Feb 272014
As promised, we are delivering to you a snack in the form of a video representing the current gameplay. The game is still in an early stage of development, so you can expect many changes in the final product. We are pretty confident that the changes will be for the better, though.
Let us know what you think & feel about Vaporum in the comments below. Check back soon for more updates on development, sneak-peeks and other stuff.
4 Responses to “Gameplay video”
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Very nice and promising. Good job!
Have you perhaps considered using turn-based combat instead of real-time? Grimrock was OK in the exploration/puzzle department but the tedious combat routine of “dancing” around enemies and kiting them around the dungeon so you can turn and attack them from the side/behind, was just terrible.
I don’t think the “Dungeon Master” mold of combat is good tbh, it rewards nothing but twitch and player reflexes, not thoughtful tactics/strategy. A true RPG should be about the character skill, the stats of your character, rather than how quickly you can click spam attacks and use WASD to dance around enemies, it’s basically the logic of a first-person shooter applied to an RPG – an abomination.
Better to take inspiration from Wizardry than DM I say.
Before we even started coding the game, we talked about the major defining features, combat being one of them, and we decided for real time combat. Vaporum is an action oriented game where player reflexes and quick decision making are vital to success. Unlike Grimrock, most of our enemies (apart from the very basic ones, as you can see in the first video) will be quite smart and fast in terms of combat and there will be more of them coming at you at once. And as our doors occupy the whole tile and are not just a line blocker between two tiles, you cannot exploit this to simply open-attack-close enemies, resulting in never taking any damage. This all combined will reward raw mechanical player skill, but at the same time will require you to find the effective character setup, fiddling with the RPG elements (stats, skills, etc.). So even if your reflexes are super-human, you will still need to play a lot with your stats and skill combinations to beat the game.
Real time versus turn based is simply a matter of choice. We’ve chosen the former. And we fully understand that it does not suit everyone.