Why humans are important!

Hello, hope you are having a great Wednesday :)

Humans in a sci-fi-fantasy universe like FORCED SHOWDOWN, adds a very important element. Which is that they allow you to compare everything else with something you know. By including humans, you can suddenly relate to the size of all the other characters. Also when hitting a human you can "Easily" relate to the consequence of being thrown 15m across the arena by a scorching-demon-lazer-bolt-of-doom.

 

Human enemies, Banner bearer who buffs other humans, Militia melee fighters and nasty ranged crossbowmen. An evil little group that could meet you in the next arena?

Also FORCED "1" is on steam sale right now and it has indeed increased the number of players currently playing. So if you're LFG - now is a good time: 

Data from: http://steamcharts.com/app/249990

Cards in an action game!?

Cards is a big part of FORCED SHOWDOWN, and it adds a very interesting strategic layer to it. 

You might think, WTF - cards in an action game, have you been drinking glue for several weeks!?

Well the idea of cards came from the thought that in Rogue-likes everyone fancies a random surprise, but what then - when it's a highly competitive Rogue-like? 

Well, we definitely still want some randomness, but how about adding a bit of control to it? - by allowing the player to influence it a bit. So now when you head to battle you select a deck of your desired perks, abilities, spells etc. and thereby you enable quite a bit of strategy in your play. 

Example of one of the powerful high cost cards.

The way you use cards is simply by spending Mana to play them during a match. Mana is rewarded when surviving an arena - hence you get a good ton of interesting choices during a match.

Cheers! 

First!

Here at BetaDwarf we've started out on a new project. We call it "our next project" as we haven't found a suiting name yet. Also we would like to avoid problems with our previous title FORCED - where google searches would find extremely old and horrible screenshots.

We are actually showing it off at this years GDC 2014 during the next week. We are quite excited as we haven't announced it and we've only spend a few months on it. So we're anxious to see if people are as crazy about it as we are :)

When I'm going to explain it at GDC, I think I'll use phrases like "It's about Rogue-like tournaments" or "Imagine 100 players competing in the same 30 minute match". I always have problems pitching our concepts, it's not an easy task and it can easily get too technical. I'm usually very psyched about our game and all it's features and whoever is listening should of course be told about specifics because all the details are very important - at least I think so :)

Okay, so our next project is about awesome fights in the arena, great action mechanics, your skills and grand matches with hundreds of players. Basically you'll be able to buy and train Gladiators and take them to the great arenas. But due to the lore of our universe, dimensions are crossmatched into each which makes every adventure into the arena different. But don't worry about that, you should just worry about surviving, that's actually the only thing - survive the longest and you'll win the favor of the crowd!

Below is one of the evil challenges you'll meet in the arena. I currently refer to him as "Daza - Lord of Fire". I'm very satisfied with his few but interesting actions, such as making a firewall behind you - forcing you to move towards him. 

  

That was it for now, I just really wanted to have a DevBlog for our next project, and so this is the first post. I'm sure there'll be many more.

Cheers!

@Baboonlord