Legend of Grimrock - Interview, Weekly Update

Are there any role-playing elements in Grimrock, or is it purely focused on the dungeon crawl and the tactical thinking?

Legend of Grimrock has lots of included role-playing elements like character generation, inventory management and character progression. At the start of the game player can create a party of four characters with Character Generator or simply select a pre-made party. With the Character Generator player can customize the name, race, class, skills and talents of each character. Characters gain experience by fighting enemies and those experience points are used to improve or learn new skills.

Characters can also learn talents to help survive the deadly dungeons. The player can equip the characters with various items from clothes to weapons to say magical bracelets to increase basic statistics. Player has also to take care of the characters by watching health, energy, mana and food levels. Basically the skills of your characters are more important than the players skills, that means you can't win the game with just quick "trigger finger".

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• Player movement has been adjusted: the screen now bobs when you move. Also if you carry too much stuff, the movement slows down.
• We added potions and a system for mixing your own drinks from herbs found in the dungeon.
• We added sacks and crates for all you pack rats out there!
• There’s one entirely new monster in the game and a ranged weapon variant of one of our older monsters (I suppose the word “old” works here on more than one level! (And the word “level” works here on more than one level!)).
• A new spell has been implemented.
• Plenty of small balancing touches: monster stats, item attributes and level design were improved in many places.
• The end cinematic graphics are in progress. Juho will probably finish them during next week.
• More items! In the beginning I never thought that it would be a problem during this project but the atlas texture that contains the graphics for the item icons is starting to be pretty full! I think we’ll add support for multiple textures here once we hit the limit, it’s something that we would have had to do sometime in the future anyway. The texture has space for 157 item icons and there’s only 13 slots left!
• We’ve been playing the game here for the whole day today! Miscellaneous bugs and balancing issues were ruthlessly eradicated in the process.
• Juho did an interview with Games On Net. Read it up, it’s interesting stuff!