Doomblade cover
Doomblade screenshot
Genre: Platform, Adventure, Indie

Doomblade

DOOMBLADE — OUT NOW!

UNLEASH DOOMBLADE



Greetings Gloomlings,



The big day has finally arrived.

Join Gloom Girl and free the long-imprisoned DOOMBLADE, a relentless weapon yearning for revenge. Dive into a vengeful quest and unlock extraordinary powers to annihilate the Dread Lords in this atmospheric 2D Fly&Slash Action Metroidvania.


Innovative Movement Mechanics

With the power of DOOMBLADE at your disposal, you can soar through the air with unmatched agility, launching lightning-fast assaults on enemies with precision. Master the art of aerial combat as you target foes directly, unleashing the full wrath of DOOMBLADE to vanquish them with ease. Seek hidden demonic shrines to regain strength, wield the fearsome arsenal of skills such as Doom Drop, Wicked Wind, or the Nightmare Onion, and instill paralyzing fear in your enemies.


Jaw-dropping Art Style and Mesmorizing Melodies


DOOMBLADE boasts a beautiful and unique art style that will leave you breathless. Each area has been meticulously crafted, bringing the dark and atmospheric world to life with stunning visual details. From the hauntingly beautiful landscapes to the menacing creatures that lurk in the shadows, the world of DOOMBLADE will draw you in and leave you wishing for more.

Accompanying the striking visuals are mesmerizing melodies that enhance the gameplay and atmosphere. The game's soundtrack features haunting and unforgettable tunes, epic orchestrations that perfectly capture the intensity and emotion of each environment.


Diverse and Engaging Game World

Traverse interconnected realms, from the forsaken halls of Gloomhaunt to the treacherous New Wilderwood forest. Each environment will have a different feel and play style than the last, always keeping gameplay fresh and players on their toes. During your exploration, battle monstrous creatures while relentlessly pursuing the Dread Lords who imprisoned DOOMBLADE.

Gloom Girl needs you Gloomlings, join her and DOOMBLADE in their quest for vengeance today.



The game is available in English, German, Russian, Simplified Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch!

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

You can pick up DOOMBLADE for $14.99 / € 14.79 / £ 12.79 NOW!





DOOMBLADE

Iceberg Interactive

Bringing DOOMBLADE to the Steam Deck!

Our Goal: DOOMBLADE Steam Deck Verified!

The Path to getting there...



We’re huge fans of the Steam Deck and because of that we wanted to make sure that DOOMBLADE was playable for all our fellow fans from the get-go. Hence our announcement: Our Fly & Slash Metroidvania DOOMBLADE is striving for Steam Deck Verification as close as possible to its release on May 31st!

We're thrilled to announce that after creating the controller support and internally testing DOOMBLADE on the Steam Deck it has been performing exceptionally well, delivering a seamless and immersive gaming experience. 🎮

We are doing everything we can to make sure you will be able to soar through the skies and unleash your slashing skills out of the box and with ease. ⚔️

So for the more technically interested people around us that want a peek behind the curtains, we would love to take you on the journey of how we work hard to get verified a.s.a.p.!


Deck Compatibility Checklist


Challenge 1: Controller support is mandatory!

As you might be aware, we’ve worked very hard to capture the same unique feeling when playing DOOMBLADE on either a keyboard or with a controller. This did cause us to get creative with the button layout due to the unique movement system, but we truly believe that if you give our layout a chance, you’ll end up loving it! Hence the reason why we’ve created a controller layout for you to use, to play the game as the developers intended.

Default controller configuration is in use (Generic Gamepad). This allows all the actions of the game to be used via controller and sets controller as the default way of playing on Steam Deck.

For in-game visuality of buttons we are using generic glyphs in our tutorials. Some of them have no text in them so they are very neutral and could represent many different standard controllers. Others have Xbox controller button names.

As a cool little addition, the game is playable using the Steam Deck gamepad controls AND touch screen simultaneously because the game seamlessly swaps between gamepad and mouse controls!

Challenge 2: Screen resolution & readability

Screen resolution was a bigger challenge for us as we’ve designed the game specifically for a 16:9 aspect ratio. As a result, the native 1280x800 resolution was not an option for us. In the end we default to 1280x720 on Steam Deck. This gives us some letterboxing, but we believe this to be the favorable option over stretching the game itself.

Readability always takes some QA work since readability differs for each language font. Interface text must be easily readable at a distance of 12 inches/30 cm from the screen. Meaning, the smallest on-screen font character should never fall below 9 pixels in height. But, after some tinkering with various language packs there should be no places where the text is too small.



Challenge 3: Playability & convenience

Of course the game must ship with a default configuration on Deck that results in a playable framerate. For this purpose we tried out various settings, leading us to take the following actions: By default on Steam Deck, VSync is off. Additionally, Player Trail Quality is set to low. Both give us a few more FPS. For the majority of our testing, which covers most of the game, we got around 35-50 FPS, which in our testing was a nice playing experience. Then for convenience we realized people might want to bring their game anywhere anytime. Even if they played parts on their PC, and wish to continue on Steam Deck. For this purpose we’re happy to report that offline mode works well, and that swapping between your PC and Steam Deck will be conveniently done via cloud saves!

Challenge 4: Proton

Most people that have tinkered around with their Steam Deck will be familiar with proton by now, a set of tools that will automatically take your current Windows executable and game data and run them on Steam Deck's Linux-based OS. When testing the game on Steam Deck you have to be careful to check if running the game through proton does not cause issues, and we believe that we achieved this. We did run into some video processing issues which we’ll dive into later – but we believe this to be unrelated to proton.

Challenge 5: So what about those nifty Steam Deck features?

No text input, no Gyro, no Trackpad modifications. A lot of the games for Steam Deck require some form of these elements, resulting in various API’s having to be implemented to allow for these Steam Deck functions to work. However, none of these features will be required to play DOOMBLADE. Since we implemented native controller support all adjustments/movements in game will be able to be done directly with controller inputs. Of course Gyro would be very cool to have, but is unfortunately not relevant for DOOMBLADE as we don’t have mouse or gamepad camera movement.



Challenge 6: Vulkan

Valve recommends targeting Vulkan as the primary graphics API for best performance and battery life, a term you might be familiar with since Vulkan shaders are often being downloaded on your Steam Deck.

To make sure the game was optimized best for Steam Deck, we tested a separate depot for a Steam Deck build using Vulkan. The performance of the game was largely unaffected and a separate depot would lead to a lot of work and maintenance (thus making the game more prone to errors). In our testing we could additionally safely conclude that performance with DirectX is pretty much the same. On the other hand, using Vulkan in Windows would cause major performance loss, so based on those two elements we have opted to not use it as the Graphics API in our main depot.

Challenge 7: Final Adjustments

As mentioned before, we ran into a video issue, which we believe to be related due to video/audio codecs.

There is one video used in our game which is used in the background when receiving a new power-up. To avoid the issue that we encounter, we have decided to simply not use the video for Steam Deck. Getting it to work proved to be too laborious: We would have to use a different video codec, which is not supported in the Windows build, meaning we would need an independent Linux build for this. As the project has plugins that don’t support Linux, this would be a huge workload we can't afford at this point. Hence why we realized that simply replacing the video with a slightly simpler visualization on Steam Deck was the easiest solution for all, especially as noticing the difference requires a very keen eye. Of course we only adopted this solution since in our opinion both visualizations work very well, otherwise we would’ve dug further.

The End?

So as you can see, we’ve put our best foot forward to get this working nicely out of the box, and we hope to greet you soon with the highly coveted verified badge. In the meantime, if you have questions, let us know!

And stay tuned for more updates as we continue our quest for Steam Deck verification!🔥





DOOMBLADE

Iceberg Interactive

Blog Post #5: The Music

Omnipotent Music Wizard



Introduction

When it comes to music in DOOMBLADE, the most important thing we wanted was to bring the music to the foreground. We didn’t want the music to just be a supportive element in the back, instead we wanted to have the music take the player’s hand and lead them on an adventure. And for this, we found the perfect man for the job: veteran music producer and composer Brian Skeel.


Brian's Style

Brian has been making sounds and music for DOOMBLADE from very early stages of development. We are quite thankful that he has been able to be a part of this journey for such a long time. While Brian is a total omnipotent music wizard in our eyes, he is particularly skilled in creating heavy sounds of rock and metal. This isn’t to say that the game’s soundtrack is a constant mosh fest, but when the gameplay gets heavy, so does the music.


Across Oceans

It’s pretty amazing that technology is at a point that allows the kind of remote collaboration we have with Brian. As we are based in Finland and Brian in the US, we have never physically met (hoping that will happen one day though!). But this hasn’t stopped us from efficiently working together. Of course it would have been more convenient at some point for us to physically hop on to Brian’s computer whenever there was a problem with version control or something, but these kinds of issues are pretty easy to take on via video call as well.

We used FMOD as our sound engine and it was a great tool for connecting the work Brian was doing to the game itself. Brian is much more well versed with FMOD than us, so we’ve hardly had to touch anything in the FMOD editor ourselves. Within the editor, Brian was able to set up logic for the music he created. Our different biomes for instance each have an adventure music loop from which we can seamlessly transition into the biome’s fight music loop once the logic is done in FMOD. All we have to do on our end of the actual game logic is to ask FMOD to kindly start the transition once needed. Easy as pie!


The Soundtrack

Now that all the music is done, we couldn’t be happier with the game's soundtrack. There are so many wonderful songs it’s hard to pick favorites. There’s a certain track that always hits us right in the feels, but we can’t really name names here because it might spoil things. But you’ll know what we’re talking about once you get to the track in the game. The Power Sector biome’s adventure music is another great one. It really has the mood we were looking for: it perfectly invites the player to explore the biome deeper and deeper while at the same time keeping up tension and danger. And the soundscape of the track is perfect for the biome as well so that the gameplay, visuals, and music all combine in a beautiful harmony.

We’ve been rocking to the soundtrack for far too long just amongst ourselves. We are STOKED to be so close to releasing the game and the soundtrack along with it!

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/

And if you are interested in Doomblade's soundtrack, check out the page for it here🎵:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2380260/DOOMBLADE_Soundtrack/

Stay tuned for next week for the surprise final blog before release! 😉





DOOMBLADE

Iceberg Interactive

DOOMBLADE - Coming May 31st!

Attention Gloomlings!



We are thrilled to announce that DOOMBLADE, our highly anticipated atmospheric Fly & Slash Metroidvania, will be released on Steam on May 31st!

DOOMBLADE is a game like no other, combining the thrilling action of Metroidvania with a sleek and innovative movement system.


Journey through a mysterious world teeming with danger and intrigue, as you wield DOOMBLADE to guide and protect you. As you progress through the game, you'll uncover new abilities and weapons, unlocking new areas to explore and uncovering the secrets of the game's world. The gameplay is challenging but rewarding, with a variety of enemies and bosses to face off against.

DOOMBLADE features stunning graphics and an immersive soundtrack that will draw you into the game's world. The art style is distinctive and breathtaking, creating a truly memorable and visually stunning experience.

We can't wait for you to experience the game for yourselves on May 31st.

Add DOOMBLADE to your wishlist now and follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes peeks. We still have a lot to share with you before release!

Thank you for your all of your support and get ready to dive into the exciting world of DOOMBLADE! ❤️⚔️





DOOMBLADE

Iceberg Interactive


Blog Post #4: Why a Metroidvania?

We Made a Metroidvania



Introduction


DOOMBLADE is a Metroidvania. This is realized via a large interconnected game world which keeps opening more and more as the player finds new power-ups that allow them to access new areas. But why make a Metroidvania in the first place?


Kim's Experience

I, Kim the Coder, was first introduced to Metroidvanias in an ancient time in which the term was still to be coined. In elementary school I got to experience the most influential Metroidvania ever made: the 8-bit Nintendo Metroid. The game really stuck with me. All the secrets to be found and the atmosphere of the unknown. Something about this combination was absolutely magical.

Naturally, I kept playing Metroidvanias throughout the years with Metroid Dread being the latest of the bunch. My favorites in the old classics are probably Super Metroid and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Of the modern ones, I love Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Yoku's Island Express. This is a genre I just can’t get enough of.



The Team Coming Together

Fortunately, Juha the Artist also loves Metroidvanias and it wasn’t hard for him to convince me to start making our own entry to the genre. We knew that we wanted to do something new related to movement and combat in platformers, so we figured Metroidvania was a great fit for us. A lot of the games of the genre we love have abilities like double jumping that give the player more range in movement as well as more and more powerful attacks that make you feel like nothing can stop you in combat. We felt right at home.

One of the things I love about Ori and the Blind Forest is that it has a bit more focus on the movement part when it comes to power-ups compared to other Metroidvanias. This means that the backtracking you have to constantly do in the genre becomes less tedious and way more fun. With the ideas we had, we knew that we could take a movement-focused approach much further while integrating the movement power-ups fluidly with combat.



Gameplay

We knew we wanted to make the gameplay unique pretty much from the get-go. This is why already in the very first fight the core gameplay mechanic that is introduced has you fighting in a completely new way. Enemies aren’t there just to try to kill you, they are also there for your convenience. They help you move around by being targets for your flight-attacks.

Combining movement and attacking with our mechanics has made backtracking in DOOMBLADE really fluid and fun. Another thing I really like is how we managed to integrate fast traveling into the game in a very organic way simply by using attacking as a way of traversing long distances fast. And we had so much fun designing the game’s bosses since we could do so many new things with them.

So, little did I know when playing the very first Metroid on the 8-bit Nintendo that I was one day going to make a game of the same genre. Or that it would even become a genre in the first place! And while it would be magical to backtrack to those days of childlike wonder, I think the magic of making a Metroidvania myself more than makes up for not being able to do so.

And oh, I almost forgot! There is another aspect in Metroidvanias that is super important to me and Juha. We want the music of the game to accomplish certain things. But that is a story for another blog post…😉

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/

Stay tuned for next week, where we will dive further into the music in the game and the producer behind it!





DOOMBLADE

Iceberg Interactive

Blog Post #3: The Origins Story

The World of DOOMBLADE



Introduction

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.

Origins of the Blade

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.

Origins of the Lore

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/

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





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.



For this post, you will be meeting Juha the Artist!



JUHA:

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.

Please wishlist DOOMBLADE on Steam and give this blog a thumps 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!



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

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





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.

KIM:


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!

Please wishlist DOOMBLADE on Steam and give this blog a thumps 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.



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

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!





DOOMBLADE

Iceberg Interactive

Blog Post #1: Biomes

Trees and Machines



Introduction

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.

New Wilderwood


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.



Power Sector

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.



Aesthetic Style

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 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/

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





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!



Click here to sign up now:

https://www.speedrun.com/auth/signup

For access to the Doomblade leadership board:

https://www.speedrun.com/doomblade?h=Demo_Any&x=z27999od



DOOMBLADE

Iceberg Interactive