Undead Citadel News

We have been quiet for a long time, working on a great physics system improvement, after having feedback from our alpha testers. We're almost there!



We hope to show you all the progress in a new video soon and finally set a release date.

Stay tuned!

We are happy to announce that we are choosing players to enter into our Closed alpha before the start of Early Access on Steam.




You should join our alpha test if you play similar games and you want to help us improve the game as early as you can. You would become one of the founders of this community, we will be thankful to you and you will have other benefits.

All we need is to gather valuable feedback during the closed alpha stage. It can be finding bugs, comments and ideas about the balancing of the game, difficulty, improvement ideas, new features/content ideas, writing mistakes etc.. We will use online documents for you to share and comment on but you will also be encouraged to write down e-mails in a less structured format about the overall feel of the game if you like.

Alpha keys we distribute will expire when we start the Early Access. If we get valuable and genuine feedbacks from you during the alpha(making us believe that you spent time to play the game and thought about how to improve it) you will get up to 3 Steam keys that doesn't expire. Furthermore we want to treat our alpha testers as the most valuable members of our community as we believe it will grow in time and they will be the first inhabitants of the citadel.

Don't share any of the content you play during the closed alpha. We are trying to promote the game as best as we can and we will let you share content earlier than regular content creators as you helped us improve the game. But sharing unpolished images/videos hurt the game in the eyes of general public. We will have your Steam accounts and if you share any visuals publicly we might revoke your CD keys.

The dates for closed alpha and the start of Early Access later on aren't very strict. Please be patient if there is any delay, game development is difficult.

Please, follow instructions in our Discord channel
https://discord.gg/XjfqXZJ

Good evening ladies and gentlemen.

Besides toiling away producing Undead Citadel, we have been providing a few assets for you to take a peek into our development. Mentioning this, we would like to give our most sincere thanks because we have truly been mesmerized by your support and positive feedback in general.



We are quite aware of this frustration in current games, thus we have tasked ourselves to provide added difficulty when it comes to taking down your enemies. This comes by implementing a few simple factors, such as the armour used by your enemies, which varies quite a bit. Swords can rarely cut through armour, thus you will need to look for weak spots at which to strike. Even if you try to hit with a two handed mace to bludgeon your opponent, there is the chance that your strike will be parried. To this we add a durability factor to each weapon, so depending on the use you give to it, it may break after consecutive miss-blows.



Ahhh, the old two handed wand claymore sword… Indeed we understand your frustration. Unfortunately VR controls do not offer weight, thus in all instances, the feeling will be that either your weapons feels like a feather, or that your hand moved farther and faster than your weapon ever could. This is the current predicament all VR games face as of now.

This is where our hybrid physics based combat system comes into play. We needed to reach a mid point within the experience. This means that the game is not 100% physics based. We initially went for this, yet after some time opted to remove this on account that whenever you fought against your enemy or even when you hit your sword against a wall (even without meaning to), the sword would either stagnate or bounce back and in the meantime your hand would actually carry on moving into the other direction without any impediment. This was okay the first few times, yet after a while this grew to be quite frustrating. So after removing this, we added durability and force into effect. So depending on your own angle, force, and a few other calculations as well as that of your opponent, you would be able to break through the enemies defense, break your weapon, have it grasped out of your hand, vice versa, etc.



Graphics and physics within the trailers are all real. But indeed we have used capture devices to show off a bit more and ease the vision for public showing. These include two factors:

We used a gimbal (steady-camera) to soften the players movement for ease of viewing on a flat screen (the sensation is quite different when you are actually immersed behind the lens.
We also used ‘Depth of Field’ in order to highlight certain aspects within the screen, which is why you may quite evidently notice a heavy blur effect in most trailers. This will not be present in the game of course.



Take a look.

https://youtu.be/wW-2tcykOZA

PSVR Gameplay



Flares are an optic effect caused by cameras and thus there is no sense using them to replicate them as part of the naked eye view. Yet we have included a certain ‘glow’ effect which we believe adds quite well to the atmosphere and allow for certain gameplay factors to give purpose to this; for example, it can be used to identify if an enemy is dead (truly dead) or not.



If you need to see to believe, so be it…

This is the PC being used by our lead developer to design/develop/play the game (we are aware that it’s in Spanish, so just to translate for those who may not undersand, it says that our system specs are fabulous, as is the local paella, the weather is amazing, and Barca rules all).





The story is half the fun. We will delve more on this soon.





Smooth Locomotion with Stick or Move, Teleport, and 3D Rudder.



To tell you the truth, we do not know yet. We have the main script, but modify it constantly. To this we are also still working on each level, puzzles, routes, etc. So once it’s all put together we will be able to give you some sort of indicator. Beyond this, we are adding hidden bonuses, weapons collection for your personal hall, horde mode, and leaderboards.







The slow motion you see is actually on account of a potion which was consumed. There are different potions available which allow you to drug yourself for a variety of effects.



We dare not give a fixed release date, since our main goal is to deliver something great. We are currently finishing up the core of the game, but there is still lots of balancing to be done, additions, modifications, sometimes new ideas come up. Therefore we shall take our time… but yes, we are confident enough to say that it will be this year.

As for beta. We will have a beta version. But as with the previous statement, we will give out more information later on.



That would be it. Thank you all once again for your support and please, feel free to join us on our Discord channel, available on our website. We are always there and eager to answer questions, listen to your comments, suggestions, ideas, or simply to have a cup of tea.

Till next time. Goodbye.

In order to answer such a question, we must start from the beginning. To do so, let’s go back; way back to the golden age we call 2014. This was a time when other game legends would be cast in stone, among them Goat Simulator and Mario Kart 8. This was the same time we released our first official game, Final Kick for mobile. Here we had a simple idea and a huge fanbase, thus we dedicated ourselves fully to creating the best football penalty simulator out there (soccer for some of you). Having secured ourselves with this modest success, we decided to start working on a personal passion of ours and create a medieval based combat game, Dark Steel, for mobile which we now felt we dominated to great standards (maybe I should now have mentioned that).



In any case it was while we were working on this game that we were given the chance to create a VR adaptation of Final Kick and thus we were presented with the Oculus Rift when it just came out (back in 2016). That was it… we were blown away by VR and soon after having finished our new expansion, decided to put Dark Steel on hold (don’t worry, we will continue working on it) and create a medieval set virtual reality game.

We noticed that there were relatively few medieval set games for VR and among those, even fewer which were not based on simple horde based arcade mechanics. To this extent we did the following:

• Make sure we could actually develop a game of this type for VR. We created a simple scenario and to this point we created a couple of weapons in order to test out the movement and interaction. Once we felt this was well in hand, we moved on.

• We decided to test out combat and movement to greater scale and created all the mechanics and ragdoll physics system in order to see how everything worked. We had our first enemies torn to pieces by our blades, and now came a new issue… Did we want to be this graphically gore oriented? After a bit of discussion, we agreed that we wanted to maintain high graphics within our rampage, yet not seem too violent, thus we replaced humans with the undead.
  
  
• Now that we had that settled, we decided to move along with something of even greater importance (at least to us). What was this game going to be about? So this is where our team, made up of the “best” movie and series aficionados (adopting Game of Thrones, Vikings, LOTR, etc), as well as old school gamers (Forgotten Tales universe – Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc), and Tolkien enthusiasts, spent nights together in order to develop a linear, yet captivating storyline, while eating pizza and croquetas, and casting magic missile into the darkness (I wonder if someone will get that reference).

• Finally (and as to where we are now), we have everything organized and set and have been working on bringing all the elements together in order to build the game up to the best standards and releasing it on the Playstation VR (PSVR), Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows VR on Steam.
  

So having declared this, we have indeed launched ourselves upon a vast new world sort of speak. We are designing, building, putting things together, breaking them apart again and starting all over. After building a new weapon, we test it out, we see all the faults (and believe us, there are always plenty), we tweak everything, including the range, the edges, the piercing threshold, durability, weight (after all, if you decide to juggle your weapon, it’s not the same to spin a dagger and catch it as it is will a warhammer), and countless other attributes.

The same goes for all the enemies out there. We are also aiming not to be completely repetitive, thus we give each creature you will encounter slight modifications and personal traits which would give a hint of the life or character (or simply height and girth) of the wretch before you.



One of the issues which we have encountered to which we decided to modify a bit in retrospect to our initial design is the fact that we have decided not be be 100% physics prone and go for what we like to call “Hybrid-Physics”. This is on account that we noticed it was actually counter-productive to providing realism within the stage. For example, if you unleash a long armed strike and your weapon was blocked an in-game object (such as a wall), normally your strike should end there, but your arm would still do the full swipe. This would leave your in-game hand stagnated and the subsequent movement would carry on from beyond the actual premises of the game confinements imposed within the scenario.

The one thing we are well aware of is that we are learning while we work on this (not to mention having an awesome time). We want to get this right and we want to create something that will be relatively new for VR and a great experience for all of you. This is why we are paying extremely close attention to all your comments when we release assets, such as videos and screenshots, and will also be relying on a few of you later on for testing.

Thank you very much for your interest and support!

Stay tuned for our next update!