Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure, Indie
Crimson Keep
Achievements and Unlockables
Hey everyone, today I wanted to speak a little bit about our achievement system. I think achievements are tragically mishandled in a lot of games. I would say eighty percent of games, probably more, don’t offer in game rewards for completing them. And why shouldn’t they? If you remember back to the Rare Shooters on the Nintendo 64 (Goldeneye and Perfect Dark) you might remember the awesome, pre “achievement” system in which the player had to complete special challenges in each stage.
The different difficulty modes for each stage naturally affected the damage enemies did and things like ammo and health for the player, but more interestingly they added additional objectives. By beating each stage in these games on different difficulties you essentially unlocked achievements, but these achievements provided the player with something: cheats/modes, and eventually a fourth difficulty mode that turns the game into a sandbox of sorts. Players have the opportunity to go back and use cheats which sometimes drastically change and unbalance the game, but can be a lot of fun to play around with.
Many games have done unlockables like this, but a lot of the time they’re just cosmetic, or are after the game proper ends (new game plus). Those Rare shooters, and more recent unlockable obsessed games like The Binding of Isaac, constantly reward the player for playing well, and just playing at all. Almost(?) every achievement in The Binding of Isaac adds a new item or character to the game’s massive pool content, changing the entire game (sometimes in a small way, other times in a big way) after each achievement.
It’s our goal to do something similar with Crimson Keep. Classes, class abilities, areas, and items, can all be locked by achievements in our game. Ideally (by the time the game is complete) each achievement will unlock a little piece of content in our game, and keep you coming back for more!
Thanks for reading!
-Ian
Features and Inspirations pt. 1
Crimson Keep
is a game that emerged out of large number of influences, and I think an interesting way to look at those is by feature. So let’s take a look at the features in Crimson Keep, and where they came from.
Random Level Generation
- This obviously comes from roguelikes, roguelites, and other games inspired by them. The first I played was Diablo; engrossing and awesome. The fact that the dungeons, monsters, quests, and loot were random every time not only added to re-playability, but made the game feel scarier, feel harder. You don’t know what exactly is around that corner even after the 100th time, and that’s very cool.
First Person Perspective
- I think the first game I ever saw played, was Hexen; a hyper-violent, first person slasher, thanks dad. Hexen made it clear it’s super fun to pick up a weapon, dodge projectiles, run in and slash monsters apart with an axe, and revel in the gory glory of it all. Hexen was also a bit of a lesson in what not to do. Hexen 2 is notorious for terrible backtracking and vague key hunts. This padded the content of the game, but in a bad way.
RPG Progression
- One of the lures of our game is our attempt to combine the traditional RPG progression of levels, stats, and abilities with core gameplay that requires skill. Strafing, dodging, and headshots matter in Crimson Keep, but so does getting new equipment, skilling up with a weapon type, and choosing abilities and specializations. The RPG/stat side of most of this comes with my experience with MMO’s like Everquest. I’ve never played another game where getting an item, or skilling up with a weapon type can feel as meaningful and rewarding as Everquest.
I’ll talk some more about the other features of the game and their inspiration in a future update. Thanks for reading!
Introducing the Team
"Hey everyone, I’m Ian Atherton. I’m the artist and lead designer on Crimson Keep. If you haven’t heard of our game before (that’s pretty likely) I’ll sum it up for you. It’s a first person action RPG with randomly generated areas and permanent death. You could call it a roguelike, or a roguelite, and in fact a lot of the design elements of the game have come out of classic roguelikes like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. I’ll go into more depth with what inspired the game in a future post. For now, let’s get to know the team.
Ben Rog-Wilhelm is the programmer, but he also helps with design, and other decisions for the game. He has had a storied career of working on some pretty cool games. He worked at Snowblind Studios on Champions Of Norrath, an Everquest themed ARPG for the PS2. Later he worked at Trion, on Rift and Atlas Reactor. Since about a year ago he’s worked with Ludeon Studios on the awesome Rimworld, and of course, for the last two years he’s been the backbone of Crimson Keep.
Starting in 2014 or so I’ve been working with a musician named Matt Oglesby, he started helping me on a horror game that didn’t really go anywhere, aided me in various game jams, and eventually got on board to do the music and some sound design for Crimson Keep! He’s been great to work with, and has recently gone full-time music composer/producer, so look forward to seeing more great work from him, both in our game and others.
And well, as I mentioned at the start of this post, I’m Ian. I’ve been doing mostly 3d artwork in the indie game scene since 2012, the first game that had my art on steam was Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox, so shoutout to those guys! Since then I’ve done art and design on games like Fjall (a puzzle platformer) and Shoppe Keep (a merchant sim). In 2015 we started work on Crimson Keep, and we’re excited to let it loose upon the questing masses."
