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Blog Post #3: The Origins Story

The World of DOOMBLADE


[h3]Introduction
[/h3]For this blog, we want to go into a little bit of how DOOMBLADE came to be. This includes the beginnings of the ideas that became the game as well as the people that helped us along the way.

DOOMBLADE got its start from a concept image created by Juha, the game’s artist. The style of the image is quite different from the aesthetic direction we ended up taking, but the idea of the highlight of the image - a powerful sword - had caught our imagination. The sword became the seed for the world of DOOMBLADE.

[h3]Origins of the Blade
[/h3]The very first thing we had lorewise was the blade. The name DOOMBLADE came up very early as well, as there was something intriguing in focusing on a sword that would not represent light or hope unlike many other fantastical swords. Instead, our blade became a manifestation of something darker.

We wanted to make DOOMBLADE into a sentient character as well with its own history and agendas. Our goal was to make the blade as unique as possible in our game’s world, so we decided it had to come from a dimension other than the one in which the story was mainly happening.



The blade would be the most powerful artifact in the world, but that posed a problem: we wanted to make a metroidvania, and thus there had to be power-ups that gradually give the player more power. So somehow the player should start the game with the most powerful sword in the world, but they would still have to be able to power themselves up more as the game progressed. The solution was to have the game start with DOOMBLADE being imprisoned and stripped of powers. This would lead into organic integration of the story and the dynamics of a metroidvania, as the player’s quest would involve restoring the blade to its former glory.

[h3]Origins of the Lore
[/h3]The core of our story was solid, but the rest of our lore package was a mess. We had some enemies and environments built in an early prototype of the game, but storywise none of this was connected in any sort of meaningful way. At this point we realized we needed professional help. Enter Andrew Adams.



A friend of ours introduced us to Andrew Adams, a writer from the United States with a style that we really fell in love with. He has a perfect way of being able to create immersive worlds with fantasy and sci-fi elements along with the sort of dark humor that we were after. Fortunately, he was very interested in working on DOOMBLADE.

What we gave him was the concept of the blade itself with its otherworldly nature as well as a concept of our freshly created protagonist, Gloom Girl (though I think Andrew came up with the name). He also got the incoherent mess of monsters and environments that would have to be packaged neatly into a story. And that is exactly what he did!



Andrew started building the dynamics of DOOMBLADE and Gloom Girl along with their joint motivations. At the same time, the monsters and non-player characters Juha had created started to come alive with rich backstories. All of a sudden we had the main races of the game: the Gloomlings, the Darksprouts, the Wilderkeeps, and the Grublins as well as lore behind the different biomes they dwell in. In the end, a rich lore bible for the game was born, from which we can absorb inspiration and content much more than we’ll ever have time to implement.

I haven’t even gotten to the game’s antagonists, but I have to stop myself here to not spoil more than I already have. The rest of DOOMBLADE’s story can be discovered soon by playing the game itself.

Please wishlist DOOMBLADE on Steam and give this blog a thumps up if you liked it, and if you have any questions you would like to see answered in later blogs leave us a comment below.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/922050/DOOMBLADE/

[h3]Stay tuned for next week, where we will dive further into why we as the developers decided to make a Metroidvania!
[/h3]



DOOMBLADE Iceberg Interactive

Blog Post #2 Meet the Devs: Juha

A Colorful Square and a Dark Vortex: Part 2


This is the second part of our blog on introducing the devs of DOOMBLADE.



[h3]For this post, you will be meeting Juha the Artist!
[/h3]

[h3]JUHA:

[/h3] I do all sorts of stuff for DOOMBLADE in design and development but my bread and butter is art and animation.

Back home, we always had some sort of computer with games on it. The first we had was Commodore 64. I have a photo of me as a tiny toddler messing around with the C64 while my older brothers were trying to play some game on it - annoying little brother haha! (I have three older brothers and one younger brother.)



I remember that sometimes almost all the kids from the neighborhood (it’s a tiny farmside village in Finland) were at our place gathered around that magic machine competing in Summer Games 2, Hat Trick, Barbarian and other hardcore 1vs1 joystick killer games. I was also fortunate to have access to all the important consoles (nes, snes, megadrive, ps1) as well since always some of the neighbors had bought the latest gaming machine. I think the common interest of my brothers and the neighbor kids towards these machines and the games made me think really early on that it would be super awesome to be able to make a game of my own - some day.

As a kid, I always enjoyed a lot if any game had a level editor or anything similar. Some of my most fond memories is from the time when we were having LAN-parties where we played some of my multiplayer levels for Descent 2 and other amazing multiplayer games.

The very first “game development” experience I had was with a software on C64 called S.E.U.C.K. (Shoot Em Up Construction Kit). It was pretty awesome, as you could draw your own backgrounds and even animated sprites for the characters, though sometimes I did steal some other games’ sprites with a magic device called Action Replay 2.0. The games you could make with S.E.U.C.K. were pretty simple. All you make were shooters where you moved upwards - still, it was amazing fun back then!
So this has really been a life long dream to get to the point where we are at with DOOMBLADE.



I am a 90’s kid who grew up happily surrounded by mindblowing games from the 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s while watching some sweet cartoons on TV such as Ren & Stimpy and Samurai Jack. I often had the experience that I was good in drawing so it was somewhat natural path to try learn more on game graphics and level design when I was considering my career towards my dream of making games. I think what drives me the most in game development is building the game world that can immerse the player with intuitive gameplay and fascinating environments and characters.

Eventually I graduated with bachelor’s degree in Computer Arts which landed me a job as a Level Designer in a game company here in Finland. I was there for a few years until I saw this opportunity to learn more about game design at Aalto University. I applied there and was fortunate to get in.

There, I met with Kim for the first time. I think it wasn’t until the second year at Aalto when we ended up making a game project together. Somehow the motivation towards making our own games and our skillset met pretty fantastically together. Also, our mindsets complement each other in an amazing way as a team. I think Kim is a colorful square and I’m a dark vortex - a perfect fit!



I can’t remember what could be my first project that I could even call a game. I have pretty much always been working on some never-ending little hobby projects with some game-maker type of software. The first project where I was professionally involved was called Ridge Racer Unbounded. It was pretty amazing to experience such a large scale game project. Our first serious game project with Kim and Muro Studios was Shadow Bug. I think from all the previous work, and especially the ones at Muro Studios, I have learned how important it is to try to prioritize the tasks we still want to make - and most importantly what we still have the time for.

[h3]Please wishlist DOOMBLADE on Steam and give this blog a thumbs up if you liked this blog, and if you have any questions you would like to see answered in later blogs leave us a comment below!
[/h3]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/922050/DOOMBLADE/

[h3]Stay tuned for this coming Thursday, where we will explore the origins of the world of DOOMBLADE and the inspirations behind it.
[/h3]



DOOMBLADE Iceberg Interactive

Blog Post #2 Meet the Devs: Kim

A Colorful Square and a Dark Vortex: Part 1


For this blog we are going to tell you who exactly is behind DOOMBLADE:

Juha the Artist and Kim the Coder.


We will be breaking the blog into two parts, the second part of which will be released early next week!

For the first part, we will be focusing on Kim.

[h3]KIM:[/h3]
I’m the coder / lead designer of DOOMBLADE. I’ve been working with Juha the Artist for quite awhile now. I think our ten year anniversary of making games together is quite close, though I’m totally lost on the exact date. I hope Juha won’t be upset!

But to get back on track, in this blog post I’m supposed to write about myself, not anniversaries. My path in making games started in the nineties when I was in elementary school, but it sort of took a detour after that. When I was in first grade, my dad bought us the 8-bit Nintendo. I was immediately hooked. In third grade, we got a PC and my video game universe greatly expanded.



Soon enough, I was able to make my own video game! I got into programming with Microsoft QuickBASIC and made some text adventure games. I don’t remember many of them at this point, but one was called Mortal Wombat. In it, you played as a wombat challenging other animals to fights. It even had some “art” I did with Deluxe Paint II. So I guess technically it was a visual novel?

Anyway, making games and in particular coding was put on hold for a long time after that. I picked up a nasty on-and-off Magic: the Gathering addiction (that I still haven’t been able to break) right before middle school. After growing up with that and all sorts of video games, I ended up enrolling in university to study Computer Science. There I really learned how to code.

By the time I got my bachelor’s degree it finally hit me - I should try to make video games for a living. For all of my life before then, for some reason it never even entered my mind as an option. But now I was at a point where I knew how to code and all I did was play games, so it just felt obvious that I should try game development.



Luckily for me, there was a master’s degree program for game design in another nearby university. And even more luckily, I was able to get in. This is where I met Juha. It didn’t take long for us to start making games together. And, all of a sudden, we had set up a company and had even managed to release some games!

DOOMBLADE is by far our biggest and most ambitious project to date. In our earlier games, we had started experimenting with new mechanics of combat and movement in platformer games. DOOMBLADE is where all that experimentation culminates.



I’m really happy with the way we are changing the way you play a metroidvania with DOOMBLADE. I think this is what drives me most as a game developer - finding entirely new ways of playing, even if the game genre is quite established. I can’t wait to be able to share DOOMBLADE in its entirety with you! We have been making this game for so long and we are almost there!

[h3]Please wishlist DOOMBLADE on Steam and give this blog a thumbs up if you liked this blog, and if you have any questions you would like to see answered in later blogs leave us a comment below.
[/h3]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/922050/DOOMBLADE/

[h3]Stay tuned for early next week, where we will dive further into getting to know Juha the Artist in the second part of this blog!
[/h3]



DOOMBLADE Iceberg Interactive

Blog Post #1: Biomes

[h2]Trees and Machines
[/h2]

[h3]Introduction
[/h3]Today we are going to look at two biomes from our game: New Wilderwood and the Power Sector.

These two biomes represent two very contrasting settings found in our game world. New Wilderwood is lush, vibrant, and thriving with different kinds of trees and plants. It is a good representation of how the world of DOOMBLADE used to be. In contrast, the Power Sector is completely devoid of anything natural and is instead filled with machines, which represents the corrupting influence the game’s antagonists have had on the world.

In level design terms, the world of our game consists of small pieces we call “rooms”, connected together into larger cohesive sections we call “biomes”. Each biome has its own strong identity defined by distinct visuals, enemies, NPCS (non-player characters), sound design and atmosphere.

[h3]New Wilderwood
[/h3]
The idea of having a forest in our game was one of our earliest ideas, and the level and enemy design in New Wilderwood ended up growing as organically as the forests themselves. There was no high level plan of how the forest’s levels should be shaped. Instead the process was very iterative and the nooks and crannies of New Wilderwood were then populated by whichever enemies felt right in the moment. Wide open areas were filled with ambushes of enemies that can occupy a lot of aerial space, whereas more cramped areas became hosts to wall crawling creepers. The different areas of the forest were created independently, in different parts of the game world as the ideas came to us. Later, we needed to find ways to connect them with new forest areas. This way, New Wilderwood grew organically to fill the map of the game far and wide.



[h3]Power Sector
[/h3]In contrast, while the Power Sector is also a vast area, the rooms inside it were positioned in the game world much more systematically. Most of the time, when creating rooms for the Power Sector, the rooms had a specific obligation of connecting one place to another or they needed to contain an important event.

The level and enemy design of the Power Sector was first inspired by the environmental visuals Juha, the artist, created for the biome. This is best showcased by the first enemy designed for the Power Sector: the Dread Cannon. It is a cannon moving on rails at high speed. The Power Sector level design is in many places defined by interconnected systems of rails on which these cannons are moving back and forth. These systems form an organized chaos, which might at first seem overwhelming, but work as an efficient way of moving through the levels once the player learns their way around the Power Sector.



[h3]Aesthetic Style
[/h3]The visual styles for the New Wilderwood and the Power Sector were quite different types of processes when compared to each other. The concept phase of the style of the New Wilderwood was pretty straight forward to plan as we wanted to create a forest environment for the game from the very beginning of the project. The color scheme of the biome was first quite heavily based on green. During the process it has become more of a mix between green, blue and yellow. Forestry is always a great theme because it’s rather easy to imagine different types of trees and organic shapes that can easily have some believable movement as well as to make the environment feel more alive and immersive. The lighting of the biome obviously needed some light rays here and there, which gave it a more warm lushy feel.

The Power Sector took more time in the concepting phase. We gathered quite a lot of reference images to get the feel of the biome as we wanted it to be. This environment is built by the antagonists of the game. It was quite important to give the player the idea of how the antagonists see the world even before the player will meet them face to face - and build anticipation for the first meeting. The idea was to have a lot of straight lines with a dark, rusty, and somewhat gilded environment with some chaotic machines and weird petrified creatures here and there. The biggest challenge was making the biome somehow alive in a believable and immersive way. The level design included much faster gameplay than the Wilderwood biome - this helped us realize that all the different machines in this biome should just be constantly moving to give a hectic feeling for the player. We believe the Power Sector did come alive rather nicely with all the moving machines in the environment. Also, the lighting of this biome is quite heavily based on the slowly moving fog all over the place to give it a more ominous feel.



Please wishlist DOOMBLADE on Steam and give this blog a thumbs up if you liked it, and if you have any questions you would like to see answered in later blogs leave us a comment below.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/922050/DOOMBLADE/

[h3]Stay tuned for next week, where we will dive further into getting to know more about us, the developers!
[/h3]



DOOMBLADE Iceberg Interactive

DOOMBLADE PAX Demo Live — now with controller compatibility!

Greetings Gloomlings,

Today is the first day of our showcase of DOOMBLADE at PAX East, and with that we are very pleased to announce that you can now play the demo with added controller support!

Try it today and let us know what you think. 😉

While you are at it, our board is still up on Speedrun.com, can you be even faster with a controller? Beat our highest scores and upload your run today. Have Gloomgirl running around the map at speeds never seen before!

Come see us at PAX booth #13109 and enjoy the new update. We have a lot more exciting news coming soon for DOOMBLADE, so stay tuned!



[h3]Click here to sign up now:
[/h3]https://www.speedrun.com/auth/signup

[h3] For access to the Doomblade leadership board:
[/h3]https://www.speedrun.com/doomblade?h=Demo_Any&x=z27999od



DOOMBLADE Iceberg Interactive