your language and are of a grumpy disposition. Attempting conversation tends to agitate them. You can even get achievements for irritating enough guards.

The roving wagoneers aren't popular with the residents of Silverglade. Bunco the Shark is the first general merchant you'll encounter. He's a rogue, but not the charming lovable type.

There is a lot to do in the village and so one of the first things you're likely to do is to find and view the town map. There are various map types available to let you get your bearings and to give the world a sense of presence and permanence.

Oh looky, it appears to be a map! I wonder what will happen if you interact with it?

And there it is, a top-down view of the village and the surrounding dungeons. This is very much a work-in-progress and will likely be replaced. I basically took a screenshot from high above and then used Photoshop filters to try make it look like a painting. It's passable for now, but not great.

The villagers aren't always on the best of terms with one another and are prone to gossip and slander. Speaking to them allows you to learn more about the world and its history, though I suspect some players will simply gloss over the conversations (and that's perfectly fine). Some villagers will request your help and offer you quests. Others will happily trade with you.

This young rapscallion may not be well-mannered, but he's an amusing little chap.

The armor smith and weapon smith hang out at the smithy area near the centre of town. It looks like the Shadow Mistress is trying to flirt with the poor armor smith but that's not actually a feature yet.

There are various graphics options which can significantly modify the look and feel of the game. I'm not sure if I'll end up exposing all of the options since it may be overwhelming for players. Nevertheless, you may notice some images looking darker, brighter, gritter or with more glare.

Oh look, it's the town portal! If you're deep in the bowels of a distant dungeon but need to return to town to trade items and clear out your bag, this is where you'll pop out. The bloom option was set to extreme when I took this screenshot, hence the overwhelming blue glow. I kinda like it, but I suspect most prefer a subtler look.

Aw, she's an animal lover! Just as you can get achievements for harassing enough guards you can also get some for interacting with enough animals. If you look carefully you'll notice a big, juicy dung patty on the ground behind the bull. How revolting!

There are numerous treasure chests scattered around the village and its outskirts, many of them well hidden.

There are collectible items called 'skull doubloons' that allow you to be revive as a ghost at your current location when you die. However, if you run out of skull doubloons you'll be forced to endure the inconvenience of being revived here at the Silverglade graveyard.

That's enough of Silverglade Village for now. I have a bunch more screenshots but want to keep these posts fairly brief so I'll save them for later. In the next installment I'll discuss some of the development process and some of the technical aspects of the game.

Bleaktide Part 4: Game Development Process

Bleaktide Part 1: Visual Style, Mood and Influences

Note that this is part 1 of a series. In this installment I discuss the basic premise of the game and talk about some of my influences in coming up with game's overall mood and atmosphere.

Around late October / early November 2019 I started work on a new pet project with the placeholder name 'Dungeon Crawler'. The game is a dungeon crawler (big surprise!) with a dark theme and lots of black humor thrown in.

It is now almost 6 months in and I have settled on 'Bleaktide' as the real name for the project. I've made substantial progress pretty quickly, mostly because I leveraged much of the framework and content from a previous (now abandoned) project which I jokingly called Skymorrowindblivion.

Early concept scene trying to nail down the desired look and feel.

The premise is that there is a central starting village serving as a hub for various nearby dungeons for you to explore, leveling up and collecting loot as you go. I'm hoping to support multiplayer and have been doing some preliminary work on the networking and keeping the multiplayer aspect in mind while designing the framework. However, multiplayer is still in a very rough, early state.

The initial look was grim and gritty. Over time the look became more colorful and stylized, though the gritty color scheme shown here is still supported as a graphics option.

Inspiration: The Wheel of Time

Initially it started as me just experimenting with creating a village scene with a dark, moody setting inspired by the early Diablo games (the town of Tristram in particular) as well as the book cover art of the Wheel of Time series.

This is the cover art for 'The Eye of the World', the first book in the 'Wheel of Time' series written by Robert Jordan (and completed by Brandon Sanderson). I always loved the style and wanted to achieve a similar (but somewhat darker) feel for my starting village. This cover art was created by Darrell K. Sweet.

This is a screenshot of the main village in Bleaktide. Although darker than the Wheel of Time cover, it bears some some resemblance in that it's a medieval fantasy village set against a blue evening sky, illuminated by orange light emitted through the windows of the surrounding buildings.

Inspiration: Diablo

Back in 1997 I encountered the first Diablo game and was struck by it's gloomy, gothic theme. You start the game in a town called Tristram, a forlorn ruin of a place with haunting beautiful music contributing to the sombre mood. Diablo 2 was great as well, and Diablo 3 was good in its own way. But there was something I liked about the simplicity of the original game -- a town serving as a hub to a single dungeon located beneath a corrupted cathedral nearby.

This is an art piece by artist Peter Lee depicting the cathedral in the town or Tristram from the Diablo games. While I enjoyed all of them, the mood of the town in the original game, with it's haunting music and desolate setting, left a lasting impression on me. I wanted to evoke a similar mood in my own game.

Here is a link to the original Tristram Village Music. The selection of music for my own game is also heavily influenced by this.

For Bleaktide I wanted to go for a similarly gloomy feel with a similar premise, except that instead of only a single dungeon to explore I wanted the main village to serve as a hub to several nearby dungeons.

A top-down view of a part of the game's starting location, Silverglade Village.

And for reference, here is a top-down view of a part of Tristram from Diablo 1.

The first character you meet is Loremaster Taerim. He serves a similar role to that of Deckard Cain from the Diablo games. I even placed him next to a well as tribute.

That concludes this introductory entry. check out the other installments if you'd like to follow the progress of the project or learn about many of the design and technical decisions.


Here is the next installment:
Bleaktide Part 2: Player Characters

Bloody Glade Update

The Bloody Glade is a side-scrolling hack-'n-slash / light RPG targeting mobile devices (primarily iPad and iPhones right now). I started work on it at the start of the year and have devoted a lot of time to it.

It's larger in scope than some of my previous personal projects, but I tried to keep the scope of the game at least manageable. I was inspired to create it when playing through the original Golden Axe (I have it as part of a retro Sega game pack for PS3). I spent a lot of time in the dingy arcade section in a shop down the road from my childhood home playing it when I was about 9 years old, so it brought back fond memories.

I could complete Golden Axe in about 20 minutes, and I liked the idea of a fairly short session where you could actually get through a game, even if it is fairly mindless and straight-forward button-mashing (though I've tried to add a bit more strategy into The Bloody Glade).

A few nights back I spent a lot of time creating a new world map (I wasn't satisfied with what I had before). I wanted to give the player the option to choose between various routes to give some incentive to replay the game once completed. Getting the map to have the feel I wanted was quite frustrating and time-consuming, but I'm happy with the end-result.

At the moment I am planning on making 3 playable characters: the wizard, the enchantress and the abomination. I have around 8 enemy character types so far. Getting enough content in is a concern (the moment a game starts visually resembling the larger, professional games people are used to, they start to expect more overall), but I'll deal with that later.

The spells I've implemented so far are a fireball, an ice orb, hailstorm (reminiscent of the ice blizzard in Warcraft 2), earth shatter (pretty much an earthquake) and lightning storm (which at the moment is a bit over-the-top, but fun). I have another one where a dragon swoops down partially implemented, though it looks pretty cheesy at the moment (a friend laughed when he saw it, that bastard).

The game has a few RPG elements, including a very basic inventory system and leveling
system. These have been deliberately keep very simple though, since I want to target a broader, more casual audience than the typical RPG player, and avoid overly complex game mechanics. At the moment, most of the game mechanics revolve around:

• selecting which characters to attack
• choosing when to consume health and mana potions
• deciding when to cast spells (some of which require quick-time events to be cast successfully) and who to target
• choosing which spells to learn when leveling up
• choosing a route to follow in the world map

I have a few plans for adding to this a bit (I want it simple, but not too simple, I don't want it to feel like a brainless exercise in simply tapping on bad guys). So far it actually feels fun so I'm feeling optimistic.

Below are a few of the items that have a chance of being spawned by slain enemies. Each item gives you a perk / buff. When you die there is a resurrection penalty (i.e. you can continue the game, but at a cost). One of the potential penalties is removing items you have collected.