Dev Diary: The Dungeon Crawl - Conception
Greetings my beloved denizens of Gloomhaven!
For the past ten months we have been working on a very exciting title: Gloomhaven. What usually happens when you spend that kind of time working on a game, is that you end up wanting to talk about it. Our friends, families and pets ultimately begged us to stop chewing their ears off about it every second of the day, so I will talk about it here on this blog from now on.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/780290/Gloomhaven/
To get you started, we just released our first “Making of” video: The Dungeon Crawl. This episode focuses on Gloomhaven’s conception as a video game. So, strap yourself in, watch the video and then keep on reading to learn more!
Let me take you back to a time, when dreams resided in the hands of those who would reach out and grab th—I guess this might be why my friends and family hate me talking to them… It all started with Isaac Childres. In 2017, this epic man came up with a huge legacy board game—the kind no one had ever seen—and built his own Kickstarter success story. If you are new to board games, “Legacy” means that the game is supposed to be discovered and played only once. When it comes to Gloomhaven, once means hundreds of hours crawling through 90+ dungeons and a huge story.
However, I think it is something else that makes the game so unique and successful. To keep you entertained for all that time, the game offers a massive amount of gameplay mechanics and tactical depth: the kind of scale you would usually only find in video games, Isaac put it on the table then polished it with love, cardboard and numbers. It felt only natural to us that Gloomhaven needed a video game adaptation. I like to think that it was a video game in the first place, but Isaac only had pencils and papers at his disposal at that time.
We’ve managed to change that. A few phone calls later, I was on board with ex-Lionhead members’ new studio: Flaming Fowl. I was nervous at first, these guys worked on the Fable games which I played when I was a teenager and had enough beard creativity to humble me instantly. Isaac has been involved with us since the very beginning as well of course, sharing advice and opinions along the way. If you ever read this Isaac: thank you.
Today we are ten months into the production and I can start to reflect upon the work that has been done, which is far more comforting than looking towards all the work left to be done. Our first challenge was to respect the source material and give it justice while working with very limited information about the world and the characters populating it. We needed to deliver, for the fans to recognize their favorite heroes, just like a movie adaptation but without all the context and personality a movie provides. We had visuals and illustrations made for 2D board game tokens, we had color palettes from dungeons tiles; the rest came down to our imagination, which was kept in check by Isaac’s comments.
Our talented artists came up with a very cool style: a 3D game to provide a good tactical isometric view of the hex-based levels and hand painted textures to give the game a unique, comics-ish look. It allowed us to stay close to the source material while expanding on the universe and giving it flesh. Isaac’s world is incredibly unique, which is admittedly pretty hard to come by these days in high fantasy. There are no goblins and no elves here! The best part was that the board game only started to cover all of it. Races, cultures, religions, spells… so many concepts and ideas only mentioned in the board game for the artists and designers to elaborate upon.
With a pretty solid creative process in place, the team was able to move onto what would prove to be the game’s most challenging and most interesting part: combat. Gloomhaven has 16 playable characters, each character has around 30 abilities, each ability is comprised of 2 distinct and unique powers. Add the enemies in the mix, and you have more than a thousand abilities with unique gameplay and mechanics to implement, and ultimately play with.
Gloomhaven is all about tactical decisions, using your abilities and combining them in the best possible way. The sheer amount of options at the player’s disposal is what makes the game so dense and addictive, and what gave the developers a few cold sweats on occasions. Spoiler: it still does.
Overall, we feel privileged to be working on this game and we want it to reconcile two worlds: Gloomhaven fans of the highest order and tactical gamers, like myself, who spent one too many hours on far too many rogue-likes. Speaking of which, we also decided on implementing a brand-new Rogue-lite mode to complement Isaac’s campaign: you guys will discover that one when Early Access kicks in. Talking about you guys, the community and support has been amazing so far, thank you so much for that! It keeps us going and dedicated to make the best game we can!
If you haven't already, be sure to join us on our Discord and Facebook Group channels to keep up to date on everything Gloomhaven, even getting sneak peeks of the game!
Congratulations for reaching the depths of this Dungeon Crawl. Fear not, I could go on and on and probably will in future posts.
Cheers!
J.
For the past ten months we have been working on a very exciting title: Gloomhaven. What usually happens when you spend that kind of time working on a game, is that you end up wanting to talk about it. Our friends, families and pets ultimately begged us to stop chewing their ears off about it every second of the day, so I will talk about it here on this blog from now on.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/780290/Gloomhaven/
To get you started, we just released our first “Making of” video: The Dungeon Crawl. This episode focuses on Gloomhaven’s conception as a video game. So, strap yourself in, watch the video and then keep on reading to learn more!
Let me take you back to a time, when dreams resided in the hands of those who would reach out and grab th—I guess this might be why my friends and family hate me talking to them… It all started with Isaac Childres. In 2017, this epic man came up with a huge legacy board game—the kind no one had ever seen—and built his own Kickstarter success story. If you are new to board games, “Legacy” means that the game is supposed to be discovered and played only once. When it comes to Gloomhaven, once means hundreds of hours crawling through 90+ dungeons and a huge story.
However, I think it is something else that makes the game so unique and successful. To keep you entertained for all that time, the game offers a massive amount of gameplay mechanics and tactical depth: the kind of scale you would usually only find in video games, Isaac put it on the table then polished it with love, cardboard and numbers. It felt only natural to us that Gloomhaven needed a video game adaptation. I like to think that it was a video game in the first place, but Isaac only had pencils and papers at his disposal at that time.
We’ve managed to change that. A few phone calls later, I was on board with ex-Lionhead members’ new studio: Flaming Fowl. I was nervous at first, these guys worked on the Fable games which I played when I was a teenager and had enough beard creativity to humble me instantly. Isaac has been involved with us since the very beginning as well of course, sharing advice and opinions along the way. If you ever read this Isaac: thank you.
Today we are ten months into the production and I can start to reflect upon the work that has been done, which is far more comforting than looking towards all the work left to be done. Our first challenge was to respect the source material and give it justice while working with very limited information about the world and the characters populating it. We needed to deliver, for the fans to recognize their favorite heroes, just like a movie adaptation but without all the context and personality a movie provides. We had visuals and illustrations made for 2D board game tokens, we had color palettes from dungeons tiles; the rest came down to our imagination, which was kept in check by Isaac’s comments.
Our talented artists came up with a very cool style: a 3D game to provide a good tactical isometric view of the hex-based levels and hand painted textures to give the game a unique, comics-ish look. It allowed us to stay close to the source material while expanding on the universe and giving it flesh. Isaac’s world is incredibly unique, which is admittedly pretty hard to come by these days in high fantasy. There are no goblins and no elves here! The best part was that the board game only started to cover all of it. Races, cultures, religions, spells… so many concepts and ideas only mentioned in the board game for the artists and designers to elaborate upon.
With a pretty solid creative process in place, the team was able to move onto what would prove to be the game’s most challenging and most interesting part: combat. Gloomhaven has 16 playable characters, each character has around 30 abilities, each ability is comprised of 2 distinct and unique powers. Add the enemies in the mix, and you have more than a thousand abilities with unique gameplay and mechanics to implement, and ultimately play with.
Gloomhaven is all about tactical decisions, using your abilities and combining them in the best possible way. The sheer amount of options at the player’s disposal is what makes the game so dense and addictive, and what gave the developers a few cold sweats on occasions. Spoiler: it still does.
Overall, we feel privileged to be working on this game and we want it to reconcile two worlds: Gloomhaven fans of the highest order and tactical gamers, like myself, who spent one too many hours on far too many rogue-likes. Speaking of which, we also decided on implementing a brand-new Rogue-lite mode to complement Isaac’s campaign: you guys will discover that one when Early Access kicks in. Talking about you guys, the community and support has been amazing so far, thank you so much for that! It keeps us going and dedicated to make the best game we can!
If you haven't already, be sure to join us on our Discord and Facebook Group channels to keep up to date on everything Gloomhaven, even getting sneak peeks of the game!
Congratulations for reaching the depths of this Dungeon Crawl. Fear not, I could go on and on and probably will in future posts.
Cheers!
J.