Welcome and Merry Juletide to you all. A lot has happened in the time since last winter sale and it is time we share a bit of information about the progress on DOOMBRINGER Episode 2.
We had hoped to be closer to a final release window by now. But alas real life has taken up a lot of focus for our main developer what with them changing their dayjob from a School teacher in Sweden to a game developer in Denmark. This has taken a lot of time from working on Doombringer and as a result, we are making up for lost time.
A Troglodyte pushing forth followed by a pack of Gorgers. An enemy that will have a surprise for the unwary traveler.
The Team
But before we get in to the progress we have done let us present the current team working on Doombringer's game directly. Not to take away anything from all the great people helping us wherever they can. We couldn't do it without their support. But this is the people who currently make the game for you.
Episode 2 developers:
Kristian Kjäll (Kristus) - Level design, Art, Modeling, Animation, Programming.
Sam Piper (Reki) - Lead Programmer.
Jeremy Sneep (RennyC) - AI and Entity programmer.
Matt Tropiano (Mtrop) - Sound effects, Linguist.
John S Weekley (Primeval) - Music.
On top of that Blaze Lightcap graciously helped us blocking out one of the maps for Episode 2.
Two Dreadnaughts standing guard. This new enemys Gotlung gun will not spare the hot lead they got racked up for you.
The Progress
We're going to go through this in three general blocks. General map progress, Monster progress and Boss progress. This so we can have a good idea of where each map is and where the finale of the episode is currently.
Maps
E2M1 : 80% - Gameplay is being refined and has for most of the map been through an art pass.
E2M2 : 50% - Gameplay is being refined and is still mostly only in the blockout stage.
E2M3 : 75% - Gameplay is being balanced to be less unforgiving and most of the map has been through an art pass.
E2M4 : 50% - Gameplay is being refined and is still mostly only in the blockout stage.
E2M5 : 90% - Gameplay is being polished and the map has been through it's art pass.
E2M6 : 50% - Gameplay is being mostly done and the map is still mostly only in the blockout stage.
E2M7 : 40% - Map has been blocked out but game play is still pending.
E2M9 : 40% - Map has been blocked out but game play is still pending.
We left out the boss map in this roundup since that is a special case map. But as you can see all the maps are blocked out. Though game play is missing for a couple of them, and the art passes are missing for the majority. This may sound bad, but game play and blockout is what generally takes us the longest to do while the art pass can be done faster once we got the ball rolling and feel confident about the game play.
E2M2 - Example of a map in it's blockout stage.
Monsters
What would new maps be without new monsters to fight. While you get a lot of new tools in the new maps like the Rocket launcher and Super Shotgun those weapons were already available to play around with in the multiplayer portion of the game or if you used weapon cheats in the campaign maps.
We're adding as many as 8 new enemies to this episode. These enemies range from variations based on the original episode enemies like the Aswang Matriarc, to completely new characters like the Vizier. The good news is that these are all more or less done and playable in game only requiring some polishing with their animations and presentation for the most part. Apart from the last enemy you will come upon in the episode the aformentioned Vizier, which still have some animation work to be done.
E2M5 - Example of area where recent art pass has been applied. The red square is a place holder switch waiting for it's decorate model representation.
Tesla Commanders are one of the new squishy types of enemies you will face. While their tesla coils pack quite a punch, just remember to keep moving so they don't get a lock on you.
The Boss
This section is going to be a bit less exciting at the moment. The boss is treated differently since it is pretty much all original materials going into making it. This is also why it's been pushed to the back burner. While we have discussed it and got a basic idea what we want to do with it. Currently we don't have any resources produced for it. What we are planning is to put it last in the pipeline, so that once the general episode is done and we are doing final playtesting of the maps. Then we can put all our attention to making the boss rather than working on both at the same time.