Dec. 4, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
11:31
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| Hello everyone, Necromancer's approaching the beta stage of development. | |
| All of the models are in, everything's animated, I think all of the sound effects are in, or at least most of them are, and all but a few icons have been done and we are out looking for people to commission them to now. | |
| So it's alright, there are only a couple of bugs, I'll point them out as we go along and I'll fix them afterwards. | |
| This was a game recorded between myself and my co-developer, where I'm playing the evil Necromancer and he's playing the heroic survivors. | |
| And I've edited the footage together to give you hopefully the perspective from both sides in sort of real time. | |
| Show you how the game works in multiplayer and to show how the two different sides work. | |
| And show you just how the game in general works, because we really had quite a lot of fun playing it. | |
| So each level begins with the camera panning from the place that your opposition will start to your starting position. | |
| This is to show you pretty much either where the threat's coming from or where you need to go. | |
| The Necromancers only control their own character and raise zombies that they can give commands to. | |
| And the heroes work differently as you control up to three groups of three heroes that you have to use tactically to try and win the match. | |
| This is the first level and the necromancer wins on this one by raising zombies and overwhelming the heroes before they can reach the mausoleum. | |
| The win condition for each team varies from level to level, although the first chapter which is set in the graveyard is always the heroes needing to reach the mausoleum. | |
| But after that it changes. | |
| The hero team starts with two survivors, the douche and the slacker. | |
| The slacker's a melee hero who's got a cricket bat and vinyl, which for some reason can go through multiple zombies at once. | |
| And the douche has got a very large caliber handgun that can kill a zombie in one hit. | |
| All of the heroes are tropes and represent certain archetypes of people in society who take themselves a little bit too seriously, at least in certain ways. | |
| For example, the slacker has a comprehensive but exceedingly useless knowledge of pop culture. | |
| And the douche is a middle class kid who thinks he's a gangster. | |
| And each hero is armed in a way that generally reflects their personality. | |
| The necromancer can't directly attack the heroes, he can only use his zombies, but he's got a number of spells that he can use to influence the battlefield. | |
| That was a spell called Vigor, which increases the hit points of the zombies that it affects. | |
| But I'd actually raised a different kind of zombie to the normal zombies, called a ghoul, which is very fast but very, very weak. | |
| And casting vigor on it actually didn't help much, because they're still weak enough to be destroyed in one hit. | |
| So I noticed that the heroes are going to go off the path here, and that's an interesting move because sometimes there are invisible triggers around the level that only the heroes can trip, and basically when they're going off the path and into the wilderness, you get extra groups of zombies spawning. | |
| It makes life more difficult. | |
| So you're encouraged to stay on the path, but it also means it's more predictable for the Necromancer players and they can set traps and whatnot. | |
| So I raised a special zombie called a white and the heroes are currently making a break for my mausoleum. | |
| So I'm probably going to lose this level because I don't want to release the zombies that I currently control and raise new ones at the beginning because if I do I'll lose the control of the white and I'll have to buy a new one. | |
| But the white did manage to kill the douche and because I didn't lose the white during this level I'll have him available for the next level and the same goes for any heroes that survive the level. | |
| So this is the breakdown of the results of the last level. | |
| For the Necromancer side, I managed to kill one hero, which was the douche, and I lost 27 normal zombies and three ghouls. | |
| But I didn't lose my white and I didn't have any of the others to lose. | |
| This gave me an overall efficiency of 70%, which is why I got a silver ranking. | |
| There's a bit of a bug here that I need to fix, as it seems to think that I actually won instead of lost, and it's given me a time bonus as well. | |
| It's not difficult to fix, I just hadn't known that I needed to. | |
| So this has given me 123 extra bonus experience than I already would have had, which was 423, giving me a grand total of 546 to spend on the next level. | |
| You're then presented with a map of the next level as well as information from the perspective of the side that you're playing. | |
| And I will be including a clear objective at the bottom, I just haven't yet. | |
| And then finally you prepare your resources for the next level. | |
| The Necromancer has the ability to purchase new zombies, which is listed in the center of the screen, purchase either boons or curses, which are the spells at the left hand side of the screen, or increase his own personal abilities such as hit points, speed, or the maximum number of zombies that you can control at any one time, or your passive zombie regeneration rate, which is the number of zombies you have available to raise. | |
| So I'm going to get a Wraith, which is a minion that has a ranged attack, and a Theta spell, which slows down the heroes, and another Vigor, which increases the health of my zombies. | |
| And then I'm ready. | |
| And these are the stats from the Heroes team, who you can see actually did markedly worse than the Necromancers, with the same kills and losses, of course, but this gives them an efficiency of 37%, because they lost over half their team, and they only killed 30 zombies in total. | |
| They actually do get the time bonus, but again, because their efficiency was less, because instead of fighting their way through Hordes of Zombies, they made a dash for it, they end up with less money at the end and a bronze rating. | |
| And then obviously the picture of the map and a different description of the next level, pertinent to the heroes. | |
| You can see that the hero's end level screen is different to the necromancers. | |
| What you do is basically select the groups that you'd like to purchase new survivors for for the next level. | |
| And the composition of these groups is often really important, as it will determine how the group operates in the next level when it comes to fending off zombies. | |
| So you can purchase your heroes in the middle, and on the left-hand side, you've got various one-shot buffs, similar to the Necromancer's spells, but they do different things. | |
| And then you've got the groups on the right, and you can purchase permanent passive improvements for each group. | |
| So if you wanted a group that was more about assault and damage, you could take one. | |
| If you wanted a group that had a lot more health than usual to just stand there and take a beating, you could do that. | |
| Or if you wanted a group that was particularly quick and nimble, you could do that too. | |
| So Russ purchases a slacker, which increases the price of the next one that he would buy. | |
| This is a mechanism to try and prevent people from spamming any of the particularly good heroes. | |
| It's not such an issue with the lower level ones though, because they're not all that powerful. | |
| So clearly group 1 is going to be like the decoy close combat group. | |
| And he purchases a douche for group 2. | |
| So that's a character with a good range. | |
| He also grabs a first aid buff, which can heal an entire group of heroes as a one-shot, but only for a certain number of hit points. | |
| So if you've got a weak hero, he'll probably be healed back up to full, but if you've got a particularly strong hero who's been hurt, then he'll probably only be up to half health. | |
| He then takes a Muslim cleric, which is a hero that has a fast-firing weapon with a long range, but requires two hits to kill your average zombie. | |
| But his rate of fire makes him quite formidable. | |
| And he rounds off his group with a hipster, who comes really well armed with Molotov cocktails and an Uzi, but years of being a vegan means that he should really be kept away from the zombies because he can die quite quickly. | |
| Also the Uzi doesn't really do as much damage as it should do, which is something I'm going to change before we send it to any playtesters. | |
| And so on to level 2 with our new teams. | |
| At the beginning of each level the safe path is marked out in orange but it's only there for a very short time so it's important to pay attention to it when you can, especially if you're the heroes. | |
| Here you can see the hero team organizing to get into position to try and navigate through the map. | |
| i'm going to use this time as the necromancer to get as close as possible to give myself as much as a buffer between them and my mausoleum at the top it says i've raised zero out of six zombies It's slightly misaligned, but I'll fix that. | |
| And you can see a long procession of, I don't know what to call them, environmental zombies, I don't know. | |
| Which are zombies outside of the Necromancer's control that will go and attack the heroes regardless. | |
| Although the Necromancers can buff these zombies if necessary. | |
| For the Necromancer, it's often important to use these as a distraction or cover to make plans and prepare in advance. | |
| For example, I've raised a Wraith in Group 2, so I can command it separately from the other zombies that I'm going to be throwing at the heroes to try and make sure that they can't attack my Wraith and that my Wraith can attack them. | |
| The position of the heroes is important because they can block each other's line of sight. | |
| And here we can see it's the hipster being attacked and he doesn't last long because the hipster's got hardly any hit points. | |
| The Wraith doesn't actually do that much damage, but he is a source of constant pressure on the heroes. | |
| And one thing that the Wraith also does is drain experience points. | |
| I haven't mentioned it, but you can see that there's a little gold star under the life bars of the heroes. | |
| And the heroes go up automatically in improving power as they kill zombies. | |
| But the Wraith slowly drains those levels off. | |
| I was playing as the client as well, and I can see that there's also a bit of a bug with the rotation of the heroes. | |
| I'm going to have to sort that out as well. | |
| As well as the health bar of one of them, apparently. | |
| Thankfully, though, these are just small bugs to fix. | |
| So you can see that the heroes didn't really have an answer for the Wraith, which I'm not too surprised at, given that it's only level 2, and I probably shouldn't have had it here anyway. | |
| But the remaining heroes are outmatched, so they're basically going to have to make a dash for my mausoleum. | |
| This is quite useful because it allows me to show you one of the curses. | |
| The cursors are used as traps. | |
| This one's called Fetter. | |
| Basically, it shows you where it places it, and then once the heroes hit it, it triggers it. | |
| But the little blue effect you saw on the cleric just there was actually a speed boost that you can give to this hero group, which has basically counteracted the effect of my Feta spell. | |
| So damn it. | |
| But luckily for me, he ran afoul with some environmental zombies and I won the level. | |
| So that's our multiplayer player vs. Player video of Necromancer, but you can play it single player or cooperatively with the AI controlling either the heroes or the Necromancer. | |
| There are 50 levels across five different environments. | |
| So thanks a lot for watching and we hope you found it interesting and we look forward to hearing your comments about it. | |
| So for anyone who's curious, some extra information about Necromancer. | |
| It was funded via Kickstarter which we only just scraped thanks to my wonderful parents and after Kickstarter takes a percentage of it it left us with about £7,000 and thankfully we completed the project within the budget which is fantastic because this is our first actual proper commercial project so we're really pleased about that. | |
| It has taken a lot longer than we expected to get it into this state at the moment so there was quite a learning curve there but we can't dedicate all of our time to working on it because unfortunately obviously none of this money went on anything for us. | |
| It all went on assets and licenses and whatnot for the game. | |
| So we had to continue working our jobs. | |
| We probably would have been able to do this a lot quicker if we were doing this full time. | |
| So in addition to what you've seen in this video there's also 50 levels spread across five different environments and about 20 heroes and spells that you didn't get to see in this video but we'll probably get to see in videos in the future and the things that aren't done yet are some of the icons and the voice actors for the heroes to give them a lot more personality hopefully but these are things that are going to be added in due course. | |
| We are on the lookout for talented people to do the voice acting for the heroes so if you're interested please do drop us a line. | |
| You can either comment on this video or get me on Twitter at Sargon of ACAD or email. | |
| I think finally we're expecting to release it early next year. | |
| It would have been nice to get it done before Christmas but I don't really think we're going to. | |
| So, with that, thanks a lot for watching. | |
| We really, really appreciate it. | |
| And if you've got any comments or questions, please do leave them in the comments below. |
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