Heya!
After (just barely) a year of development time, Ecrazeus Castle, my first commercial game release, is now officially available on Steam!
Hopefully it'll be worth the short wait, as it was delayed a bit from it's internally planned release of June.
By purchasing the full game, you'll experience:
3 courses filled with unique levels, their unique dungeon, unique bosses, and slight gameplay mechanic tweaks between each one.
Beginner: Short duration, single level dungeon
Advanced: Shops after a set amount of levels cleared during grinding, dungeon has randomized rooms
Expert: Fixed amount of stages, Time limit becomes a deadline. Two different fixed dungeons based on player character.
2 cute playable characters, Hime-Alice and Faune, each with small differences.
A quest mode that lets you play through all three courses in a row, a harder mode overall.
38 achievements / secrets that unlock additional content for the game, including outfits and mini-games.
Over 60 weapons to use, categorized into 8 broad weapon types.
Over 15 different special room events.
A few consumable items.
A few things that aren't disclosed due to being secrets.
The game costs 4.99$. Regional pricing has been set to "purchasing power conversion only" for all other regions, so hopefully this should be a good bang for your buck product.
While each course can take between 10-30 mins each on their own, the Quest Mode took me just about an hour to complete a winning run (testing this mode due to it's length was a nightmare). And I personally took about about 20 hours to get all the secrets on my Steam account (technically 22, but the last 2 hours were just me fighting the RNG for one achievement). It's also really satisfying trying to manage the strange, ever-incrementing score multiplier and managing survivability with it.
As some might know, I had dabbled in game development prior to my PSO2 YT Channel: around 2015, I started work on an RPG in HaxeFlixel that would take years to go nowhere, and when Covid hit, I had no remaining desire to jump back into game development (and PSO2 started to eat at my free time). After leaving PSO2 in late 2023, and several real life issues at the time, I ended up finding and purchasing RPG Developer Bakin in the middle of 2024, and it just clicked. After a few gamejams, and a few test projects that went no where, one of those gamejam entries became Ecrazeus Castle.
The road to completing it was not ideal either: making a game within an engine designed for turn-based RPGs that barely released out of Early Access (with still a lot of bugs, especially export-only bugs at the time), proved difficult at times, but the sheer amount of gains from the eventing system, map editor, and various built-in features without having to worry about the nitty gritty of Unity or Unreal Engine, made making this game unbelievably easy compared to past games I tried making... especially for a fully 3D title.
Now, I'm not offering a broadly known and critically well-received game, nor a I offering a simple but well-polished game, but I am offering a game that I wanted to make, a game that I have fun playing (once you get the hang of it), and a game that I'm happy that I was able to bring it to fruition. Some aspects of the game I'm a bit disappointed in myself for failing (like the game performance in some areas, or not being able to think about more weapon ideas), while other aspects I'm more than satisfied with, way more than I expected.
Regarding "future updates", they'll mostly be focused on bug fixes brought up by the community, but otherwise I'd prefer to keep the game in a finished state. There are no plans to perpetually update it with either free or paid content. I'm personally at my limit as to what I can really do with the game itself. After a year of work, I really want to start on a new project, hopefully something that's NOT fighting all the systems of the turn-based RPG engine for it's existence. :)
I sincerely hope everyone who purchases the game has a great time with it. Once you get the hang of the gameplay, and gotten all the secrets, the next step is to aim for a high score. You can especially go wild in Quest mode, where I've personally hit >5,000,000 points on the online leaderboards with several mistakes. Please, aim for the top and share it online!
(On a technical note, Steam won't be able to show on the Steam Community either the Leaderboards or the Achievements, until the game gains a sufficient amount of notoriety)
I'd also like to mention the Meringue Rouge website, over at https://meringue-rouge.neocities.org/. There are some additional tips and some behind the scenes information about the game over there on the Ecrazeus Castle related pages, so check them out when you're comfortable with it. From there, you can find my socials, such as my X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube channels.
I will say, it is very strange being more comfortable with making video games, and becoming so... uncomfortable with making YT videos, outside of trailer dumping (and I tried). It's like I've performed an irreversible class change (or is it a class promotion?), but I'm happy with the outcome of it all.
Anyway... I hope you enjoy this video game product.
When I'm done with release date shenanigans and post-launch patching, I hope to see you guys next time for my next game project.
Sincerely,
| Meringue Rouge