Druidstone - Interview @PC Gamer

[Silver]

PC Gamer talked to the developers of Druidstone about moving on from Legend of Grimrock and the new game's inspirations.

The Legend of Druidstone

For Druidstone to be born, The Legend of Gimrock had to die. Or at least be shelved for the time being.

"Grimrock 1 and 2 took over four years to make, and we poured our hearts and souls into those games," says Juho Salila, art director for Druidstone and the Grimrock series. "It would be a massive task to make Grimrock 3 and improve the game as Grimrock 2 improved Grimrock 1. We needed a break from that world." The team at Almost Human began to break up, with many developers moving on to other projects.

"At some point Petri [Hakkinen, designer and programmer on Druidstone and the Grimrock series] and I started talking about prototyping games just for fun," says Salila. "After doing several prototypes it got more serious and we started a new company [Ctrl Alt Ninja] to make Druidstone. We didn't feel the pressure of doing another Grimrock game with the new company."

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Thanks henriquejr!

More information.

 

[Gwendo]

A pity they made this game more like a puzzle than a tactical combat one. That constant spawning of enemies out of nowhere and those spawners, just ruin the game for me. Feeeling I have to rush and always make the right moves, isn't entertaining for me.

 

[forgottenlor]

During Druidstone’s early stages the gameplay evolved substantially. The biggest change: Every level was once procedurally generated. "We really wanted to make the game work with procedurally generated levels," says Häkkinen."I guess we fell into the old ‘Hey, let’s make a level generator and we don’t need to do any level design’ trap. But it didn’t mesh with the compact game design. At one point we made a single level in a few hours and it was more fun than any of the generated levels."

This confirms exactly my feeling about proceduraly generated levels.