Antti Tiihonen anwers the question: How to design a modern retro Dungeon Crawler?

Almost Human Games have published a new blog about the iPad version, and released a new one minute video with some game footage. So will any of you buy this version?

Hello all! The blog has been silent for sometime but do not fear, we have been hard at work. The long overdue iPad version of Grimrock 1 is finally nearing completion and it has entered the closed beta testing stage. This means that the game is playable from start to finish and all features have been implemented. Juha Pinola, the man responsible for the conversion, is currently busy fixing the remaining bugs, smoothing the hard edges and balancing the game.

And thats not all as  they talk about the Mac version of Legend of Grimrock II.

The Mac version of Legend of Grimrock II is also progressing well. The game is now fully playable but the new OpenGL renderer still needs a performance improvement or two. Our DirectX version of the renderer has been much thoroughly optimized because that’s our primary development platform, so additional optimizations are needed for OpenGL to achieve good frame rates. Our goal is to release a beta version still during this month and those who already have the game on Steam will be able to participate in the OS X beta. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.

Matt Barton is back with the second part of his video interview with the Co-Founder of Almost Human Juho Salila to talk about the Legend of Grimrock games.

In the second installment of this 2-part interview with Juho, we chat about Ratlings (a new race), Farmers (a new class), and Firearms (a new weapon category) for Grimrock. We also chat about puzzles and why you shouldn't look for answers online. We also chat about the possibility of a third game, though it's up in the air whether that'd be Grimrock III or something new.

Matt Barton interviewed the Co-Founder of Almost Human Juho Salila to talk about the Legend of Grimrock games, and his opinion on other dungeon crawler games.

This week is the first of a two-part series with Juho Salila, co-founder of Almost Human, the studio responsible for The Legend of Grimrock. In this segment, we talk about the first Grimrock, what's new in the second installment, and how Almost Human works as a studio. We also chat about the influence of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder, and what Juho thinks about Might and Magic Legacy.

Almost Human announced their dungeon crawling game series is close to selling over a million copies. The first game Legend of Grimrock has already sold 900 000 copies.

Legend of Grimrock Series Sales Approaching One Million

The development of Legend of Grimrock 2 has entered final testing phase, sales of Legend of Grimrock  series are still going on strong.

ESPOO, FINLAND - OCTOBER 1, 2014. Indie game developer Almost Human Ltd. is proud to announce that their dungeon crawling role playing game series is well on track to sell over a million copies. The first installment of the series, Legend of Grimrock, has surpassed the milestone of 900 000 copies sold while the pre-orders for the second game, due to release on 15th of October, are going on strong. The developer anticipates that the milestone of 1 million copies sold will be achieved still during this year, after the release of Legend of Grimrock 2 on Steam, GOG.com and other online distributors. Following the recently released new trailer, the sequel has been available for pre-orders on Almost Human's website www.grimrock.net for a special 15% discount off the regular price of $23.99.

Legend of Grimrock 2 development also reached an important milestone today when the Release Candidate version of the game was completed. "With the sequel, we set to improve on an already great game and, judging by the extremely positive impressions of our beta testers, we have definitely reached our goal and more" says Antti Tiihonen, one of the co-founders of Almost Human. "All the aspects of gameplay and presentation in Legend of Grimrock 2 have been either touched up, expanded upon or, in some cases, completely rebuilt and we're thrilled that we finally get to share our newest creation with role playing game fans" continues Antti. Next the game will enter its final testing phase to ensure that it is stable and bug-free when it is released. With the game in near-final quality, Almost Human is gearing up to sending review copies to the gaming media and the developer is confident that the sequel won't fail to impress.

About Legend of Grimrock

Legend of Grimrock is a dungeon crawling role playing game with an old-school heart but a modern execution released in April 2012. A group of prisoners are sentenced to certain death by exiling them to the secluded Mount Grimrock for vile crimes they may or may not have committed. The game brings back the old-school challenge with highly tactical real-time combat and grid-based movement, devious hidden switches and secrets as well as deadly traps and horrible monsters. Legend of Grimrock puts an emphasis on puzzles and exploration and the wits and perception of the player are more important tools than even the sharpest of swords could be.

About Legend of Grimrock 2

Legend of Grimrock 2 is a sequel to the chart-topping, critically acclaimed dungeon exploration role-playing game Legend of Grimrock that revived the dungeon crawling genre in 2012. The game is a dungeon crawling game inspired by oldschool classics of the genre while still bringing its own twists to the game. The game features survival, combat, magic, puzzles and role-playing elements. The player controls a group of four prisoners who are shipwrecked on the secluded Isle of Nex which is filled with ancient crumbled ruins, mysterious shrines and a vast underground network of dungeons and mines. If the prisoners wish to make it out alive, they have to overcome the challenges devised by the ominous mastermind of the island. Find out more at http://www.grimrock.net

Continue-Play published a new Retrospective Review for Legend of Grimrock.

Legend of Grimrock is a thoroughly enjoyable old-school experience. Although it can be ruthlessly difficult at times, it’s well worth a playthrough – if only to try out an advanced and modern way of how games used to be played, or to use the Dungeon Editor to build your own adventures and challenges for your friends to solve. A sequel to Legend of Grimrock is currently in development, and if the first game is anything to go by, it’s something to look forward to.

I posted about the probability of a new Legend of Grimrock web mini-series. Well it's official as the makers of Fallout: Nuka Break have started a new kickstarter to fund the project.

High atop Mount Grimrock, an airship transports a group of prisoners escorted by armed knights. Each prisoner has been tried and sentenced by The Court for crimes against the king. The prisoners are thrown into the pit of Mount Grimrock, at which point their crimes are immediately absolved; however, no prisoner pardoned in this manner has ever made it out of the mountain.

Almost Human has a new post on the Legend of Grimrock webpage that the game might be getting a live action mini-series.

The Legend of Grimrock website has word that the Linux edition of Almost Human's dungeon crawler is released on Steam.

Phew, it took quite a while but finally it’s here: the Linux version of Legend of Grimrock is on Steam! This means that Steam now carries all the versions of the game: PC, Mac and Linux.

The standalone Linux version of the game has also now been updated to version 1.3.7 which eliminates a few annoying bugs. Most importantly text input and mouse look troubles have been fixed as well as the issue some users have had where they have been unable to export custom dungeons. You can get the update for the standalone version by redownloading the game from the link that was emailed to you when you purchased the game from Humble Bundle or from our store. If you’ve lost the email with the details, you can get it resent but you can of course also email us as well if you need any assistance.

The team behind Legend of Grimrock has announced that they're making a sequel to the
first game called - Legend of Grimrock 2. 

Here's a bit from the announcement on their website:

Secondly, and this is a biggie (probably more to ourselves than you!), we are now officially working on... Legend of Grimrock 2! Creating a mere DLC or expansion to Grimrock simply would not have felt right. As today's meeting proved, we still have a lot of ideas we'd like to explore, lots and lots of new content already done (originally made for a DLC/expansion) and a big engine update in the works.

Thanks RPGCodex :)

Almost Human has a blog update on their "new Grimrock project" talking about some of the updated engine capabilities:

Up to now mostly everything in the dungeon has been scriptable. This means that we (and modders) can spawn and destroy alcoves, pressure plates, monsters, items and so on at will. This has proven to be tremendously useful. But one thing has been lacking: the dungeon walls themselves have been living outside the realm of scripting. In fact, for performance reasons they were originally implemented as a special case making them completely static. So, for example, spawning an alcove on top of a wall results in the alcove overlapping with the wall since the wall and alcove share the same space.

We thought about various ways to workaround this problem, but quickly we realised that fixing this problem once and for all means that we should have access to the walls from script and being able to dynamically destroy them. And this is exactly what I have been working on this week. Now everything, including the walls, floors, ceilings and pillars are fully scriptable entities. It is now possible to retrieve the wall entity from the dungeon and call methods such as “destroy” on it. In fact, spawning an alcove now takes care of destroying the wall automatically, so we (or modders) don’t even need to bother with deleting it using script. Likewise, spawning a wall on top of an alcove destroys the alcove automatically. This works for pressure plates and everything else that should replace the existing object automatically. (In modding terms: this works because the alcove and wall entities have the “replacesWall” property set and alcoves and walls have both wall placement.)

The blog for this game has been updated with its first post in 2013. This first post includes the sales numbers for the first game and a screenshot from possibly could be an expansion:

And to sum up the year, we're now proud to announce that Legend of Grimrock has sold over 600.000 copies! We would've been happy with just one tenth of the sales numbers, so needless to say we're very happy and the future of our company is secured for a long time.But great success doesn't mean we haven't lost our passion for making great games. So, what's next, you might ask. We thought we could share with you a glimpse of some new exiting things we've been working on. But beware, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy!

Humble Bundle 7 is up, offering Legend of Grimrock if you pay above the average - currently $6.13:

Six masterful indie games and one incredible film for your holiday delight. Humble Indie Bundle 7 features an unbeatable collection guaranteed to keep you entertained all winter long. Pay-what-you-want and get The Binding of Isaac (and its DLC, Wrath of the Lamb), Closure, Shank 2, Snapshot, and Indie Game: The Movie! And if you pay over the average, you’ll also get Dungeon Defenders (and its DLC) and Legend of Grimrock! To top it all off, you also get a handful of awesome soundtracks in lossless (FLAC) and MP3 formats!

While we're on Grimrock, there's a new v1.3.1 update on Steam, which allows the creation of custom GUIs in the editor:

One nice addition we put into the game is that if you’ve got a low-spec machine, we’ve got a new rendering mode that will help the game run much much smoother on older hardware. But the real exciting stuff is the new features for the dungeon editor. I’ll add a comprehensive change log to the end of this post but there’s one thing we want to highlight here: you can now create custom GUIs. That means you can add 2D graphics on the screen and interact with them using a mouse or keyboard. This means that now you can create, say, dialogues with NPCs, trading interfaces, screens for custom skills and so on. But to show off what the system is capable of doing, yesterday we decided to get off on a bit of a tangent and make a new game from scratch using it. Prepare yourselves for… Toorum’s Quest II!!!

A minor blog update from Almost Human but fans of Grimrock might want to see what the sales have bought them:

Wow. It’s already been a few weeks since our last post on the blog. Sorry about that. We definitely want to maintain our activity in here so we’ll try to work harder in the future to update the blog more frequently. I don’t wanna make any promises, but… this is a promise.

Of course we have our excuses for being lazy writers and as a matter of fact in this post I’ll concentrate entirely in just one of the things that has kept us busy during the last few weeks: we moved offices! That’s right, we bid farewell to our old basement office on the edges of periphery: even though the office technically was in the city, our next-door neighbors was a horse stable. Or “neigh-bors” if you’re into embarrassingly terrible puns… 

Good Old Games have a Nordic sale where they offer amongst others Legend of Grimrock with a discount of 50%

Almost Human has released the Dungeon Editor for Legend of Grimrock - so get modding:

After several months of break-neck speed development, Almost Human is proud to release the most anticipated modding tool ever, the Dungeon Editor for Legend of Grimrock! The Dungeon Editor is a free update for everybody who owns the game. [...]

I’m sure everybody’s eager to start modding right away, so here are some links to get you up to speed: official modding documentation, Komag’s excellent video tutorials, official modding forum.

And if you want to play some mods right now, that’s no problem either! The Public Beta testers have been very productive and have already created over 150 mods that can be subscribed to in Steam Workshop and downloaded from Grimrock Nexus.

Steam users will get an automatic update - hit up the link to find out about other systems. Some fixes are also supplied with this patch.

RPGCodex played Legend of Grimrock and had amongst other this to say:

The only real complaint I did have was the level design. At first, I really did thnk the levels were randomly generated. Randomly twisting corridors, dead-end rooms that made no sense and arbitrarily placed puzzles all made me think it was being generated on the fly. Unfortunately, it wasn't. This has two effects, the first being that replayability is limited - Legend of Grimrock is the same every time you play it. The second effect is that, in my opinion, they're designed like someone pulled something out of their ass, smeared it on canvas and said "that'll do pig, that'll do". Still, provided you never ask "just why the hell did someone build a room with this kind of trap / puzzle in it anyway?", you'll do fine.

As I've said before, the puzzles themselves are very well designed - with plenty of adequately obscure (but not too obscure) clues found nearby (if you look hard enough). It was only on Level 9 when everything went to shit for me where after successfully getting through the game without help up until that point, I had to google for assistance. Working out what to sacrifice, missing a switch in the wall and just how exactly one should slither... In hind-sight, the switch should've been obvious but after the slithering puzzle (a note I had written off as a clue on how to fight the Big Bad that the game continually hinted was coming up), I honestly thought I'd missed something somewhere. And I would have been completely stumped at the sacrificial altars without reading the help in the forums.

A positive review of Legend of Grimrock without a rating can be found at No Highs Scores.

Indeed it’s in that montage that the game truly shines. Solving puzzles is often the key to opening doors, and newly-open doors are a great excuse to let monsters into the room. You’ll be stolidly clicking and dragging away, trying different combinations and ideas to solve a puzzle and suddenly you’re knee-deep in ice lizards and other assorted vermin. And then, after what feels like an eternity of desperate button mashing, you’re dead. It’s frustrating and exhilarating in equal measure, and you’ll come to love the agony of reloading because of the rush of excitement that precedes it and sometimes allows you to escape it. If ever there’s a game for masochists, this is it.

Almost Human has called for players to test the Grimrock Dungeon Editor beta through Steam. Grimrock Nexus has also been set up, in anticipation of the incoming mods:

We have now been working on the Dungeon Editor and modding capabilities effectively for almost four months. From the get-go we knew that there would be lots of work ahead of us, because many things were hardcoded and we didn’t have a level editor when we were originally working on the game. Even so it still took us longer than we anticipated to get here.

The Dungeon Editor is now complete except for one thing. And we need your help with it. Yep, I’m talking about testing.

Because the scripting interface of the editor has so many features and the game has seen such a big internal overhaul to allow modding, testing everything is a major undertaking. So that’s why we announce the start of a short public beta today.

To participate in the beta you need to have a Steam account and the game installed on Steam. Why only Steam? Steam’s automatic update system allows us to do frequent incremental updates to quickly patch issues that may arise. Also we need to be able to isolate the development in a separate branch during the beta. In short, we can react to the feedback more efficiently and keep the beta as short as possible. After the beta has concluded the Dungeon Editor will be available on all available distribution platforms.

If you don’t have the game installed on Steam and would still like to help us, you can give us valuable feedback on the documentation and perhaps help by working on the model and animation exporters if that’s your cup of tea. We are also listening to feature requests about the scripting interface. Are there important functions missing? We know that many of you would just want to start using the editor right away, and we too are very eager to finally release this beast. So our intention is to keep the beta short and sweet and release the editor as soon as possible.

We also would like to announce the release of Grimrock Nexus. The kind folks at Nexus have been busy setting up the site and it should be fully operational today. With both Nexus and Steam Workshop supported we believe modders will be able to reach all of our customers who in turn will have a huge number of great mods to play.

To join the beta right-click on Legend of Grimrock in your Library of games in Steam and select Properties. In the Betas tab opt into the beta using the dropdown there. The Steam Client should then automatically download the beta.

We invite everybody to join in the discussions in the modding forum and help make the editor reach its full potential!

Almost Human's Grimrock blog offers a feature list for the upcoming Dungeon Editor:

• Simple and straightforward user interface.
• Instant preview lets you test play the dungeon instantly: no need to leave the editor or wait for the level to export.
• Create puzzles, traps and contraptions simply by connecting buttons, pressure plates and other triggers to trapdoors, spawners or teleporters for example.
• Use Lua scripts to create even more complex logic and go beyond what would otherwise be possible.
• Fill your dungeons with any of the 350+ original Legend of Grimrock assets.
• Create new items, complete with new graphics and functionality like new magical weapons or potions with their own custom effects.
• If you want a cow-on-wheels roaming the tunnels, it’s no problem: you can use your own custom monsters!
• Totally transform how the dungeon looks and feels like by using custom environment graphics and objects.
• Trigger your own sounds or replace the background music.
• Tell a story with custom intro and ending cinematics.
• Create hellish demon snails simply by changing the textures of the original snail: you can modify, replace or recycle the original Legend of Grimrock textures, meshes or other assets to suit your needs.
• Publish your creations by using the built-in Steam Workshop support – or just freely upload the dungeon data anywhere or hand it out directly to your friends.

Almost Human's blog announces the Grimrock Dungeon Editor is now in beta and also offers a video of one of the developers experimenting with a silly idea in the Editor - head over to watch the video.

Almost Human continues their "Making Of" posts for Grimrock, looking at the creation of the game's monsters:

Monsters are an essential part of Grimrock’s dungeons and I thought I’d share some in-depth look at some of them. Legend of Grimrock features twenty unique monsters whose shape and size range from green jelly to… well, all you who have finished the game know to what. Here I have picked three of my favorite monsters that I enjoyed making the most and still feel happy about.

The basic consensus that applies to all LoG’s monsters is that they should support the gameplay. Monsters are designed based on the needs of varying the gameplay or making the difficulty rise up. When we know what type of enemy we need, we start to brainstorm and looking for references of  what the monster could be like. After that I start designing and modeling them. Due to our rather tight schedule, one monster usually took to design, model and texture around one week. Some more complex models took maybe couple of days longer. All the monsters are relatively low spec with 5000-10000 triangles with mostly 1024×1024 px maps on diffuse, specular and normal channels. Modo 501, Zbrush and Photoshop were the primary tools to create the monsters.  All the monsters were rigged and animated by Olli in XSI, but maybe more about that later.

Almost Human has a general wrap of the week, talking about one of their team injuring themselves, merchandise sales and - of course - the editor:

The dungeon editor is also progressing well. I know there’s a lot of folks out there who have been asking if using custom assets, like new environment graphics, monsters, sounds, items etc., would be possible and I’m glad to say that we have now solved all remaining issues with those! I’m sure we’ll see a lot of awesome new fan made graphics and other things of immeasurable beauty . There’s also a handful of usability improvements like better filtering of the asset list (no more scrolling, yay!) and we think we could call the editor pretty much feature complete. This means that it’s now possible to do everything necessary with the editor to create functional custom dungeons but there’s still a few improvements we want to make and we’ll also have to update the game itself a little so you can load the custom dungeons there. But all in all, we’re very close to the finish line here!

Over at the Grimrock blog is a new "Making Of" article, this time talking about the programming:

In this week’s chapter of “making of Grimrock” I’m going to talk about programming. This might be a little lengthier post and more technical and therefore probably not for everybody, so it’s fine if you want to just skim ahead!

First a bit of background. I’ve been programming for more than 20 years, starting from Basic on the venerable C64, moving on to AMOS, 68000 assembly and C on the Amiga, and after that I’ve been programming mostly in C++ for the past 10 years or so. I’ve also tried other programming languages such as Scheme, Java, D, Objective-C and Python (although very briefly). Today games are written mostly in C++ because it has very good performance but more importantly in my opinion because it is the de facto standard, in other words almost all libraries and tools (especially on the consoles) are geared towards C++ development.

Almost Human continues their blog series on the making of Grimrock, looking at the music in this latest entry. Here's a snip, with some music samples also provided in the article:

Anyways so, now that we have some background music playing for you while you read, let’s start from the beginning. When we begun the Grimrock project we already had one good looping ambient soundscape that we could use that Markus “Captain” Kaarlonen of Poets of the Fall fame had made for one hobby game project that Petri and Olli had been working on some years ago. It was pretty much a perfect match for this game too but the only problem was that we needed more and we were on a tight budget. So that left me as the most practical option for creating the new tracks since I’ve been fiddling with electronic music as a hobby for a while and, with our salaries, I was pretty damn cheap too!

Adventure site Just Adventure takes a look at Legend of Grimrock, for a rating of 'B':

While not officially D&D compliant, the stats all appear to be well thought-out and balanced.

The magic system requires you to remember patterns.  Your magic user has a three-by-three grid and to cast a spell you must click on one to three of the nine possible squares.  Casting spells drains energy which gradually regenerates on its own.

You can sleep.

You must eat.

The game also has an auto-mapping feature which you can turn off if you want to use all that quadrille paper you may have lying around.

But is it fun?  I sure think so.  It is a true child of the genre I remember from decades ago and I am having a blast.  Will you enjoy it?  Well, are you old enough to have owned your own Amiga?  Or do you just enjoy a dungeon crawl which doesn't involve nonstop action?  If so, I recommend you give it a try.  For less than $15 US you certainly aren't risking much.

The Grimrock blog has a rather cool article (at least, for a non-artist like me) on the creation of the intro sequence.

Legend of Grimrock is 50% off on GOG for 48 hours (finishes "Wednesday, July 11 at 5:59 AM EDT"):

The sun is shining. It’s steaming hot. Nowhere to hide. Well, we’ve got a surprise for you. You can cool down in the air-conditioned 5-star Grimrock Mountain Spa, courtesy of Almost Human Ltd. and GOG.com. We know that there’s nothing more chilling than crawling through miles of specially-designed levels of perilous dungeons. For the next 48 hours only, entry to our Legend of Grimrock premium holiday resort is $7.49. 

Thanks, SveNitoR!

Almost Human posts on their blog that the Dungeon Editor for Legend of Grimrock has reached Alpha:

And then let’s continue the weekly update with another announcement: we’ve had good progress with the dungeon editor and we have hit the alpha milestone! Since we now have the core features of the editor done, we are now ready to extend the testing even outside the walls of this office but don’t get too excited yet: it’s not a public testing phase, it’s just something we will handle with a handful of friends at least for the time being. We’re not only concentrating on finding bugs (or locating potential for improvement) in the editor alone because the base game itself needs some rigorous testing too since there have been some fundamental architecture changes to the game we have had to do in order to support the loading of custom dungeons and such. This testing round probably also means that we’ll have to slow down with adding new features to the editor for some time since I’m certain there will be a lot of things we need to fix and stabilize before we should proceed to add some more functionality. But the good news is that it seems like there isn’t a massive amount of things missing from the editor anymore either but we’ll have to wait and see what the testers can come up with!

Oh, and just so that you know: if nothing terribly exciting on the development front has happened during a week, we’re going to serve you a dose of “making of” -style documentation from Legend of Grimrock on our weekly updates. Like for example once we get a build out of the doors for testers to mess with, we’re certainly going to be occupied by ironing out usability issues and bugs so we might not have anything profound or exciting to tell you and since we wouldn’t want to stay completely silent either, we’ll give you a behind the scenes glimpse on what goes into making a game like Legend of Grimrock! But in essence this is nothing new since that’s basically what we did early on in the development too when we were doing features on things like monster design, level scripting or graphics here on the blog. We just haven’t done that in a while now and I think that will be more fun than trying to come up with something interesting to say when nothing dramatic has happened.

Almost Human has kicked up a video sneak peek of the Grimrock editor.

Almost Human catches readers up with a new update, having returned to work after a much-deserved holiday after shipping Grimrock. The good news for fans is more Grimrock is on the agenda:

After finishing a big project it’s always a good time to look at what has been accomplished and think about the future, and a big chunk of our time for the past weeks has been invested precisely into this. The success of Grimrock has really blown our socks away, but it also has enabled us, for the first time, to sit down and think through our options instead of just rushing madly forward with the project in the hope of finishing before cash runs out. During this time we also received some very interesting and tempting offers about other game projects (we can’t talk about the details as they’re covered by NDAs). It took us some time to evaluate these but in the end we realized that building our own games is the reason why we are here and the success of Grimrock tells us that it is a good reason. So we’re committed to keep working on Grimrock and see where that road leads us. The exact form, whether it be an expansion, a full blown sequel or even something completely different, is still undecided. 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.

But first things first! The editor is still work in progress and it is starting to shape up well. We are almost in alpha stage now which means that we are just a few features short of being able to build Grimrock level dungeons with it. Please note that alpha is going to be an internal milestone for us and we are not going to do public testing on it, so no need to send applications for testing at this point, thank you! As always you can follow the progress of the editor here. Oh and stay tuned for an upcoming video preview showcasing the editor! 

Almost Human's Grimrock blog has the first screen of the in-development Editor:

Friday time, Blueberry Pie!! Here is a work-in-progress screen grab from the upcoming Dungeon Editor. The editor is still pretty far from final but we wanted to give this early sneak peak anyway. There is no release date for the editor yet — we don’t want to risk making bad design choices by hurrying. You can follow the progress of the project here.

Jeff Vogel has a new blog post that reviews Legend of Grimrock...

I played Legend of Grimrock from front to back. It's a pure nostalgia trip, extremely well done, and I enjoyed it immensely. If you like role-playing games of the retro school, I recommend it.

...but goes on to talk about the "design space", saying that while there might be a Grimrock 2, he doesn't believe the concept has legs beyond that:

Once again, Legend of Grimrock is a ton of fun, and I enjoyed it immensely. However, it is a game on a square grid with monsters, pressure plates, secret door switches, and holes in the wall that shoot stuff out. There is only a limited number of ways that you can piece those elements together to make interesting dungeons for the player to explore. It's finite, and, by the time I was at the bottom of the dungeon, I was already noticing elements repeating themselves.

As I said, there might be a Grimrock 2. But, as we discovered twenty years ago, this earth will only stay fertile for so long before it needs to lie fallow again. Only then will it yield a fresh crop for a new generation of gamers. (Analogy!!!)

This is NOT a criticism of Legend of Grimrock, which is, for the third time, very good. This game doesn't have to be responsible for carrying future titles. It only has to be fun by itself, and it does so very well.

I just think it's a good example of the varying durability of different designs. Some can support many titles. Some only a few. This isn't a problem. It is simply important, when planning games beyond the first, not to heap onto a humble structure too many expectations.

A short update from Almost Human this week that talks about their progress with the Legend of Grimrock editor in between their partying: 

Fans of Matt Barton will find a review of Legends of Grimrock in his latest Matt Chat video.

Swiss site GBase.ch wrote in with their review of Legend of Grimrock, which our German readers can find here.

Here's another review, this time from Joystiq with a score of 4/5:

Grimrock's hopeless atmosphere makes every little victory something to be savored. In other games, stumbling across a rusty sword might be worth, at best, a disinterested yawn and a few gold from a merchant. In Grimrock it's a rush akin to finding a $100 bill in the gutter or realizing that, wait, no, there is totally one more Oreo in the back of the box. New weapons and items tend to be marked improvements over old ones, which, combined with a sublime leveling pace, creates a constant sense of real progression.

...and let's throw in the latest update from Almost Human:

Okay, another Friday, another update. Just like we promised! The spring has finally arrived here in Finland so we’ve had to jury rig all sorts of crazy makeshift sunlight blockers in front of a few pesky windows that shine their light directly into Juho’s and Olli’s displays again. And now that we got the first patch done, Petri has been mostly occupied by the work with level editor and it’s been progressing steadily. If you want to stay on the pulse of the development of the editor, there’s a thread on our forums which Petri will update as the work with it progresses. There’s also been reports of some strange never seen before creatures slithering in the darkness of a dungeon but the whole thing is still shrouded in mystery…

Gamasutra writes about the formation of Almost Human and the success of Legend of Grimrock, which as we know from their first post-release blog, has paid for the development costs "many times over":

As for why Almost Human thinks the game has been such a big hit, Salila believes the team was able to strike a crucial balance between staying true to the dungeon crawler genre's essential elements (e.g. difficulty, grid-based movement) to appeal to players' sense of nostalgia, and updating the game's graphics, audio, and user interface to meet modern standards.

Patch 1.1.4 has been released for Grimrock:

The latest Matt's Podcast from Matt Barton looks at Grimrock, as well the current Kickstarter trend:

Hi, guys, it's been awhile since we had a new podcast up, so here's one I recorded today about the epic Legend of Grimrock and some of the latest Kickstarter news. Are we experiencing a fad--a brief phase--or on the cusp of a gaming revolution? I also chat a bit about Grimrock, though I stick to basic points since I plan to do a Matt Chat on it soon. As always, feel free to comment, ask questions, or do whatever it is you do below.
Download the podcast here.

Digitally Downloaded sent us their review of Legend of Grimrock, which carries a score of 4/5:

Simple and to the point, these dungeon hack RPGs have largely being relegated to history, or the occasional attempt to play on nostalgia with a new release from a small, indie outfit with slavish devotion to their fond memories. The problem for the genre is that RPG gamers started to expect stuff like “stories” and “large worlds” in their games, and that didn’t gel so well with the dungeon delve. Pity, because like most who grew up with Wizardry and Dungeons & Dragons, I have fond memories of the relatively simple style of those games.

Thank goodness for Legend of Grimrock, then, because that scratches every dungeon delve itch I’ve been wanting to scratch for a long time. 

Almost Human writes about the launch week for Legend of Grimrock, which has obviously been successful as they say the sales have already been so good "the development costs of the game have now been covered many times over so the future of the company seems pretty secure". They also created a DVD box sleeve, if you'd like to print it out and make your own Grimrock box for the shelf.

On to the patch, anticipated for next week:

- vsync is enabled by default
- borderless windows are no longer topmost
- pressing ESC closes character sheet
- fixed unlimited frost arrow exploit
- bug fix: topmost menu item don’t work reliably in 2560×1440 resolution
- bug fix: wall text translations are not dismissed when right-clicking
- bug fix: inanimate objects can be backstabbed
- bug fix: projectiles go through doors in some very rare cases
- improved display resolution auto-detection at first launch
- fixed a couple of typos
- removed check that disables high texture resolution setting when running low on video memory (some graphics drivers seem to report available video memory incorrectly)

Here's a new pair of Legend of Grimrock reviews, starting with fellow indie developer Jay 'Rampant Coyote' Barnson:

The longer answer: If this was 1993, reviewers would be bitching about it. “It’s just a Dungeon Master Clone,” they’d complain. “Didn’t we just play this game last year? And the year before?” They’d further lament, “Legend of Grimrock offers little in the way innovation on a tired game mechanic. It’s a competent and entertaining entry but if offers few innovations to help it stand out from the crowd.”

Actually, if this was 1993, they’d take one look at the graphics, and their heads would explode. But in a good way. Even if the gameplay was total crap and they’d all have thrown their backs out heaping praise upon the game. But with solid gameplay behind it, there’d be little to stem the gush.

But regardless, this is not 1993. It’s nearly twenty years later.  The “Dungeon Master” subgenre is long gone.  Or it was, until this week. There’s no ‘crowd’ to stand out from. The graphics are still quite pretty, but unremarkable when compared to AAA games. Compared to other indie games, yes, the graphics are gush-worthy. And while you are limited to turning and moving only in the four cardinal directions, as usual with the game type, you can hold down the right mouse button to get something of a ‘freelook’ to admire the environment.

...and another at Edge Online, with a score of 7/10:

Discovering the exploits becomes the main pleasure of an otherwise rudimentary system. The first time you meet an ogre, you might be caught off guard by his ability to turn and strike at the same time. But there’s a simple process you can (ab)use to defeat it. Another cheeky path to victory, that worked in Dungeon Master, too, involves opening a portcullis, landing a cowardly couple of blows, then closing it again. Grimrock’s puzzles are fairer than those of its predecessors, and the pace between them and monster encounters is well-judged. Switches, pressure plates, and miscellaneous trickery conspire to fox you, but in the first half of the game the puzzles and their solutions are kept close. As you go deeper, the clues get more oblique and distant and the potential for satisfaction and frustration rises. Grimrock rarely helps you out: drop a key in the wrong place, and you’re going to have to find it on your own.

No doubt you are all playing Legend of Grimrock as I type but here's the official announcement that this highly-anticipated title is now available:

Legend of Grimrock Released Today

Indie developer Almost Human's old-school dungeon crawler Legend of Grimrock for PC is released today on Steam, GOG.com and the developer's website grimrock.net for $14.99 with a first week sale cutting 10% off the retail price.

ESPOO, FINLAND - APRIL 11, 2012. Almost Human, the indie developer "more human than most", is proud to announce that their monster infested, mind bending, trap filled and lovingly crafted dungeon opens its doors for brave explorers today when Legend of Grimrock is released. The critically aclaimed first-person dungeon exploration game is Almost Human's debut title. Here is what the reviewers had to say about the game:

"It’s bloody brilliant." 
- Rock Paper Shotgun

"Legend of Grimrock is Everything I Wanted in a Modern-Day Dungeon Crawler."
- Kotaku

"The balance between exciting combat, thought-provoking puzzle work, and open-ended exploration is stellar."
- IGN

"Grimrock has some of the best puzzles in a video game we have encountered, ever."
- Video Review by Elder Geek

"Captures everything that's fun about old-school RPGs."
- GameSpy

I'll throw a couple of addition LoG items here:

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a game diary titled A Dad in A Dungeon:

You must consider that I had left the Land of Skyrim to enter this dungeon. After gliding around stupendously breathtaking landscapes, here I was moving one square, surrounded by bricks! “Ah!” I thought, “this is like Dungeon Master.” But do I really want Dungeon Master having experienced Skyrim?

So, we found some clothes, and some rocks for my Roguish Popsy to chuck. I bumbled about a bit, opened a few doors, met a snail… and died.

...and GameBanshee announces they have their LoG subsite ready with a walkthrough, alchemy recipes, hard-to-find secrets and so on.

Legend of Grimrock continues its stellar run of reviews with this trio. First, IGN who awarded 8.5/10 and Editor's Choice Award. On the magic system:

The unique magic system throws a neat twist into combat that requires some concentration and quick reflexes in order pull off more elaborate spells in the heat of battle. Spells are cast by plugging a specific rune pattern into a 3x3 grid that fits neatly over your wizard character's portrait. Once queued up, you can fire off the magic at any time with a quick click. From hurling fireballs and poisonous clouds to using invisibility and protective charms, there's a good mix for magic-minded folks to play around with. While experimenting with different combinations sometimes unlocks spells through accidental tinkering, most spells aren't uncovered until you find a scroll with their formula on it. Scoring new spells during your travels feel more rewarding than simply gaining them automatically. Potion crafting has the same appeal as well, since you have to track down ingredients and vials, find note scrolls on how to use them, and then combine them properly on an inventory grid to create your elixir.

Destructoid awards a huge 9.5/10 - on the strength of the puzzles:

Legend of Grimrock's strongest element is easily the puzzles you'll find strewn throughout the dungeon. I lost count as to how many times I threw my fist in the air and shouted, "YES!" after successfully completing a puzzle. I can't stress enough how well the guys over at Almost Human nailed the puzzle difficulty. 

Most puzzles will consist of you activating pressure plates or finding secret buttons to press on the walls. In some cases, there will be hints written on the walls or in scrolls that you can find around the area. Some are quite dastardly, and required me to break out the ol’ paper and pencil to get a better look at them. 

There are also optional puzzles that are way more difficult than what you'll normally encounter. Occasionally, you'll come across large iron doors that will take a lot of wit and a keen eye to open. I managed to open about three of these doors in my playthrough, but left many more closed. I felt defeated and I loved it. 

...and Mashable with a very positive article:

If you’re looking for a rich and expansive fantasy world, save your gold for a title like Skyrim or The Witcher 2. If you prefer a no-nonsense dungeon crawl that plays by classic D&D rules and focuses on one quest at a time, Legend of Grimrock is worth every penny.

Thanks Zohaib and Melvil for writing in.

The Grimrock site takes a look at some early reviews, which we've already covered, but also provides a quick update as Almost Human starts prepping the level editor for eventual release:

Also, a bit of development related news: we have started working on the level editing capabilities. There’s not much to report yet since the whole thing is still pretty much undergoing some planning and early prototyping but we should be on the right track. Anyways the current plan is to release the editor in stages: initially the editor will be rather simple but more advanced features and scripting capabilities will be added in incrementally in later releases. That way you can get your hands on the editor more quickly and we can get useful feedback from you already in the early stages.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a Wot I Think for Grimrock and it seems they really enjoyed it. Looks like Almost Human might have an indie hit on their hands:

But overwhelmingly it’s a superb experience, characters levelling up at a perfect rate, agonising choices about which skill to improve becoming like knife wounds when you struggle to find the right type of weapon – the game is so cleverly sparing in its distribution of everything, so something as simple as finding a mace can feel like a mad victory. And talking of which, there are few games where I’ve felt so elated at figuring out a puzzle that I’ve punched my arms in the air and declared to the house, “I’m so brilliant at games!” Along with all this, it does a splendid job of creating a creepy atmosphere, and a deep sense of weirdness. Also, it understands the need to carry skulls.

There are also video reviews by TotalBiscuit and Elder Geek.

GameBanshee has kicked up an early full review of Grimrock. In general, it's highly positive, though they do note a lack of depth in some areas and would have liked more non-combat skills. Still, it's a very strong start for Almost Human:

While it's hard to live up to quite so much hype, Legend of Grimrock succeeds on its promise of old-school gaming about as well, fitting the mold pretty much to a T.  However, thanks to its technological advancements, it also manages to introduce a few new game elements that simply weren't possible back in the day. The end result is a game that plays very, very well, and while it might not have quite as much depth as those older games in some respects, it's got all the puzzle-solving, monster-slaying and secret-searching that fans fell in love with twenty years ago. 

This week's update on Legend of Grimrock goes back in time to look at a video of their very first build, put together over a weekend April last year.

Hi there! First a recap from this week in case you have somehow missed the big news: Pre-orders for Grimrock have now started with a discounted price of $11.99, that’s 20% off from the retail price. So be sure to check out the preorder page if you haven’t already done so. We are also glad to report that pre-orders are doing pretty good and if sales continue like this it seems likely that we’ll be able to continue making games in the future. A big thank you to everybody who have preordered so far!

A few people have been asking for a making of video and while we’re still too occupied with launch preparations to make a proper video we thought we could share something that might interest you. Thanks to our source code control system it’s possible to go back in time and see how the project looked at its very early stages. So, behold the first ever build of Grimrock!

The build has an epic title “Build 001″ and it’s from April 3rd 2011. It was done in a weekend for no particular reason other than for fun. The project didn’t really start for real back then because the outsourcing projects we were doing for other game companies were keeping us fully occupied. By June we had finished a bigger outsourcing project and we sat down to think about our next move. We dusted off the old build and it didn’t take long for us to get up to speed with our first ever game project. And the rest is history as they say!

Naturally all graphics in the video are placeholders but it already shows what Grimrock is all about: pure old-school gameplay, grid-based dungeon crawling, secret switches, locked doors and of course horrible, horrible creatures with moustaches that haunt you forever in your dreams! Observant readers probably notice that the player walks over a pit in the video – the prototype did not support pits and falling (hey, it could have been a fake illusionary pit! )

Have a nice weekend!

Grab the video here.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has kicked up 11 Things I'm Looking Forward To In Legend of Grimrock. It's essentially a collection of screens that demonstrate one of the 11 titular features, so don't expect a deep article that breaks new ground. On the other hand, if you've just seen the preorder newsbits and haven't followed the game, you'll get a fair idea of what your $11.99 preorder would get. Bonus points for Dungeon Master references:

Legend Of Grimrock is out in a couple of weeks, via Steam and GOG.com, and anticipation is building. A game that harks back to the glory days of FTL’s Dungeon Master is something many would like to get their hands on. Get my hands on it I have, and after spending a little time with some pre-release code, I’m excited to confirm it really does seem to be capturing that era, with tile-based movement, a quartet of characters, and the terrifying moments when you’re trying to mix a potion in the middle of a fight. Below you can read the top 11 things that I think make it a game worth taking an interest in. (I have a sneaking suspicion that anyone who didn’t play Dungeon Master is going to find this post a touch confusing.)

As per the previous newsbit, you can now preorder Legend of Grimrock from GOG.com or direct from Almost Human. The preorder is discounted 20%, for a price of $11.99, and the release date is April 11th.

Legend of Grimrock is a dungeon crawling role playing game with an oldschool heart but a modern execution. A group of prisoners are sentenced to certain death by exiling them to the secluded Mount Grimrock for vile crimes they may or may not have committed. Unbeknownst to their captivators, the mountain is riddled with ancient tunnels, dungeons and tombs built by crumbled civilizations long perished now. If they ever wish to see daylight again and reclaim their freedom the ragtag group of prisoners must form a team and descend through the mountain, level by level.

The game brings back the oldschool challenge with highly tactical real-time combat and grid-based movement, devious hidden switches and secrets as well as deadly traps and horrible monsters. Legend of Grimrock puts an emphasis on puzzles and exploration and the wits and perception of the player are more important tools than even the sharpest of swords could be. And if you are a hardened dungeon crawling veteran and you crave an extra challenge, you can arm yourself with a stack of grid paper and turn on the Oldschool Mode which disables the luxury of the automap! Are you ready to venture forth and unravel the mysteries of Mount Grimrock? 

Legend of Grimrock has gone Gold but, unfortunately, it seems we have to wait another week to hear about release details:

That said, we are really happy to announce that we’re now officially in gold, that’s GOOOOOOOOOOLD BABY! *dancing around the office like a fool*

It’s been a long and challenging journey but we have finally reached this important milestone. But we don’t think it’s the end of the road, more like a fork in the road with ways branching into all sorts of interesting directions: iOS, Mac, map editor, sequel, new IP, living in a dumpster totally broke…

Now that the game is done, we can fully concentrate on launch preparations like the trailer, press releases, sending out review copies for the press, interviews and so on.

Everybody at the office is totally jazzed up and we really can’t keep in our pants much longer. You are probably as anxious to hear about the details and we can finally reveal them all next week!

Stay tuned!

Thanks, Rookery!

Here's a snip from the weekly Grimrock update:

Wait, what happened to release candidate 2? Well, we have been busy working day and night and we actually did two releases this week. The latest build or “RC3″ as we like to call it has now been sent to testers and if any issues are not found in the next couple of days this will be the gold build! Fingers crossed!

So, what has happened this week? Juho has been working on the trailer and it’s progressing well. Next week we’ll hand it over to Stakula, our man in charge of music production. Besides starring in a super secret video, Antti has been working on the installer and he has also been making so many builds this week that we lost count. I actually had to do a dubious deal with Antti, saying something along the lines of “if we have to do yet another new build before releasing the game, I owe Antti a beer, not just any kind of beer but some really nice imported beer.” Antti actually forced me to write this down on paper with my signature on it and he stored the paper somewhere in a secure place.

Almost Human has hit a new milestone for Grimrock, with RC1 built during the week:

Well, the game is almost done. And amazingly, it’s still pretty entertaining even for me to wander in the hallways and fight some monsters and solve puzzles even though by this point I should already be seriously overdosed by the game. And some of our friends who have been testing the game have already played the game through twice or more! Needless to say, all of this seems very promising to us and we hope the game will find its audience when it is released in April.

Oh, and what was it specifically that I meant by the game being “almost done”? Well, we’re no longer in beta, baby! On wednesday, we built the RC1, or release candidate 1, version of the game. This means that we “freeze” the development of the game (by stopping adding new features, basically) and start concentrating entirely on getting the game as stable as possible for the release. If something pops up that absolutely needs to be added to the game, it’s quite possible that we’ll have to wait until we do an update. Among the last things we improved on the game were: additional polishing of some of the GUI elements, save/load game dialog overhaul, some improved monster animations and miscellaneous level tweaks. I know the list of changes doesn’t look that impressive or sexy at this point but we needed to move carefully so we wouldn’t introduce any new bugs.

As teased last week, Almost Human has set a release date for Legend of Grimrock...well, almost. The game will launch in "early April" through an unidentified vendor who required an NDA:

We know you’re all anxious to hear about the release plans and as you probably already saw in the big poster above, we’re finally able to tell you something concrete: The PC version of Legend of Grimrock will be released in early April and we are going to start preorders a few weeks before launch. That said, we have signed NDAs so we are not allowed to tell the exact date and distribution platforms just yet but rest assured that everything is now in good hands.

To celebrate this Antti and Juho have kindly setup a forum. Discussions should certainly be a lot easier there than in the blog comments.

So we’re not done just yet but close! So, what’s up next? There’s still a few bugs to fix and testers are still finding stuff to polish. We are also going to do the long overdue site migration to a more powerful server with more bandwidth over the next two weeks. Biggest of all we are going to freeze the code and content pretty soon, build our first release candidate and start the final round of testing. We hope to get the RC out of the oven to testers sometime next week. And before you ask, beta testing is still closed so no need to apply for beta testing, thank you

So that’s it, see you on the forums!

Thanks to Von Paulus and screeg for writing in.

Almsot Human has posted their regular weekly update for Legend of Grimrock, discussing some interface changes and other happenings, offering a beautiful screenshot and most importantly...

And hey, currently it seems that next week we could be ready to tell you something regarding the release of the game but we’ll have to wait and see! Have a good weekend everyone.

As always, Von Paulus keeps us up to date on Grimrock!

Having released the compatibility test last week, Almost Human spent the week tweaking Legend of Grmrock in response:

As the post’s title says, this week has mostly been about tweaking stuff. As we’re getting every day closer to finishing the game, major feature implementations get scarcer. We are focusing on testing, tweaking and fine tuning things here and there. Creatures have learned some nasty new moves to make the escape from the dungeons yet a bit harder. We also now have a big TO DO list on our whiteboard that we need to clear before the launch. Luckily the list gets shorter as the days pass. GUI got some tender loving as we merged the attack buttons and character portraits to the bottom right side of the screen. Now the marching order is much clearer and it is also easier to change the order by dragging the panels and everything looks a lot better and cleaner this way. The tutorial has been cleaned up and it is now easier to digest. On the business side, things nudged a bit forward, which is nice, but we can’t say anything more about that in here this time. Sorry

Big news for the legion of Grimrock fans we have: Almost Human has released a compatibility test to see how the game is going with hardware compatibility. You can download via the torrent link below and, obviously, this gives you the opportunity to taste the game - although there is no "gamplay" - just the chance to look around, as I understand it:

Legend of Grimrock is, little by little, getting closer to completion but we are starting to have some serious night terrors about the game not running properly on the computers it should run on! But now you have the opportunity to help us sleep better! We’ve made a test build that you can download, install and run (and then later on uninstall) to see if the game starts and take a look if everything looks normal. Just to be clear, there’s no gameplay of any kind in the build, unless you are exceptionally easily amused, and probably everything works just like it should work… But in case the build doesn’t work or something just doesn’t “seem right” you should let us know by dropping a line to:

In the mail, you should describe what happened and tell us the specs of your computer like your OS, amount of memory and what is your display adapter. Also, if an error pop-up is displayed we generate an error.log file that you should attach to the mail. The error describes where the log file is saved so take notice!

The bare minimum requirements to run this test is Windows XP SP2 or above and a DirectX 9 compatible graphics card with pixel shader 3.0 support. Thank you for helping!

Update: we now have a torrent available!

Almost Human writes about creating the music for Legend of Grimrock, complete with a sample track. Here's a snip from the post:

Summer 2011 I noticed an interesting trailer link in Finnish IGDA pages about a game called Legend of Grimrock by a new Finnish game team Almost Human. I was intrigued because it was very much like old Dungeon Master games which I was big fan of back in the good ol’ gaming days. I contacted the team, congratulated them on great concept and gave them some advise on sound design.

Sometime later, it so happened that Almost Humans were interested in having me compose the main theme for the game! Antti Tiihonen contacted me early September and shortly after I met the guys in Espoo. Game looked fantastic and we agreed that catchy, fully orchestrated song would be what the game needs, a memorable theme with strong emotional impact.

Head over for the track itself and thanks Von Paulus.

From Joystiq comes this encouraging newsbit.  It deals with how Almost Human, the developers of the game,  added on-screen arrows to help a disabled fan play the game:

Hours earlier, Reddit user meandertal had posted this screencap from the Almost Human blog, highlighting a fan's question about the inclusion of on-screen arrows in Grimrock. That wasn't currently an option, programmer Petri Häkkinen said, asking the fan why he wanted to know. "I'm disabled and use a mouth stick for typing," he responded, saying he'd adapt to the existing controls and couldn't wait to play the game.

I've tried to find a link to the Reddit site, but currently, I haven't been able to do so.

Another week, another Grimrock update - this week also with a rather nifty desktop wallpaper. A sample from the update:

Anyways, besides adding bugs, we’ve been eliminating them aplenty this week. A lot of nasty ones too. For example there was a brief moment when all of our monsters were immortal but since it made the game a little too difficult, we had to fix it. Oh, and regarding difficulty, the game now has a setting for combat difficulty! If you feel like you want to concentrate more on the puzzles and adventuring and just glide through the combat, just switch it to easy! Also, keyboard bindings should work now pretty universally across any sort of keyboard, language or key and if you accidentally hit caps lock during an intense combat it won’t be a problem. The fabled “oldschool mode” that disables the automap was implemented and we’ve also added a little more spice to the spells and the key art of the game is looking mighty fine too!

This week's Legend of Grimrock update eschews patch notes for details about the automap:

Hello again! We’ve survived yet another week, despite being engulfed in a small snow blizzard for the past few days. But at least I find it refreshing since the winter this far has been exceptionally warm here in Finland… Anyways, even though I know that you’re just dying to hear more about the local weather, I’m afraid we’ll have to move on to the development update. Since I’m in a storytelling mood now I’ll avoid the usual bulleted list this time! But first, since some of you have asked what our automap looks like, here’s a screenshot. I hope I didn’t ruin the joy of discovering the early parts of dungeon level 2 for anyone! The “N” on the map indicates a note that I’ve left and you can see what is written down in a note when you bring your mouse on top of it. Level three will be displayed on the other page once the player discovers it.

Thanks, Von Paulus!

GameBanshee caught up with the folks behind Legend of Grimrock, Almost Human. The conversation is mostly about the company and indie development rather than game details and here's a snip:

GB: As an indie developer, it has to be liberating to have virtually no restrictions on creativity. But do you find that this is both a boon and a curse? Have you ever overextended yourselves when chasing "that one unique feature" that your game just has to have?

Petri: It is true that we have virtually no restrictions on creativity but practically speaking indie developers are always restricted by limited resources. Thankfully we happen to be in a good situation because what we lack in resources we can make up with our experience. That means we can estimate with quite good accuracy what we can do and what is beyond our reach. This is very important so that we don't waste precious time by developing features that would have to be cut in the end anyway.

Perhaps the only thing we underestimated was the time and effort needed to create a balanced skill system. The original plan was to make a simple and traditional class based system, but we didn't want to risk the game to be viewed as too simplistic. So, we decided to work extra hard and make a more detailed point buy based skill system but balancing all the skills deemed to be a bigger task than we anticipated. We are quite happy how it is now but we still want to add a little bit of extra and variety before release.

Almost Human writes about changes to the GUI for Legend of Grimrock in their latest blog post. Head over for the full text and a couple of screens:

On the graphical side, the GUI is now unified to match all the other panels to get a proper consistency throughout the game. The GUI scales according to the resolution and stays proportionally the same size whatever the resolution is. The fonts used in the GUI (and anywhere in the game btw) are now actual true type fonts that stay sharp in any resolution. Functionality of the attack panels was changed to act more like basic inventory slots. Player can now put any item in each hand and attack or use them by clicking right mouse button. So now all the item slots in the game have a similar logic for left mouse click to pick item up and right mouse click to use item. On the inventory, when hovering mouse cursor over an item, a tool tip pops up. Same logic goes with all the items like basic scrolls and magic “recipe” scrolls. For the really old school players and for those who want an option to navigate the dungeons, we added the option to use the traditional direction arrows. And yes, those status bars are still work-in-progress.

Gamespy has a preview for this goodlooking indie-game.   As usual, a quote:

Despite the appearance of turn-based exploration, the game's action played out in real-time causing the combat to have a very urgent feel to it. Though a drastic change of pace from the classic dungeon crawlers of old, this injected a sense of danger into the mix that was a welcome update on the formula. There was no time for deep thought or complex strategizing when monster's were near, and I had to remain poised to strike at a moment's notice. This produced some harrowing encounters when gaggles of giant carnivorous snails, undead armored spearmen, and other unsavory creatures showed up for dinner.

In other Grimrock news there's a new development update from the Almost Human team.
It is to long to post in its entirery, so here's a snip:

- tweaked item skill requirements
- adjusted monster difficulty
- fixed crab turn right animation clipping through doors
- Uggradian strafe and walk back animations (not plugged in yet)
- added bigger variation to the attack speeds of weapons
- weapon damage balancing
- item tool tips now show weapon’s speed rating
- balanced skills
- new fighter skill: athletics
- removed daggers from fighter skills
- replaced herders in level 7 with slimes
- item and monster placements tweaked
- added script for analyzing weapon DPS
- balanced some weapon attack powers and speeds
- ogre two-handed attack animation (not plugged in yet)
- elemental damage bonuses are now formatted as percentages in the ui
- improved auto pickup so that each hand remembers the type of item it had
- improved audio, animation and timing of XXX
- resting is no longer interrupted by damage from poisoning
- added a short delay after going to sleep before health & mana regeneration starts
- tweaked XXX’s interval and duration
- improved readability of some in-game texts by adding shadow under them
- improved texts in level 11- fixed z-fighting of floor dirts

Almost Human is back to work on Legend of Grimrock, posting a lengthy set of notes and saying they have made "progress on the release front":

New year and we are already busy at work! To prove that we haven’t been slacking here, below is the complete changelog (censored with XXXs as per usual) since the last big update on December 16th. We have currently about 30 known bugs remaining and beta testing revealed some parts that need to be improved so there’s still enough work to keep us occupied for some time. We have also made progress on the release front but we can’t talk about that just yet!

Spotted by Von Paulus.

This week's Grimrock update has the latest changelog, rather than the usual description of work. It's a bit long, so here's a sample:

beta-1.0.2 changelog (all changes since 5th December 2011):
- added a new spell (with 4 variations)
- tweaked shields
- added legionary shield, legionary spear and a new helmet
- added and tweaked monster loot drops
- added elemental resistances to XXX
- tweaked nutrition values of food items
- modeled and animated background scene for XXX
- removed offhandedness (any weapon can now be wielded in left or right hand)
- any item can now be carried in hand slots
- separated attack power and accuracy values for left and right hand
- attack icons now double act as inventory slots so that items can be quickly exchanged between prisoners
- reduced arrow count a little in level 3
- tweaked skeleton archer audio volumes and distances
- improved lvl3 monster teleport puzzle
- added new decorative floor objects
- added dragon statue dungeon prop
- smoothed Warden idle animation

Thanks, Von Paulus!

The Grimrock site has some renders of undead warriors you might encounter.

From the Grimrock site:

Five Indie Games to Watch For is the awkward title of an article at GameSpy that includes Legend of Grimrock as one of their indies to watch. They don't have much to say but it's nice to see it included:

Your band of adventurers starts off imprisoned in the deep labyrinth beneath the nefarious Mt. Grimrock, and the step-by-step trek to escape through winding corridors and deadly chambers pits you against all manner of traps and evil beasties alike. Each of your four party members can be customized with combinations of different classes and races. Feel like making a minotaur wizard or a lizardman thief? You can totally do that. Gear you've picked up can be dragged and drop between characters' inventories, and there's an abundance of weapons and secret goodies to uncover. Throw in a ton of monsters to slay, loot to score, and a cool rune-based spell system, and it's dungeon thrashing time. Here's to what's shaping up to be a slick revival of an oft-neglected gaming genre.

The Grimrock site announces they have reached Beta...but won't be releasing this year. Here's the text from their blog but head over for some screens and a video:

We’ve got some big news this time! Let’s get started with the most important one: Legend of Grimrock has reached beta! This means that every feature, all enemies and all levels that are going to be in the final game are now in place, and we can now fully concentrate on polishing and balancing the game and fixing bugs until everything is perfect. If we get cool new ideas we might still add them to the game but improving existing features has now higher priority. And before you ask, at this point we are not looking for additional beta testers!

Secondly, many of you have been asking if we’re on time for launch at the end of this year. Looking at the game we have now we could do it but that wouldn’t be the best game we can deliver. We want to make this game really shine so that’s why we have decided to push the release to early next year. With the extra time we can hopefully fix all the bugs, make the level flow better, tweak item attributes to perfection and adjust the balance to be just right. These are the things that really matter to us, and hopefully to you as a player too! We are not ready to give an exact release date yet, because when we give a date we want to keep the promise too. But don’t worry, we won’t take too long!

We also need to start looking more closely at our distribution options. We would really like to release first on Steam because it’s simply the biggest digital distribution service on the PC and we want to make the game available for the largest audience possible. For that to happen we need to pass their evaluation process, so we really hope that the guys at Valve like our game!

So the next steps are:
* Get the distribution channel sorted out.
* Get the preorders working.
* And of course finish the game!

Thanks, Von Paulus.

This week's Grimrock weekly update, courtesy of Von Paulus' eagle eye:

•  First pass of story related content has been added to the game. This will continue as we work towards the beta.
• Juho has finalized end cinematic graphics.
• We have all monsters now in place and animated. Olli is still going to add more detail to animations and keep improving them.
• First batch of performance optimizations have been implemented. The game is now playable in 1080p with decent frame rate even with our relative old and cheap PCs!
• We’re in the middle of redoing the gui so that it scales to higher resolutions nicely. This work should be complete sometime next week.
• Related to the gui changes we have a new font rendering system which is capable of rendering vectorized true type fonts (previously all fonts were bitmap based), so text look much sharper now, especially in higher resolutions.
• Groundwork for “secrets found” statistics has been done, i.e. we have a mechanism of marking and tracking secrets in the game. The game has already 45 secrets and I think we’ll still add a bunch!
• Antti has been generating a gallon of mucus and has also been adding new items to the game.
• Work on tutorials has been started. 

Von Paulus has been keeping an eye on Grimrock, as usual. First, here's an interview at Games on Net:

Are there any role-playing elements in Grimrock, or is it purely focused on the dungeon crawl and the tactical thinking?

Legend of Grimrock has lots of included role-playing elements like character generation, inventory management and character progression. At the start of the game player can create a party of four characters with Character Generator or simply select a pre-made party. With the Character Generator player can customize the name, race, class, skills and talents of each character. Characters gain experience by fighting enemies and those experience points are used to improve or learn new skills.

Characters can also learn talents to help survive the deadly dungeons. The player can equip the characters with various items from clothes to weapons to say magical bracelets to increase basic statistics. Player has also to take care of the characters by watching health, energy, mana and food levels. Basically the skills of your characters are more important than the players skills, that means you can't win the game with just quick "trigger finger". 

...and from the Weekly Update:

• Player movement has been adjusted: the screen now bobs when you move. Also if you carry too much stuff, the movement slows down.
• We added potions and a system for mixing your own drinks from herbs found in the dungeon.
• We added sacks and crates for all you pack rats out there!
• There’s one entirely new monster in the game and a ranged weapon variant of one of our older monsters (I suppose the word “old” works here on more than one level! (And the word “level” works here on more than one level!)).
• A new spell has been implemented.
• Plenty of small balancing touches: monster stats, item attributes and level design were improved in many places.
• The end cinematic graphics are in progress. Juho will probably finish them during next week.
• More items! In the beginning I never thought that it would be a problem during this project but the atlas texture that contains the graphics for the item icons is starting to be pretty full! I think we’ll add support for multiple textures here once we hit the limit, it’s something that we would have had to do sometime in the future anyway. The texture has space for 157 item icons and there’s only 13 slots left!
• We’ve been playing the game here for the whole day today! Miscellaneous bugs and balancing issues were ruthlessly eradicated in the process.
• Juho did an interview with Games On Net. Read it up, it’s interesting stuff!

An update from the Legend of Grimrock site announced they have officially reached Alpha:

As I said in the previous post, our alpha milestone was pending only a complete playthrough. Petri worked on it for the last three days and we’re happy to announce that he passed through the game so now we can proudly proclaim that Legend of Grimrock is officially in alpha! Now that we have a working full length game on our hands, we have a good vantage point where we can see what aspects of the game still need to be refined the most and luckily there were no big glaring issues or features we would need to drastically change. Regardless, the smaller things added up to a rather hefty todo-list but worry not, we are already working on it!

There were a few areas in the game that were too difficult or had too much combat in them. As far as monster variety goes, the latter half of the game was almost there but the initial stages probably need a little more peppering up. Some types of items, like food, needs more variety and our set of spells is still incomplete but the work needed to get there doesn’t seem overwhelming. Implementing most of the story elements is one of the bigger areas we need to tackle before beta: we have the beginning and the end in place but the in-between bits are lacking. All in all, I think we are doing fine and our path towards beta doesn’t seem very convoluted but we need to do a little more testing to see if our gut feeling holds true. And by the way, the game takes more than ten hours to complete even for a developer who knows all the levels!

And please do keep in mind that this was a purely internal milestone so no need to apply for testing . Oh, and we also meant to add a photo of our rowdy alpha party here but Juho forgot the mini-USB cable of his camera at home so to make up for it, here’s the main menu of the game!

The latest Grimrock update announces they are almost at Alpha. Here's the bullet-point list of this week's achievements and head over for the full post:

• We’ve reworked the skill system and there should be tons of added flavor in this new version. Leveling up and creating the characters is now much more interesting!
• A lot of game balance improvements. Monster stats and where they can be found in the game have been improved and we’ve also fiddled around with some of the items as well as looked at how quickly the characters develop.
• A new monster, mostly geared towards the end game sections, is in the works.
• The steady trickle of new items continues. New ranged weapons like a sling and a crossbow have been added and a new set of armor and a shield have also been done and some other more minor things. We have well over 100 items in the game now.
• We have four new spells. Although it’s basically one new kind of spell that has four variants of it.
• There’s some new variations in enemy animations to reduce some of the repetition.
• We have a pretty much final version of the theme song too! Maybe we’ll have to release a new video some day so that we would have a good excuse to showcase the music too…

As usual, Von Paulus has been watching the Grimrock site and sends news of the latest update. There's a rather nice screen of Goromorg Temple and a list of the latest works. Here's a partial snip:

Another week and another update (despite the fact that we forgot to do one last week, oops)! The game is really starting to feel like a complete game, we are this close on having a game that you could install and then play all the way through! And the whole thing would feel pretty much like a real, complete game as well, instead of some strange unfinished prototype. I think next week is the week we can proudly call it alpha. But the real work is about to start: after alpha we can start concentrating on improving all the aspects of the game and put in some extra polish and implement all sorts of new fun little things! More spells, skills, monster special attacks, some new monster variants, level and puzzle improvements but, most important of all, a lot of testing and balancing!

The Grimrock blog has been updated with a post on Magic and Runes. Here's the intro and head over for a full list of the runes:

Spell casting is an integral part of the diet of any healthy fantasy setting and there have been numerous different approaches to it in computer role playing games. To us, the systems where you pick a spell from a list have always felt very mundane: invoking magic should feel like you’re messing around with mystical forces instead of a spreadsheet! Runes are true and tested vessels for arcane power and they certainly make your imagination run wilder than text printed with Arial, size 12, so using them was a pretty obvious choice for us from the get go. And despite them being more abstract than writing, they still have the opportunity of having a logical underlying structure that prevents the spell casting system from turning into a bewildering mess where the player doesn’t have a chance to figure out what he’s actually doing. I’m here to explain a little bit of how we handle that logic and what our runes are.

Von Paulus sends in the latest Grimrock update, with Almost Human talking about the end-game and various improvements:

We have been working on the end game this week and the whole thing has grown a lot bigger and cooler than we initially thought. First we had the idea that there should be a chamber with a boss fight at the end but we quickly scrapped this as it didn’t feel epic enough. We want to make the ending really memorable to you as a player and we want it to explain some aspects of the mountain and tell you some of the background lore we have. So, instead of just a big fight, the game will climax in an intense multi-level combat and puzzle solving episode with a surprise at the end. We don’t want to spoil the experience by giving too much details, but just want to say that it’s going to be awesome!

Some other highlights from this week:

+ Antti has been adding new items to the game and we have almost one hundred unique items now. I think we are still going to add some more but I think we should have almost everything we need now.

+ We have added some more dungeon levels this week but they’re not in alpha stage yet. We have placeholders for two more levels and then all the levels should be in place.

+ Projectile routines have been rewritten. The old code was inaccurate, inflexible and was in dire need of some love.

+ We had our very first high profile vip visitor at the office on Thursday. The meeting went well, except our second-hand coffee machine (yeah, we are that cheap ) didn’t co-operate with us, so the first batch of coffee pretty much vaporized into thin air somehow – we are a bit lost what exactly happened (believe or not, none of us are coffee drinkers). Thankfully the second batch worked out.

There's also a nice screenshot on offer.

Von Paulus sends in the latest weekly update for Grimrock:

There's a new update at the Grimrock blog - here's the text and there's also a new screenshot on offer:

Some highlights from this week:

+ Character generation (wohoo!)
+ New character race.
+ 4 new talents.
+ 2 new monsters but they need more love before they are in alpha quality.
+ 8 new harmful conditions to make our prisoners’ lives even more challenging.
+ about 20 new item graphics.
+ 6 new portraits.
(+ Juho has generated about a gallon of mucus.)

EDIT:
+ Implemented right-click stack merging and splitting for stackable inventory items.

+ Added 5 new herbs.

Thanks, Von Paulus.

Almost Human has a new blog post outlining their broad release plans for Grimrock, saying they plan to finish the game this year:

Von Paulus sends in the latest update from the Grimrock site, as they Work Towards Alpha:

Almost Human has kicked up a couple of wallpapers showing off concept art for Mount Grimrock.

Thanks, Von Paulus.

The Grimrock blog has a second article about Building the Dungeon, further explaining their level-building process:

It might be shocking news to you but we don’t actually have a level editor at all. All our levels are laid out in text editor because that was the fastest way to get started. The initial plan was to first do a few test levels with text files and then code a proper graphical level editor. Well time passed and we actually learned to like the text based system a lot. It actually has some really nice properties: first, because we are using a full blown programming language (Lua) we can use all kinds of nice programming techniques like create functions (i.e. pieces of script code) that help in repetitive tasks or even automate some aspect of level creation like place items procedurally in the level. We can also script all kinds of wacky features into level files without having to wait for our overworked programmer (yea, that would be me!) to add new features to the level editor. Another benefit is that we can easily search for items in the levels simply by doing Find in Files in text editor.

Almost Human has kicked up a short a article on how they approach their art asset pipeline for Grimrock, with a quick overview of the process from scribbling on paper through to tools to build the 3D art.

Thanks, Von Paulus.

Fun Pastimes For Stupid Children (10 points for the name) is the blog of Remedy Entertainment writer Mikko Rautalahti. He recently had the chance to play Legend of Grimrock and has posted some impressions. Grimrock is being developed by former colleagues, so Mikko may be somewhat biased, but it certainly sounds promising:

I played Grimrock for maybe an hour, an hour and a half, something like that, until I panicked when I encountered a big horde of spiders, got myself boxed in, and died: I was somewhere in the middle of the third dungeon level, and the guys said that they plan to have 15 of them. The levels tended to get bigger and more complex, the further I went (predictably, the first one was pretty simple); I wouldn’t be willing to draw any conclusions about the overall game time based on this. (Also, I’m a Dungeon Master veteran, so I got through a lot of puzzles pretty quickly, but I have no doubt that a novice would spend a lot more time figuring them out.)

And speaking of Dungeon Master… If you liked it way back in the day, chances are you’ll like Legend of Grimrock. It takes everything that was great about that game and makes it better, smoother, more modern — and when I say modern, I don’t mean “they’ve changed key elements but still like to throw out that name in the hopes that fans will buy it out of nostalgia.” But it looks much nicer, and more importantly, they’ve tried to make things more fun to play — let’s face it, 1987 wasn’t exactly the golden age of user interface design.

Thanks, Von Paulus!

A new status update from the Grimrock site:

Looks like the rest of the internet has noticed Grimrock with Minecraft's Noch posting about it and bringing down their server. They're back up and here's a short status update:

Here’s a small status update of what has happened after the video release and what we are going to do next:
+ it’s harder to interrupt monster’s attack sequence by hitting them (done)
+ monsters do nasty counter attacks if you keep doing the forward, hit, backward routine too much (done)
+ improved monster death effect (done)
+ super secret new monster (done)

Next:
+ improve missile logistics – we know picking up ammo from the floor after every combat gets really tiresome fast
+ prettier mouse cursor
+ and of course more levels, items, monsters, puzzles, spells and other goodies

We've moved on from animation videos and now you can see the first gameplay video for Legend of Grimrock.

The Grimrock folks have tossed up some screens of the PC user interface, which has been reduced to offer more playable area (previous screens showed the iPad GUI).

Von Paulus writes that the Grimrock team has a new video on animating the giant spider at their blog.

A quick post on Skills and Talents at the Grimrock site: