I put together a rough little WIP walk-around tonight. Nice to have something that moves for a change vs. nothing but screenshots. Enjoy.

Once again, Coldfire Keep is part of the Indie Gala bundle! A big thanks to the Indie Gala folks for including me – I really appreciate it

The bundle is active right now and available right here: www.indiegala.com

I was commenting recently on Legend Of Grimrock 2 and basically saying that – in my opinion – it’s kind of a huge disappointment. My problem with that game, if I had to boil it down into one sentence, is that “They should have stuck to just making a great dungeon crawler”. I absolutely LOVED the first game – in fact, I played through it 3 times. The sequel? I’m about 4 hours in and really don’t see myself returning to it. It’s trying to be too many things and it just leaves me feeling kind of lost. I mean, come on – you can walk around under water!

Anyway, it occurred to me today that I’m basically going down exactly the same path (hmm) with The Deep Paths. I got it into my head that after Coldfire Keep, I needed to add all these features like outside areas, and a town, and massively varied environments to explore, and the bottom line is – I can’t really live up to that scope if I ever want to finish the game, and even if I do, I’m definitely going to half-ass it and the game is going to suck. Taking my own advice, what I really need to do is just try my best to make A Great Dungeon Crawler.

So that’s my new mission statement. Not saying that anything in particular is OUT or IN at this stage; only that I’m going to just focus on the key dungeon crawling experience and see where I end up.

Oh! Except for the Cleric class; that’s definitely OUT! You’re now either a Fighter, Rogue, or Mage. Deal with it!

Big Disclaimer: Even on their worst days, the Almost Human guys are 10x more talented than me. Don’t take my negative comments as me trying to convince anyone (least of all myself) that I’m doing better work than them.

I don’t think I’ve ever come straight out and said this, but I’ve been working for quite some time with the plan in my head that The Deep Paths will be a series of games, with at least a second and third installment roughly outlined at this stage. More observant folks may have even noticed some early screenshots of the main menu with the title “The Deep Paths: Reclamation”.

In a way, this is the reason it’s taken so long for me to present any further screenshots or gameplay videos. I’ve spent pretty much all of my time so far building tools that will help me build the games, rather than building an actual game. Kind of like an “editor”, but not something that will be going public. I’m trying to automate as much as possible, spending a little additional time now, to save a lot of time later.

Before I started to talk about this more though, I wanted to post this to make sure that people realise this isn’t an “episode” type of thing. I’m not planning on taking a single game and just breaking it into pieces. This will be 3 (or more) completely independent games, set in the same “universe”, and roughly following the same series of events through the eyes of independent groups of people, with some cross-over here and there throughout the stories.

My hope, upon completion and release of the first game, will be to release a new installment approx. every 6 months after that, so that people don’t have to wait too long before continuing on their journey in this world. 6 months might turn out to be ambitious, but at this stage I think it’s going to be achievable.

I’m very excited to see this first game slowly taking shape. Sometimes the mountain of work in front of me gets a little overwhelming, but reminding myself that the end result is hopefully going to be a kick-ass dungeon crawler for you guys to play, definitely keeps me going.

…I’m mostly just continuing work on The Deep Paths. I’ve been doing a lot of coding, getting new systems up and running and redoing some of the old stuff to make sure it’s as future-proof as I can possibly make it (you know, for sequels and such!). I’m also talking to some artists, trying to sort out exactly who is going to be doing what, and figuring out the budget for everything. I’m hoping to share a lot more information, screenshots, and maybe even some videos for this game very soon.