Legend of Grimrock II Development Update

Almost Human’s Petri Häkkinen has penned our first major development update on Legend of Grimrock II, bringing the welcome news that code optimizations are being made, the savegame system has been reworked, the dungeon editor is getting some new features, new levels and monsters have been completed, and more. I absolutely cannot wait for this one:

Time flies when you’re working hard on something and, oh man, have we been working hard lately. It’s time for a first proper dev update for Legend of Grimrock 2!

The codebase has been in quite a bad shape after working so furiously on the first game. So I’ve been doing a lot of code refactoring which is a bit unthankful work because I’m rewriting a lot code and on the surface nothing seem to be changing. But still it’s very important and will speed up development in the future tremendously. Almost everything is now component based (except for the Party class which is a bugger to refactor because it’s so tightly connected to many places). Also I have rewritten the save game system, so that it’s easier to add new components that store their state automatically in save games.

I’ve also worked on the AI and as a result some critters are now noticeably harder to deal with. A completely new AI behavior has also been added. You can tell the difference immediately when this new behavior is activated but I don’t want to spoil the fun by revealing all the secrets yet!

The Dungeon Editor has also seen some changes. The inspector is now tree-based and shows the components of the selected entity. The (Paint Wall) tool has been extended quite a bit. It is now possible to paint different types of walls and floors in the same level. Shift-clicking on the map flood fills large areas. The editor also has a zoom feature, so tightly packed levels are easier to deal with.

Meanwhile Antti has been busy designing the levels. We have now about 5-6 playable levels in pre-alpha stage depending on how you count them. The levels have puzzles in them but monsters and extra polish will be added later. Antti has also been prototyping on a cool new puzzle mechanic which will eventually help extend our repertoire of tricky and brainteasing puzzles.

Juho and Olli have been modeling and animating new monsters and we have now eight new nasty critters, including two new spellcasters in development. We are trying to get a wider variety of monsters with different abilities in the game this time. If time permits we would like to implement unique AI behavior for most of them.

Jyri has been working on a new interior wallset and dungeon props. Jyri has also helped Juho and Olli by creating the very first monster that you will encounter in LoG2! Jyri reports that the monster has 3192 polygons, uses three textures, has 17 deformers and fits approximately inside a 3×3 meter cubic block. Can you guess what it is? 🙂

So all in all, I’d say we are progressing at a good pace. But there’s still a lot of work left, so better get back to banging the keyboard!