Lair Of The Leviathan - Development Update

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Some news for Lair of the Leviathan:

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Updates from the Lair

Powerful new editors for dungeons, creating monsters and more...

Greetings, mighty dungeon crawlers!

Been a while since our last update but David (from Nostaglic Realms) and I have been powering away hard at work on Lair of the Leviathan. It goes without saying that this is easily the biggest thing either of us have worked on ( and I've built over 10 games for Steam already!) , but honestly this is also the most fun I've ever had working on a project.

The more we build the game, the more we realise it's shaping up to be basically our own version of the classic Gold Box D&D games from the 90s. We loved those games so much - but naturally they have aged, and have their own annoyances. We're basically trying to pay homage to them, but also remove a lot of the tedium ( all those random encounters and clunky 3D maps, gone !) , while keeping true to the spirit of the era. There's also hints of Darklands, Ultima, Knights of Legend in there. All the stuff we loved growing up.

My good friend Anders Lauridsen ( developer of Skald : Against the Black Priory ) has been a great supporter of the game, and in our conversations has given me tons of advice in how to program a successful RPG. The major thing he stressed upon me was this : make good tools! . Building deep game editors is an investment in itself, it takes time, but when you're building a huge game, if you have a good toolset , this investment will pay off tenfold later.

With that in mind, I've spent almost all of my time on the project building a massive suite of editor tools for David and I to use ( and down the road, hopefully to make the game moddable for anyone to create their own adventures using the same built-in tools that we do, something akin to the classic Forgotten Reams Unlimited Adventures editor of so long ago.

I've shown off some of these tools in earlier posts ( the character creator and overland map ), the most powerful and central to the game so far being the Encounter Editor. From here you can create conversations, trigger party members to enter and leave, play sound and music, enter towns and so much more.

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