Grimrock Developers Look to the Future

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
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Grimrock Developers Look to the Future


The Legend of Grimrock team is continuing to work on a level editor and considering ideas for its next project.

Legend of Grimrock [http://store.steampowered.com/app/207170/], you may recall, is the wantonly old-school RPG that came out to critical acclaim back in April. Developed by the four-man indie team Almost Human, it was also, despite its grid-based gameplay and mercilessly vicious difficulty, a pretty big commercial success, which has allowed the developers to get down to the business of working on future projects without having to worry about starvation or sleeping in the streets.

Currently, they're up to two things. First and foremost is the Legend of Grimrock level editor, which is starting to come together but still in a very preliminary state. The original plan was to give the editor advanced functionality and "implement all kinds of interaction and logic with the Lua programming language," but they've now decided to use a simpler form of "visual scripting" instead.

"The dungeon designer can now connect actuators such as buttons, pressure plates and levers to doors, pits and other types of entities without writing a single line of Lua script," Almost Human's Petri Hakkinen wrote. "Of course this form of scripting has limitations because the designer is ultimately limited to the building blocks provided by the editor. That's why we still have Lua scripting support that can be used to implement more advanced puzzles."

The team is also working on a new "Grimrock-related project," although there hasn't yet been any firm decisions made as to what its final form will actually be. Hakkinen said that the studio has received "some very interesting and tempting offers about other game projects," but that the team ultimately decided that whatever it does next, it wants to continue making its own games.

"Whether it be an expansion, a full blown sequel or even something completely different, is still undecided," he continued. "Frankly, we were a bit exhausted with the whole concept of grid-based games after working so intensely for a year but as some time has passed we now think that we have more to give to this genre."

There's no word on when the level editor might be ready for a public reveal, but interested dungeon designers can follow the development process on the Grimrock forum [http://www.grimrock.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2118].

Source: Almost Human Games [http://www.grimrock.net/2012/06/20/update-and-future-plans/]


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CAPTCHA

Mushroom Camper
Sep 30, 2009
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What do they mean by "visual scripting"? Dragging and dropping premade assets into a editor?
 

EternalFacepalm

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Feb 1, 2011
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That actually really disappointed me, I was looking forward to scripting dungeons in Lua, it's fun and simplistic. Whatever the case, a visual scripter is best for people at large I guess.
[sub]*goes to sulk in a corner*[/sub]
Djinn8 said:
What do they mean by "visual scripting"? Dragging and dropping premade assets into a editor?
Sounds like something similar to Portal 2's level editor, which was actually surprisingly decent.
 

Fr]anc[is

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May 13, 2010
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As long as I can edit the last boss to be less cheap, they can do whatever the like. I had a blast with this game.
 

Corven

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Sep 10, 2008
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EternalFacepalm said:
That actually really disappointed me, I was looking forward to scripting dungeons in Lua, it's fun and simplistic. Whatever the case, a visual scripter is best for people at large I guess.
[sub]*goes to sulk in a corner*[/sub]
Djinn8 said:
What do they mean by "visual scripting"? Dragging and dropping premade assets into a editor?
Sounds like something similar to Portal 2's level editor, which was actually surprisingly decent.
I think you skipped the bit where he said lua scripting support was available for those who want more complex puzzles.

OT: I'm looking forward to whatever these guys come out with next since grimrock was a great little game.
 

EternalFacepalm

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Feb 1, 2011
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darkstone said:
I think you skipped the bit where he said lua scripting support was available for those who want more complex puzzles.
I have no idea how I missed that... I guess I skipped the paragraph or something. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, anyway.
 

fenrizz

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Feb 7, 2009
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Sounds good, I'm definitely looking forward to that Grimrock related project.

I don't care much for level editing myself, but I'm sure there will be many good fan made adventures.
 

Elate

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Nov 21, 2010
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Evil Smurf said:
it better be free
If you mean the level editor, I'm pretty sure they said it will be, otherwise, no.

Hmm, a multiplayer system could be interesting? Like, a dungeon Master type scenario, where the Dungeon Master pre-builds something and people play one adventurer, on the current engine. DnD style, that could possibly work, I know I would play it.

An expansion would also be nice (still haven't completed grimrock, got quite a bit of hours clocked on it though, need to have a sit down and play it some time.)

Possibly mod support, with the dungeon editor? There are a lot of places I can see this going to be honest, and all of them are good. In fact, I struggle to think of anything they could do wrong.
 

surg3n

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May 16, 2011
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I really like Grimrock, but it's heavily based on Dungeon Master, and I was always a Captive fan...



So ideally, I'd like them to make a futuristic game using the Grimrock engine, with lots of technical puzzles like finding and entering passwords into computer terminals. IMO Grimrock is a bit too samey, and having more mechanics in the game would make it more interesting and more strategic. Thats the other factor - it can be difficult to play strategically, because some places you just have to deal with, like when you walk into a room and the walls open up, and you have to find a button or whatever to get out again. That, and the constant transportation puzzles. It's not that they weren't done well, I just think that a few more elements to the puzzles would have been great. A futuristic sequel with more gadgetry would make me very happy. Incidently, Captive is possibly the biggest game ever made, 65,000 dungeons, it would aparantly take 50 solid years to play through them all. I made it up to level 65 or something, and that took a couple of years!

The other thing that I hope they would consider is an iPad version - these games would work great on a pad/tablet I think. I'm not sure how multiplayer would work - but even having a 2-player co-op mode would be nice, that way you take 2 characters each, and can re-merge as a group, let one player be in charge while the other player makes potions etc. I don't think multiplayer would work with 4 characters each. Bloodwych was a good game, multiplayer dungeon crawlers like that can be a lot of fun, but too many players would just mean that grieffing would be rife, and it would be so easy to grief in a multiplayer Grimrock.