Work-in-Progress Spotlight
July 14th, 2009 by Scud

Keltos

By Dtrungle

Welcome back for another Work in Progress Spotlight. If you’re wondering about the short delay one can blame the fundamental laws of science: if you give a young man three months of spare time and enough disposable income to last said months, he will spend most of said free time waking up past noon and being out all night. So in a bid regain any credibility as punctual content writer I hastily tracked down Dtrungle (or as I like to misread it as, De-Jungle) and asked him about his new project ‘Keltos’. This may seem like an odd choice for Dtrungle doesn’t seem to have a reputation for his faithfulness to his project, indeed, he often has more than one on the go and that is the case at the moment. So some may muse what is the point of featuring ‘Keltos’ when we most likely will never see it finished? But these people who do muse are very much wrong, for those Dtrungle has many projects on the go they are only side deviations from his sprawling mutliplayer RPG that is ‘Ketlos’. Yes, that is correct, I did say ‘sprawling multiplayer RPG’ so when such a brave man takes on such a huge mantle he does deserve some time out from design. And that time out is only testement to Dtrungle’s work ethic and he is spending he free time away from designing by doing…urrh..more designing! What might be a long time coming will surely be worth the wait – and even to those who has no friends, Dtrungle has promised that this campaign will be fully playable in single-player as well as full multiplayer support. Pretty much two games in one it seems, right?

The game starts with a band of merry travellers moving south away from thier former home town of Celton. The reason for this migration was the search for more farmland and perhaps a decent spot in which to start up a trade colony. After scouting around for a few weeks, the travellers soon find the perfect spot and begin to build their new town and future home. The new town soon strung up and the the villagers were happy, yet the town’s Mayor, the original leader of the first band of travellers soon fell ill, under curious circumstances. From his sick bed, the Mayor tasks his youngest son and his friends (meaning you and your online buddies) to go out and find a cure, and the task will be long and hazardous, filled with many an adventure. On regards to gameplay, Dtrungle promises a ‘pratical and quite flawless’ way for the player to use potions and cast spells, which will easily help people dive into the game. Your standard RPG elements of leveling, equipment and items are all there as well so fans of the genre will not be disappointed. Apart from killing monsters, questing and the usual lark, Dtrungle promises lots of new and unique puzzles that should force you to stay on your toes mentally in what is shaping up to be a great online experience.

In a wierd role reversal, ’twas I who was dragged kicking and screaming to the interview table as I would much rather had stuck to my usual routine, which mostly consists of sleeping in way past an acceptable hour:

What have been the difficulties of making a mutliplayer RPG – surely there must be a lot of triggering involved?

Dtrungle: Being created to be played for both MP and SP, I need to stray away from custom AI and the conditions ‘Object Visible’, ‘Object Not Visible’ and ‘Object Selected’. A custom AI and those three conditions can produce some great effects. As for the triggering, take whatever there is, and duplicate it for each playing player. It adds up and gets very boring at times configuring the settings for different players with the potential of making a mistakes. Bug hunting would take longer than usual as you can tell. Thanks to AoKTS though, trigger work is a lot easier. Another difficulty in making MP scenario is in game balance, testing the balance for compatibility for 1 to 4 players takes a lot of time. A big obstacle in making MP maps is that you need to make it clean. Clean as in not having chats occur out of nowhere for a certain player for when players are not together. You need to edit your game in a way that all players are accounted for.

How important do you think the music is to the overall gaming experience – is it really worth taking up 20megs?

Dtrungle: I believe that music plays a very important role in improving any game. It helps set the atmosphere and makes the gaming experience more ‘epic’ feeling. The music itself should link with the events occuring ingame, having music that doesn’t connect with the event would considerably pull the experience down. As a designer, you need to assume what music is needed and what is not simply because the players dislikes downloading large files. I have since reduced the quality of my sound files(thanks to Popey) and now it should be below 10MB on full release.

You say there will be ‘Special’ boss fights – can you be anymore specific?

Dtrungle: From my experience, boss fights has been all about hacking away at a unit with high HP and attack. There has been a few battles that were different such as Matty’s Quiet Dawn and the turn-base-battle in Wrath of the Dark Lord. Keltos will have a few different battle events and it won’t be purely hacking away. All I can say is that you won’t be standing still for long and there won’t be any turn-base-battles.

It seems like a very ambitious project, like most multiplayer RPGs. Do you think the amount of effort it takes to make a multiplayer RPG means not many people are making them anymore?

Dtrungle: Grand and unique MP RPG will take a huge amount of effort to complete. The original kill-fest RPGs have been done to death and quickly gets dull. There has been quite a bit of designers who wanted to make grand and unique RPGs but they quickly get bored and/or run out of ideas so the project gets ditched. Like SP scenarios, the creative part is fun and easy but the triggering and editting part directs the designers away.

Perhaps one day we might have four screenshots – but a man can only dream: