Interview: Kickstarting Team 21’s Dungeons Of Aledorn

 

A small yet dedicated team of indie developers known as Team 21 are in the process of launching a Kickstarter campaign for Dungeons of Aledorn. A bold spiritual successor to old school dungeon role playing titles such as Grimrock and Might and Magic, complete with all the challenge and depth that made such games so significant when they first released. The team are planning to craft an adventure that will appeal to veteran fans of the genre whilst drawing in new players in search of a formidable, but unfamiliar challenge. We recently had a chance to sit down with the team and go into more detail about what the Kickstarter is all about, and the surprises we can expect when it launches towards the end of this month.

So what is Dungeons of Aledorn, and why should we be excited for the Kickstarter?

A dungeon of Aledorn (DoA) is a dungeon/RPG that combines several attractive game features. The main gameplay takes form of a first-person view world exploration. Then, when a battle encounter commences, the game switches into a bird´s perspective viewed – turn-based combat system on a hex-field. This system allows you to utilize the whole potential of every character to their maximum, as it´s usually expected from a turn-based combat. We’ve made the system quite complex, so that it always offers you vast combat options to choose from. It´s only up to the player to find the right tactics in order to win the encounter.

We are saving our gameplay videos and trailer for the upcoming KS campaign; during which we’ll reveal additional details about DoA´s features, such as the camping mechanics, the alchemy and a precise mechanics of exploration-combat-GUI switching.

What was the primary inspiration of Dungeons of Aledorn, and is there any particular reason why you want to craft an adventure specifically for hardcore players?

Our inspiration didn’t come from just a single source, but a primary source was surely the old-school “dungeons” in general, like Betrayal at Krondor or Shadows over Riva. The game scene has for the last decade or so, has almost completely forgotten these kind of games and it survived only thanks to the classical dungeon crawler Legends of Grimrock which undoubtedly proved, that there´s still demand for these kinds of game experiences. While Grimrock ‘only’ revived the genre and did add just a few new features, we’re trying to bring back all time-tested principles of these games and enhance them with new ideas and new approach to game mechanics. For example, we already mentioned the camping management. Apart from that, several board- and pen & paper games (such as D&D) also served also as an important inspiration to many of the game mechanics of DoA.

We´re deliberately aiming our product at hard-core community because it´s been in recent years the most neglected gaming group. The AAA titles simply have to be mostly mainstream oriented, because a single limited group couldn’t even compensate their high development budget. This fact has created a market space for indie game developers such as we are.

The first person perspective you plan to use for exploration looks really interesting, how do you plan to transition between combat and exploration throughout the game?

This system works on the “distance-trigger basis” and a danger meter function. Enemy entities vary in their aggressiveness and respectively in their combat-triggering distance. The closer you are to the enemy, the danger meter itself fills faster and the combat encounter commences upon reaching its full state. At this moment, the game lays a hex-field to the players surrounding and places all characters, enemies and objects in it, respectively to the positions they held before the combat began.

At specific locations it will be also possible to actively engage enemies by clicking a single button. This function comes handy especially if you prefer the ranged-fighting or in order to take your target by surprise. Player may also set his preferred party formation as default in a separate GUI and thus begin each combat in a fixed formation.

You are abandoning the traditional open-world many are accustomed to in modern role playing games to focus on particular locations, what kind of environments can we look forward to in the full game?

DoA players will travel between several islands, which differ in their climate and other specifics. You will get opportunity to experience various forests and mountain areas, subtropical islands and jungles or inhospitable swamps. There are, of course, many dungeons throughout the world waiting to be explored, be it those artificially created (tombs, crypts, jails) or the natural ones (like caverns).

The story will lead our players also into several towns, including a huge city with many side quests and services. Furthermore, you’ll visit various keeps and castles as well. As you may see, our game offers more or less every location you might expect from a fantasy game.

You seem to be quite focused on the realistic and hardcore style of the game, if the appeal is there would you ever consider a more casual approach to reach a larger audience?:

Originally, we planned to create a game solely for the hard-core gamers. After some consideration we eventually compromised and added a lower difficulty setting that will disable various hard-core features and decrease the amount of enemies as well. This will give the more mainstream of our players more of a fighting chance, so that they enjoy our game as much as the hard-core players.

Do you plan to implement multiple story paths depending on the route a character takes throughout a playthrough, or are you dedicated to telling a single fleshed out narrative?

Concerning the main story path, you have to keep in mind that we’re still just an indie project, but several side quests will have a direct impact on the player’s surrounding or future events. Specific parts of the main plot will demand that you have to decide the general direction of your next action. The final outcome will be the same, but the paths to those will vary according to your decisions.

We will also present a karmic system as one of our KS stretch goals. We’ve already prepared the mechanics to implement it in our game, but it seems to be quite demanding for our designers and programmers. That´s why we´re going to implement it; but only if we gather enough resources.

Any stretch goals in mind for your Kickstarter? Or if successful where you would like to see Dungeons of Aledorn go in the future?

Our stretch goal list is, of course, prepared and it’s been ready for some time already. For now we can say that there are both minor and major game-changing features in it. From those minor ones, we’ll mention the possibility to creating your own magical equipment or a little extra item for our backers, which will definitely please all munchkins. There are also stretch goals adding more content such as side quests, bigger towns or voice acting of all the game dialogues (not only of the currently planned main plot dialogues).

For major ones, we’d like to point out the so called “living-NPCs” stretch goal, which would add a day cycle to all our NPCs (like Skyrim has) or an extra huge dungeon stretch goal, that would expand the game by around 20%, on top of its currently planned size. The biggest and final stretch goal would be the possibility to play the game as the “bad guys”- the Orcs. It actually adds a completely new campaign; where the player’s goal is to defeat the group of adventurers that’s threatening the interests and very existence of your nation.

We already have ideas for the future, in case that our game succeeds, to find its fans. We plan to publish two major expansions packs that will build on the mechanics and partially also on the story of the original game. We would also like to add another campaign that would bring a significant amount of extra playable content for our fans.

Have you considered an Early Access model of release for the game?

Yes, but we’re planning it for a limited number of players only. These players will be chosen from a pool of enthusiasts that would get a chance to participate on development as testers. We actually want the game to be modified in early access, under the direct feedback from our community – especially so in the alpha access phase.

So if you had to, how would you summarise Dungeons of Aledorn in a single sentence?

DoA is a spiritual successor to old-school dungeons RPGs, which combines both time-tested and new game principles in a single game.

The Dungeons of Aledorn Kickstarter is set to begin on March 11th, so if this seems like the style of game you would enjoy be sure to take a look! We’ll have more coverage as the campaign continues and we see more from Team 21 in the future, where we can expect more juicy screenshots, gameplay and information about the project.