Dr. Kness graced us with another nugget of wisdom.
Today’s topic will be Improvements, which are upgrades or extra utility items that you can enhance your tower and its inhabitants to increase odds of successfully making it through the mission.
If you’ve missed the previous post - take a look here.
First of all, you’ll need a Carpenter’s Shop to get Improvements cards. After that you can assign a dwarf to work there and you will be able to draw a random card from your deck from the pool of Improvements.
In no particular order, here’s the list of all improvements available right now:
Barricade - cheap (and rather prone to breaking down) way to stop goblins.
Torch - illuminates the room during the night and allows you and the dwarves to operate it 24/7.
Doors - prevent the fire, water and goblins spread around the tower, but takes a while to construct.
Dome - protects the tower against flying opponents, lightning and rain, it also adds style to your tower!
Battlements - Undestroyable, invulnerable, you name it. Works similar to dome with only difference - flying enemies can land on top.
Sword - can be handed over to a nearby dwarf, so he can protect the tower, mage’s hands are too delicate for this.
Armor - fortifies the block so it takes longer to burn or it can withstand more damage before breaking apart.
Now we’ll check the use cases for each block.
Barricade - Builds really fast (compared to doors, which take ages) but it won’t slow down goblins for long, yet it still provides enough time to come up with a solution to the goblin problem at hand.
Torch - without it you are limited by daytime to get new cards and make dwarves work in workshops and other buildings. When you place it - it will also provide light for neighboring rooms. Take it into consideration when planning your tower - it might be handy to place them in more strategic places.
Doors - they are not exactly invulnerable, rather just sturdy good doors which can take a lot of punishment, be it work hazard or goblin misdeed. Which, in turn, gives you more than ample time to respond to a developing situation.
Dome - basically a medieval lightning rod with extra functions (like keeping flying enemies from landing) and style. Still can be burned down by a sneaky goblin lighting fire underneath.
Battlements - can’t prevent enemy landing on top of it, but it excels in other things. Like being invulnerable to any damage (even the almighty TNT!). Like with dome, it may be used to cover an open-top room in your tower, so no rain will flood the underground parts of the building.
Sword - Dwarves probably wished it was an axe, but they have no choice in this matter. It gets the job (making short work of goblins) done, that’s all that matters to the wizard.
Armor - Might be a good idea to place it on a foundation block of your tower if it is especially tall, otherwise any incident (like losing your stick of TNT to a goblin raider) can nullify all the hard work you’ve put into your creation.
That is it for now, see you in the next post, when we’ll talk about spells!
You can try it all for yourself in our demo! We’d also be very happy to see you on our other social media or if you consider adding us to your wishlist.
Hoping to see you next time and thanks to you for joining us on this magical journey!
Dwarven Skykeep | Tips & Tricks #4
Greetings and salutations, magicians!
Dr. Sevendar Kness is back yet again! Now with a more detailed overview of tools, which we partly covered in a previous post, when talking about workshops & carpentry. If you have missed that one, you can catch up here.
Quick reminder of all tools that can be gained from the workshop:
Repair allows dwarf to fix a room that was broken (be it unintentional fire or else).
Firefight allows dwarf to extinguish fire (it was probably a sneaky goblin who lit it).
With a crowbar you can dismantle one of the walls of any room. Most useful when you want to attach another room that can't yet fit to existing construction.
Pump is used to drain a room flooded with water, can be handy when digging underground on a particularly rainy day.
Dynamite works by completely destroying a whole room you've selected.
Now we will cover each of the tools separately with a handy demonstration.
Repair: Especially useful to save something like crystal when it was broken, so your mana supply won’t dry up.
Firefight: Goblins are not the only source of fire hazard during the building process, lightning can also strike at the tower setting the room that was hit ablaze.
Crowbar: Sometimes you just ran out of building space and you need to connect that one extra room to place something like a second workshop there. That’s when the crowbar comes in. Just break one wall of a room and place another room next to it.
Pump: There are several ways to get rid of the water. But not every time you can dig another room underneath or cast spells (maybe your mana ran out?), the good-old pump will come in handy right then and there.
Dynamite: Dynamite speaks for itself, when you need to speedily remove certain room - nothing can be quicker. Just don’t let that pesky goblin steal a dynamite stick! He will be able to lay waste to the whole tower.
So, as you can see, everything has a certain type of situation or scenario when it is needed.
That’ll we all for today, keep an eye out for the next scroll of knowledge!
We have a demo readily available for your enjoyment. We would be most happy to see you on our other social media or if you consider adding us to your wishlist.
See you next time and thanks to you for joining us on this engineering journey!
Dwarven Skykeep | Tips & Tricks #3
Greetings, fellow magicians!
We are back once again with a new scroll of knowledge from Dr. Sevendar Kness himself!
Albeit a shorter one, it covers in detail two of the buildings you can construct in your tower’s rooms - workshop and carpentry.
Before we continue to the main topic of this post, we’d like to say that we have a demo readily available for everyone to enjoy. We would also be most happy to see if you on our other social media or if you consider adding us to wishlist.
Now, back to the subject: out of the two, a workshop is more essential than a carpenter's shop to building your tower. You will more often find yourself needed a tool to solve a certain issue, but upgrades from carpenter's shop can prove valuable to operating your tower.
Here are their in-game descriptions:
If you assign dwarves to the workshop you will be given the choice of drafting one of the cards from the tools section of your deck.
They will spend time (depends on the card you want to draft) after that you can come to the workshop and take the card for later use.
Here’s list of all tools that can be gained:
Repair allows dwarf to fix a room that was broken (be it unintentional fire or else).
Firefight allows dwarf to extinguish fire (it was probably a sneaky goblin who lit it).
With crowbar you can dismantle one of the walls of any room. Most useful when you want to attach another room that can't yet fit to existing construction.
Pump is used to drain room flooded with water, can be handy when digging underground on a partictulary rainy day.
Dynamite works in a similar way to crowbar, but insted of dismantling a single wall of your choice it will simply make holes on all sides of the selected room. Be careful - goblins can steal it from you!
Each tool has its use, as you can see, and you will encounter situations when every last one of them is needed.
When you assign dwars here they will produce you a card that you can select (same process as workshop).
Here’s list of all upgrades that can be gained:
Barrcade is a cheap and not exactly durable way to stop goblins.
Torch is quite valuable, as it gets dark in the night. It lits up the room and allows dwarves to operate it 24/7.
Doors take long to set up, but they are more than worth it. They prevent fire spreading, floods and prevents goblin from accessing more of your tower.
Dome prevents lightning strikes, protects from flying opponets as well as rain.
Battlements are indestructible, works similar to dome but enemies can land on top of it.
You can arm dwarves with swords and command them to protect the tower from goblins.
Armor fortifies the block so it can last longer if it starts burning, for example.
That's all for today! Thank you once again for exploring Dwarven Skykeep with us! We'll be back next week with another scroll of valuable info on how to build your tower.
Dwarven Skykeep | Tips & Tricks #2
Welcome to Tips & Tricks #2, Wizards!
We are pleased to be back with another piece of useful information that might be useful upon your journey.
Before we continue the excourse in room types, we’d like to say that we have a demo readily available for everyone to enjoy. We would also be most happy to see if you add us to wishlist.
After the building blocks, which are basic elements to any tower, rooms are the second most important thing among card types. They are sections which allow you to draft cards from respective categories of your deck, let me show you an example:
is drawn from , because Firefight is a tool and tools are drawn from Workshops.
You can have multiple instances of the same room-type in your tower; it just gives you an option on how to tune internal structure to your liking.
You can only build rooms in building blocks that were completed. Also it is possible to place any room in any building block, there are no prerequisites for placing rooms.
And here is the list of all the room types: In no particular order:
Workshop allows you to order dwarves to craft different tools from your deck
Brewery - because there is no a single resource more important to dwarves other than beer :)
Warehouse the only purpose if you want to redraw card in hope a better card
Library provides you with access to utility spells but requires mana cards to operate
Crystal has one job - generate mana for you to collect.
Carpenters’ Shop - basically a Workshop, but Room upgrades instead of Tools.
Magic Vortex - for any mage it is bread & butter, and, unfortunately, we aren’t talking about food, we are talking about combat spells which you can draft from it.
We will cover each room separately and all corresponding cards in later episodes That will be it for today! Thank you for exploring Dwarven Skykeep with us!
Fellow magicians, you are more then welcome to join us on our other platforms and have a friendly discussion - check out our socials!
Dwarven Skykeep | Tips & Tricks #1
Greetings and salutations to all of you!
Welcome to the first post in the series which will get you acquainted with the world of Dwarven Skykeep and get you up to speed in managing your own successful tower-building operation.
Before we continue, we’d like to say that we have a demo readily available for everyone to enjoy. We would also be most happy to see if you add us to wishlist:
In the first post we’d like to start with the very basics of any tower - building blocks.When you get a card allowing you to build said block it determines whether your tower will grow up or down, left or right.
In essence - each of the building blocks can have up to four empty sides, which allows them to be connected (empty side to empty side)
Seems rather simple, doesn't it? You should be mindful of leaving empty sides of a block uncovered when placing it.
You would consider flooding of your tower the least of your worries when you have an uncovered entrance to said tower and goblin rushes in to burn the result of your labour.
Dwarves are most definitely not happy about their beer brewing being flooded and accessible anymore.
When placing blocks you can also funnel goblins to one of the sides of the tower by placing blocks with no opening on either side of the base block.
It can help you set up a proper defense on one of the sides while being sure that no sneaky goblin can attack you from behind.
We’d be thrilled to see you on our other platforms and have a chat - check out our socia media here!
That will be all for today, fellow wizards, we’ll see you in the next post. Stay tuned!
Dwarven Skykeep | Making of
One of the first concepts for the Dwarven Skykeep storyline, some explosions...
We first had the idea of making a non-traditional tower defense with magic and dwarves in 2019 and it was the first game we all created together. It started only with 4 of us but today there are already 13 people in our team
It would seem like Mages and Dwarves have nothing in common. Mages are arrogant and despise mere mortals, while Dwarves love to dig and have little to do with magic.
The Mage himself and his loyal Dwarf - ready to protect the Tower... or drink some beer.
But as it turned out, Mages endlessly wage their magical wars, and, as you know, fireballs are flying around and can strike the Tower and collapse it! The Mage himself can’t run around with a bucket or roll up his sleeves and grab a hammer. While the Dwarves are ideal for this - executive hard workers, unpretentious and tough. Of course, the Dwarves won’t work for free. How can you pay a Dwarf? That's right - beer.
The Tavern - the most visited and loved place in the city. Stories and adventures, as well as a pint of beer, await fellow travelers.
But hold on for a second, why do we have to build a tower at all? Well, we have this answer too: magical crystals work better in the air! But then our game designers had to create features on how to protect the tower, the roof, the lower levels, and, of course, mechanics to flood it all or burn this Tower down.
After all, we even created a Levitron that can help our tower levitate, well, until it explodes...
Following the story behind the Dwarven Skykeep, you will meet 4 lords of the kingdom.
It took us quite a while to generate a wholesome storyline, characters, bosses, and elements of different worlds in the Dwarven Skykeep universe and launch the first public demo. The most important thing for us is to create a unique experience within a developing story yet add a bit of survival and fun explosions to it :)
The main city - this is where it all starts. You are going to learn some secrets of the kingdom and get some quests!
However, this world is not perfect. The game is a real-time turn-based strategy and every night enemies will attempt to destroy what you’ve been working through the whole day. Can you survive Goblins-kamikazes attack, gargoyles, evil mages, giant spiders, and everything our game designers imagined?!
When you eventually make it to the last level of every world through trial and error, you will have to face the boss and defeat him. The bosses’ discussions were so much fun! Each type of enemy and boss is vulnerable to certain spells or physical force, but you’ll learn about it ;)
The concepts of two bosses. They seem nice but don’t let them trick you!
So this Wolf is also the boss and he is clearly mad at you. I don’t know what you're gonna do!
New times
In 2021 Ravenage welcomed us to the game family and we are now very close to releasing the game! Thanks to our community support, the Ravenage team, and new team members (pixel artists and testers) we were able to progress so much and will share our journey and news soon!
Stay tuned!
The Mage is not quite excited about technology but his Raven is trying to keep up with all requests and media. Follow us here.
P.S Yes, you can play the demo and throw some fireballs NOW. P.P.S. Remember to add the game to your wishlist otherwise, the Mage is going to get you!
Ready to help the Mage build a tower and complete level challenges before the Goblins and Gargoyles crush?
Loyal Dwaves build, repair, drink beer and protect the Tower. The Mage creates spells and spends hours in the library.
Night is coming and so are enemies! Can you protect the tower and the Mage?
Play Dwarven Skykeep Demo now and share your experience!
Dwarven Skykeep Updates
Hi, guys!
Thank you all for wishlisting Dwarven Skykeep! Mage is super happy and sends his deepest respect.
Few things happened in our indie dev family:
We took part in the WN conference in Russia and tried our new pitch with some publishers.
We created new designs for our branded T-shirts, yay!
We are having some brainstorming sessions to create more worlds and levels (now we have 3 main worlds: Goblins' World, Shadow World, Sky World)
Of course, we were playing with fireballs and Goblins!
But we also finally finished the Paladin Jerkins's armor and house (he was very annoying, tho).
And I'm sure you all will be happy to hear that very soon we're releasing a Public Demo! ːsteamhappyː
Dwarven Skykeep STREAM
This time we will show our gameplay: how you can build the deck and the tower, what kind of worlds we created, and you will definitely notice the personality of our Mage and feel the main city vibes.
Are you ready? We will be releasing the game somewhere around Q3 2021 and this is probably the only stream we will be doing before the release date!
Stream is on 3rd July, at 18 UTC (Saturday).
Let me quickly remind you that Dwarven Skykeep is a building strategy RPG with: - multiple pixel art replayable levels - main plot with different characters and interesting story - tower building - deck building - beautiful pixel art - irony, magic, and beer - lazy Dwarves
You're building a magical tower facing various adversities. Goblins will burn your books or break your rooms while rain will flood your cellar. Tune your deck to cast spells, improve your tower, lead friendly Dwarves, and smartly solve all the hitches in this building strategy RPG.
Stream in Russian
We will be streaming in Russian. A stream in English will follow soon. Follow our development on our page by wishlisting us:
Barricade - cheap (and rather prone to breaking down) way to stop goblins.
Torch - illuminates the room during the night and allows you and the dwarves to operate it 24/7.
Doors - prevent the fire, water and goblins spread around the tower, but takes a while to construct.
Dome - protects the tower against flying opponents, lightning and rain, it also adds style to your tower!
Battlements - Undestroyable, invulnerable, you name it. Works similar to dome with only difference - flying enemies can land on top.
Sword - can be handed over to a nearby dwarf, so he can protect the tower, mage’s hands are too delicate for this.
Armor - fortifies the block so it takes longer to burn or it can withstand more damage before breaking apart.
is more essential than a carpenter's shop 
to building your tower. You will more often find yourself needed a tool to solve a certain issue, but upgrades from carpenter's shop can prove valuable to operating your tower.
Repair allows dwarf to fix a room that was broken (be it unintentional fire or else).
Firefight allows dwarf to extinguish fire (it was probably a sneaky goblin who lit it).
With crowbar you can dismantle one of the walls of any room. Most useful when you want to attach another room that can't yet fit to existing construction.
Pump is used to drain room flooded with water, can be handy when digging underground on a partictulary rainy day.
is drawn from 
, because 
