Dome Keeper News

Keepers!

Dome Keeper is now available to pre-order! 😍

As a thank you, as well as a 10% discount, pre-ordering will get you the Pioneer Pack which includes TWO cosmetic items: a hardened suit, and a vigilant owl pet! 🦉



What is Dome Keeper I hear you ask?
Defend your dome from wave after wave of hostile attacks in this roguelike survival miner. Use the time between each attack to dig beneath the surface in search of valuable resources. Use them carefully on powerful upgrades to help you stay alive and make it to the next world.

Dig
Drill tunnels beneath your dome in search of precious materials. Watch the time, you need to get back to the dome and be ready when the next wave of attack comes. How deep will you get this time? How much can you carry back?

Defend
Take control of the defenses and fend off the alien attacks. Air and ground, slow and fast, the attackers must be prioritized and dealt with before they tear your dome apart.

Develop
Use your mineral harvest to gain powerful upgrades; improve the strength of your weapon, make your drill more powerful, increase the speed of your jetpack, and research other improvements. Find artifacts to give an extra boost to your survival odds.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Secure your pre-order here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/

Dome Keeper's combat looks simple, and that's by design. Move your weapon, attack, and knock out the baddies. Easy, right?



How you fight isn't quite as straight-forward, of course, because – as we talked about last time – you'll quickly have to master the art of prioritization, learning which enemies you need to tackle first to minimize damage.

We didn't stop there. Battle abilities for primary gadgets add another option to your combat tactics. Here's a little more about how they work and why they'll be different from the gadgets you've been playing in the demo (which is back, by the way: give it a try if you haven't played it yet!)


What's that? You played with the three gadgets in the demo and loved them? Us, too! And though it may look like you get the same gadgets in the full version of the game… Well, we have a little surprise for you. ;)



During Dome Keeper's development, the tech trees have been completely reworked. That means we've enhanced the design of every gadget – especially the primary ones – with expanded upgrade options, too, in order to bring added depth and complexity to the game.

Take the Orchard, for example, which lets you plant a tree that bears fruit that will buff the speed of both you and your drill. Originally, the Orchard offered eight possible upgrades but now, in our reworked system, you can choose from six different unlock-able abilities that altogether offer 17(!) options.

Or take a look at Snare Roots, a nifty little defence mechanism that briefly catches wandering monsters and locks them in place. This gives you time to deal with them or, alternatively, keeps them out of the way whilst you deal with more troublesome monsters first.

What's that: you'd like roots that not only catch monsters but destroy them, too? Sounds good to us! Unlock further Snare Roots upgrades and you'll discover that monsters trapped in the roots will explode and damage nearby enemies, too. Yet a further upgrade lets you grow even more roots around your dome.



Another Orchard upgrade lets you cover your dome with an additional carpet of protective roots that shields your dome from projectile damage. Upgrading this one even further lets you double that protective layer.

As for the Repellent? That can slow down all the monsters - or even stun them completely if you upgrade it enough - and you also have an ability that reduces the amount of health each monster has.

The Shield, on the other hand, has three abilities: Electro Blast, Invulnerability (later upgrades for this trigger automatically, as soon as your shield depletes, or kick in when your dome is about to be destroyed; cool, eh?) and Reflection.

Each of these abilities have their specific uses and advantages, enabling you to mix and match your skills to match your Dome defense strategy… or tackle your world's trickiest monsters, as the case may be!


Before we go, there's one more change we wanted to talk to you about, and that's water!

Whereas previously the Repellent and Orchard required water to operate – and the Shield didn't – we realised this left the game a little unbalanced. Because the amount of water you have in the world is fixed, you could find yourself running low or, alternatively, drowning in the stuff! So, to improve this, we've removed the requirement to use water and given every primary gadget an overcharge ability instead.

What's an overcharge, you ask? Good question! It does exactly what it says on the tin, enabling you to go to the gadget in your dome and – quite literally – overcharge it.

Every primary gadget's overcharge is a little different, so - for example - the Shield overcharge means you get to absorb more damage during the next monster wave. And yes, just like your other abilities, overcharging can be upgraded further, too…

We didn't just rework the primary gadgets, of course – we've been working to revise and expand all our tech trees! – but we hope this has given you a wonderful sneaky peek into the changes we're making and how they will improve Dome Keeper.

Make sure you're following Dome Keeper on Twitter or join our Discord and tell us all about your favorite gadgets – and what gadgets you may like to see in the future! And don't forget: Dome Keeper is out on September 27, 2022.

Until the next one, Keepers - Dome Sweet Dome!

Attention Keepers!

We hear you! You’re excited for Dome Keeper and want more. Hey, we have the same hard time putting it down so who are we to say, “no?”

The demo is back!

We do have a couple of quick notes! A lot of work has been going into the full game, including some changes. We think Keepers will enjoy a long career so we moved some ideas into post-launch content, which we have big plans to bring you more of, and we have new things in store for you on launch day!

We’re excited for you to start your Keeper career on September 27th!

As a thank you for all your support, over the next few weeks we'll be sharing behind-the-scenes peeks at how Dome Keeper is made. This week, we explore the influences and inspirations behind Dome Keeper's key design choices.



The idea for Dome Keeper – or Dome Romantik, as it was called once upon a time – came via the three-day Game Jam Ludum Dare 48 and the theme "Deeper and Deeper". Just three days later, Dome Keeper was born!

While it made sense to pick a mining game for the theme, it was important to us that the mining had a purpose, too. We also didn't want mining to be the only thing you did, either…


Every game we've ever played shapes the way we think about game design, but we were particularly inspired by Kingdom (yes, the same Kingdom published by our publisher, Raw Fury!).

It was its minimal control – you could only move left and right and collect and drop coins – and lack of handholding that impressed us most. Every gamer is different, sure, but we've never been a big fan of tutorials, and would much rather figure out how to do things on our own.

Older games were like that, weren't they? They trusted you. And so do we. That's why Dome Keeper gives you the chance to figure some things out on your own. Letting players make their own discoveries and not hand-feeding them every answer is something Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy) has been vocal about, and we agree!



The original Legend of Zelda is a good example of that kind of game design. Its world was open and mysterious, and you learned through exploration and experimentation. There was beauty in that discovery that's harder to find these days, as newer games try to give more instructions in order to improve accessibility.

Justin Ma (Into the Breach) and Lucas Pope (Papers, Please) were also influential. Both designers only add something to the game if it's significantly different to what's already there. That's why when we add things to Dome Keeper, we make sure it's never just making boring variations of the same old gameplay.


Take a look at this Walker. It comes in (very) fast and starts beating on your Dome. But it's pretty straightforward, right?



So when it comes to creating other monsters… well, we could've just made a bigger Walker. Maybe one that's a little bit slower, but a little bit stronger. But honestly? That just doesn't appeal to us. What's the point of taking on the same kind of enemy with the same kind of strategy?

It's not about giving you different monsters as much as it's about giving you varying challenges.

That's why Dome Keeper has a whole menagerie of creatures to keep you on your toes! Look at this flying monster: you can't tackle it by using the same strategy as the Walker because it shoots projectiles and even has an invincible phase. The Walker can be tackled at any time. You can choose not to engage the flyer, especially if it's on the other side. But if you're tackling a Walker at the same time one of these bad boys swoops in, you have a decision to make; can you make it over there in time, or will you mess it up? Do you keep fighting the Walker or tackle the flying enemies? What you decide next may be a matter of life or death!



What happens when this pesky divebombing enemy comes in, does a tonne of damage to your dome, and flies off? If you don't deal with it immediately, it can do a lot of damage, but as it retreats, it can be safely ignored until it loops back again. What happens when the burrowing worm beast arrives? Or the Shifter, which teleports around and shoots a very strong projectile. Which monster do you need to fight first to minimize the damage they cause?



All of Dome Keeper's combat is about assessing the threat and working out how much time you have to fight with the weapons you have at your disposal. And as the game progresses, the monsters you meet in the early game may not be as threatening later on, so – eventually – a variant of that enemy may arrive and change things up even more…

Make sure you're following Dome Keeper on Twitter or join our Discord and tell us all about your favorite monster designs. And don't forget: Dome Keeper is out on September 27, 2022.

Until the next one, Keepers - Dome Sweet Dome!

As a thank you for all your support, over the next few weeks we'll be sharing behind-the-scenes peeks at how Dome Keeper is made. This week, Bippinbit's René offers a tantalizing technical breakdown of our game's striking color palettes and how we make every world feel distinctive.

Like a lot of things in life, sometimes it's the tiniest details that make the biggest impact. Take the colors used in Dome Keeper; we already know that its striking art style makes it stand out for all the right reasons, but did you know that every world has its own particular mood and atmosphere (pun intended, of course), too?

[h2]Color me excited![/h2]
First, check out this hot pink screenshot below. It's memorable, right? I mean, I don't think any of us are going to forget a world with a hot pink sky and royal blue plant life, but this image is unforgettable not just because of its strange color combination! You see, without this particular color palette, Dome Keeper would be a very different game indeed…

Here comes the science bit!



Thanks to the color combination of this world, we can create whole new hues and colors on other ones, too. To help you visualize it, here's a handy breakdown of the hues and shades we can find in the color palette for the groovy image above:



It's kinda cool, right? Varying shades of green, blue, and pink dominate the color scheme, but the palette also generates a number of purples, violets, and browns, too.

What's that? You don't want to live in a hot pink world? We're not sure what you have against the pink skies (we dig it, quite honestly), but the good news is, you don't have to!
"The reason this pink palette looks so strange is because the color values here actually have something encoded, so it's not about the colors at all," René explains. "It's about the placement in this grid.

"We can tell the game to use a different palette, but one in the same shape. For example, it will take the color that's in one square and replace it with the color in the same spot from a different palette. Like this!"



Some of these colors and shades are just for the monsters. Some are for the Dome. Some can only be used for your Keeper. But that's why - thanks to this nifty system - Dome Keeper enables you to easily swap color schemes and create a world that feels special and personal to you!

[h2]Worlds apart - making Dome Keeper's worlds feel distinct[/h2]
But it's not just the colors that make every world in Dome Keeper feel unique.

In the future, Dome Keeper's worlds will offer different challenges, including what monsters may spawn there, and how often. For instance: although you may encounter the same monster type on more than one world, each world will have a unique setup.

This means every battle phase will play out a little differently, and every battle will offer its own unique benefits and threats. Combat will always feel distinct as you move from world to world, adapting your battle strategies as you go.



There will also be modifiers that offer pre-made setups that will spice up your worlds, too, allowing you to select preferred modes when choosing your loadout.

One mode includes speeding up the monsters - oh no! - but giving them fewer HP points - yay! Another includes creating a maze-like map with loads of appendages, tunnels, and chambers to explore. And another again halves the number of attack waves you encounter – giving you much more time to do that all-important mining, of course – but the waves you do endure will be much more challenging.

As for why we're mining for minerals, relics, and gadgets? Hmm. Guess we'll have to tell you more about that in another update, eh? Watch this space…

Make sure you're following us on Twitter or join our Discord and let us know what color schemes and modifiers you'd like to see pop up in Dome Keeper!

[h3]Until the next one, Keepers - Dome Sweet Dome![/h3]