![]() Speaking of visuals, your pixel art is really neat. We were also really lucky to find Alex Yoder who’s doing an awesome soundtrack that’s marrying gothic orchestras with glitched out arcade machine sounds. Barney loves animating the glitch effects, and they’re fun to program. Is there a story behind that? The initial idea was to have some arcade machine aesthetics as a nod to Gauntlet, and that grew into the idea to present Crawl as if it’s being played on some demented arcade machine powered by dark trans-dimensional magic, which is frying the circuit boards and glitching the sound and visuals. I love how the trailers mix this dungeons and dragons settings with kinda glitch art audiovisual effects. Now Valve is eager to get into the living room, and we’ve had Towerfall, Samurai-Gunn, Nidhogg, Broforce – it’s been really exciting seeing that happen. There really wasn’t anyone we could see releasing that sort of game. When we started Crawl we were really nervous that local-multiplayer really wouldn’t be viable on PC. Getting a friend to team up with you as against the hero, then sneaking in and taking their kill at the last second, becoming the hero and turning around and instantly killing them all in the space of a few seconds that tends to make lots of silly shouting and swearing and laughing when you’re in the room together, but we’re not sure how much that will translate online. Some situations that get us giggling when they come up in local would be very different in an online context. It goes back to playing games as kids where we had no choice but to be in the same room. Aside from the fact that it’s a difficult feature to implement, we really like the «idea» of couch multiplayer. Why? How are you designing the game so being in the same room with the other players will affect the experience? Right from the start Crawl has always been about getting friends together to play, and for us it’ll always be about that even if we can add online multiplayer. You’re studying online but for now Crawl features just local multiplayer. I find more interesting, though, how the indie scene is betting on local multiplayer. I guess it’s easy to put Evolve as another recognizable «asynchronous multiplayer» game. ![]() When you play as the enemies though, having any sort of «tell» feels unresponsive, so we have to be really careful. Likewise, with single player combat, enemies will often have a «tell» that you can watch for and avoid. In a single player RPG the hero can be overpowered for a bit, and the AI monsters don’t get frustrated, it’s very different when you’re playing as a monster. ![]() Reach the boss, and kill it! It was the same story for a lot of the game’s mechanics – Gold, XP, leveling up, buying equipment… Whenever we tried a mechanic that was balanced for multiplayer, we then had to also make sure it fit in with classic RPG tropes. We tried ending the game with a time limit, after reaching a specific floor, after a set number of monsters had died… but the thing that ended up working seemed so obvious once we’d thought of it. We found that whenever we put in game mechanics that you don’t encounter in a single player RPG, it just wouldn’t feel right. The difficulty came from having the game feel like a single player RPG to the hero, and include all the same tropes, but still be balanced for the monsters. That was probably the biggest design challenge we had, and we had to try a lot of ideas before we settled on something that worked. The early game-jam game was basically an endless game where you’d take turns being the hero or the monsters. It was great to have the flexibility to be able to add as much content as we wanted, while having a game that was playable from day 1. ![]() How has been developing Crawl from that 4P RPG prototype? Dave Lloyd: Working on a game that was already fun after only a few days development is a big plus, especially for a first project. Your game started as a small game made for a game jam. ![]()
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