Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog - Heat Maps
Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest - Mikko Rautalahti Joins the TeamBannerlord has many dynamic systems for maintaining most gameplay mechanisms. Horses are a case in point. They are produced in certain villages so there is a steady supply being created each day. These are then purchased (or sometimes looted) by passing armies or carried to town markets to change hands. Horses are also regularly removed from the game when cavalry troops eventually die or desperate parties slaughter them for food.
However, this dynamism brings its own unique challenges. How do we make sure that all these systems stay more or less balanced and working as intended, even after the elapse of many in-game years? In order to help designers with this, our engine team added a nice little utility for creating heat maps.
Hades Interview - EurogamerThis is big! Mikko “Mikki” Rautalahti, a dear friend and a talented writer who has worked on hit games like Alan Wake and Quantum Break, has joined the Druidstone team! With Mikki on board the rest of us can concentrate on game mechanics, levels and balancing, while Mikki is stabbing away at the story, writing missing dialogue lines, filling gaps, and do what is necessary to make the characters and the world really come to life. Mikki and I have a long history and the idea of working together has always been on the back of my mind. Previously other projects and timing has prevented this, but luckily the planets finally aligned… So, without further ado I’ll pass the mike to Mikki and let him introduce himself!
Supergiant's Hades is in many ways a departure from the studio's earlier work. Unlike Bastion, Transistor, or Pyre, it's a roguelike dungeon crawler, and it's also the first of the team's games to be put out in early access.
One thing that ties all of Supergiant's work together, though, is a strong narrative. Hades' protagonist is Zagreus, a blurry member of the Greek pantheon who is seen only through fragmentary texts that identify him as the son of Hades, lord of the underworld. (He may have later been merged with the myth of the god of wine, Dionysus, further obscuring his original tales.) The developers took this loose foundation and built up their own character, a rebellious young man who wants to escape his father's underworld, tasking the player with battling through an ever-shifting maze of enemies in an attempt to reach the surface.
Creative director Greg Kasavin has worked on writing and implementing the narrative on all four of Supergiant's games, but this is the first one to draw on an existing mythology. He tells me that this narrative foundation first came from the structure of the game they wanted to make.