Legend of Grimrock

We realized that we really haven’t listed the Dungeon Editor’s features and capabilities in any single place clearly so hey, why not compile a list here. This should give you a better overall picture about what you can create with the editor. Let me switch on my marketing droid -mode here for a moment… There! Let’s go:

• Simple and straightforward user interface.
• Instant preview lets you test play the dungeon instantly: no need to leave the editor or wait for the level to export.
• Create puzzles, traps and contraptions simply by connecting buttons, pressure plates and other triggers to trapdoors, spawners or teleporters for example.
• Use Lua scripts to create even more complex logic and go beyond what would otherwise be possible.
• Fill your dungeons with any of the 350+ original Legend of Grimrock assets.
• Create new items, complete with new graphics and functionality like new magical weapons or potions with their own custom effects.
• If you want a cow-on-wheels roaming the tunnels, it’s no problem: you can use your own custom monsters!
• Totally transform how the dungeon looks and feels like by using custom environment graphics and objects.
• Trigger your own sounds or replace the background music.
• Tell a story with custom intro and ending cinematics.
• Create hellish demon snails simply by changing the textures of the original snail: you can modify, replace or recycle the original Legend of Grimrock textures, meshes or other assets to suit your needs.
• Publish your creations by using the built-in Steam Workshop support – or just freely upload the dungeon data anywhere or hand it out directly to your friends.

Some of you might know that we’ve previously had a policy in place that has prevented modders from modifying/distributing the game assets found in our game data. We will still have that policy in place as far as reverse-engineered assets are regarded but we will release a comprehensive pack of assets along with the editor that you can use and modify to create Legend of Grimrock mods. This is just due to the fact that we can’t, for example, give away sounds we have bought and give people the permission to use and modify those assets. But don’t worry, the majority of our assets will be in the pack for you to use. We will release the revised modding and asset usage terms soon.

Oh, and there won’t be a need to hack the game to access the developer console anymore either: to make it easier to debug your custom dungeons, we have implemented an option to enable the console.

If you’ve got any more questions on what could be done with the editor, ask in the comments or on the forum.

Hello everyone! Let’s kick things off in this weekly update with a small announcement: Legend of Grimrock is now available through GamersGate as well so if you haven’t gotten yours already, there’s now another way to get it (although I do have a feeling that I’m preaching to the choir here)!

And then let’s continue the weekly update with another announcement: we’ve had good progress with the dungeon editor and we have hit the alpha milestone! Since we now have the core features of the editor done, we are now ready to extend the testing even outside the walls of this office but don’t get too excited yet: it’s not a public testing phase, it’s just something we will handle with a handful of friends at least for the time being. We’re not only concentrating on finding bugs (or locating potential for improvement) in the editor alone because the base game itself needs some rigorous testing too since there have been some fundamental architecture changes to the game we have had to do in order to support the loading of custom dungeons and such. This testing round probably also means that we’ll have to slow down with adding new features to the editor for some time since I’m certain there will be a lot of things we need to fix and stabilize before we should proceed to add some more functionality. But the good news is that it seems like there isn’t a massive amount of things missing from the editor anymore either but we’ll have to wait and see what the testers can come up with!

Oh, and just so that you know: if nothing terribly exciting on the development front has happened during a week, we’re going to serve you a dose of “making of” -style documentation from Legend of Grimrock on our weekly updates. Like for example once we get a build out of the doors for testers to mess with, we’re certainly going to be occupied by ironing out usability issues and bugs so we might not have anything profound or exciting to tell you and since we wouldn’t want to stay completely silent either, we’ll give you a behind the scenes glimpse on what goes into making a game like Legend of Grimrock! But in essence this is nothing new since that’s basically what we did early on in the development too when we were doing features on things like monster design, level scripting or graphics here on the blog. We just haven’t done that in a while now and I think that will be more fun than trying to come up with something interesting to say when nothing dramatic has happened.

Alright, that’s it for this time. Take care!