Celtic Heroes

“Has it really been a week since the last dev diary? Development on the Tower continues in earnest and after last week’s sneak peeks at some of the Tower denizens we’ve got some shots taken inside the tower itself.

Since you last saw it the Tower has had a fair amount of detail added to it. Kenny, the artist leading up the development has created all of the elements central to the tower and he’s now in the process of putting them together to form the levels. From this initial building set we can create as many floors as we need while making them distinct from each other in terms of the way players will navigate across them. The floors will be further distinguished by different lighting and colour schemes.

The designers are currently looking at creating some 2d floor plans using an example level created by Kenny to ensure we have enough space for them to place gameplay mobs that provide enough challenge and progression for players. The Tower is aimed at high level players so we need to strike a fine balance between difficulty and rate of progression. We’re looking at achieving this not only by the mobs you’ll face but also the route you take to go through the level. We also have to bear in mind that once a challenge is defeated a player might not necessarily want to face it again to progress further so alternative routes should be available.

Once we have these floor plans created Kenny and the other artists will be creating them from the building blocks available to them and the designers will set about placing the mobs. They’ll also be fleshing out the quests that will take you through the Tower as well as expanding the narrative so for all of you interested in the back story of Dal Riata get ready for some fascinating tales of Gelebron and how the tower came into being.
Those of you in the beta should have recently seen a pretty good improvement in performance and stability across some of the older iOS devices, and we’re aiming to roll these improvements out to our Android players too in the very near future. Some of the oldest handsets in the office have been given new leases of life with these improvements so kudos to the coders and artists involved.

Interesting developments from Apple since their recent acquisition of Testflight (the site we use to run and co-ordinate the beta test) mean we may be able to open up the beta even further in the near future. So, if you didn’t get on the beta program in the initial stages you may well be playing sooner than you think!

Our plans for Yule have taken shape nicely and we’re putting the finishing touches to the event so keep your eyes open in the next few weeks for more info and teasers on that. The weather in Dal Riata is getting colder, I’d be surprised if it didn’t snow this year.

Keep at it Heroes, Dal Riata needs you!
Until next time.”