Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest Christmas Mega-update

Following three months of relative silence, the developer blog for Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest, a fantasy RPG from ex-Legend of Grimrock developers, now has a new post they proudly call a mega-update. It starts by showing us the new level editor. You see, initially, the game was supposed to be mostly procedurally generated, but as that’s not really the case anymore, the editor is a big deal and should greatly help with the game’s development. And apart from the editor-related news, we also get some concept art and in-game screenshots that already look quite snazzy, and a minute-long preview teaser of Druidstone’s battle music that’s also pretty outstanding.

You’ll have to visit the update proper to see the screenshots and listen to the music, but here are its text parts:

Ho ho ho! Welcome to the Druidstone development MEGA-UPDATE! As they say, time flies when you’re having fun, but it’s still hard to believe three months(!) have passed since the last blog update. So what have been up to lately? Well, many things, glad you asked!

Druidstone Editor

For instance, we now have a full fledged level editor, which allows us to make much more detailed levels. A year ago, when the game design was more heavily oriented towards procedurally generated content, we thought that we would not need a level editor at all. The levels were supposed to be mostly generated with some manually crafted rooms thrown in. But as development progressed, we felt the need to make more and more hand crafted locations and the need for a proper level editor arose. We will still keep adding new features to the editor, but as it is now, it’s ready for some prime time and we can start making new content with it.

Some highlights of the Druidstone editor:

• Seamless integration to the game, so we can start playing the edited level immediately by pressing a button, and also summon up the editor whenever we’re playing the game.
• Tools for quickly painting objects, e.g. trees, plants, grass, on the ground with mouse strokes.
• Heightmap and texture painting tools, including configurable brushes and smoothing.
• Compared to the editor we made for Legend of Grimrock, everything is now much more wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get). For example, with the Grimrock editor you couldn’t see the effect of painting dungeon walls on the grid unless you hit the play button. Now we can just paint the walls and you immediately see them.
• Multi-level undo/redo. Pretty basic thing but nonetheless crucial to have.

More monsters!

Apart from the editor we also have made a bunch of new monsters, some of which have been featured in our Twitter feed. Here’s the screenshot of the Basilisk and some others behind the scenes material, in case you have missed them. We’ll probably keep updating Facebook and Twitter more frequently than this blog, so if you’re not already following us on social media and have been missing our updates, you know what to do

Oh, and talking about the new content, check out that new location and environment set above that we have been working on. It brings to the game much needed variation to the summery forests and dungeons you have been so far. And as I write this, Juho is already working on yet another completely new environment, which we’ll feature later as the work progresses. As you can probably guess from the screenshot, the world of Druidstone, the Menhir Forest is a magical place with several different kinds of areas with unique feel to them.

Battle music teaser

Some other highlights of development lately are the new outstanding musical masterpieces we have received from Scoring Helsinki. When done properly, the music really is at least half of the soul of any game, and the guys at Scoring Helsinki really know how to pull the right strings (pun intended!) and constantly surprise us with new awesome pieces. Receiving a new music drop from them feel always like opening a christmas present, so we thought it would be proper to share some of the fun with you guys! So enjoy this small glimpse into the musical side of Druidstone. It’s still work in progress, i.e. not fully mastered to the quality of the final version, but here it is, a small teaser of the battle music[…]

We also have added fourth playable character to the game and it’s unlike any of the other characters we have. But this MEGA-UPDATE is already getting long and the holidays are luring us in with the promises of feasts, winter wonderlands, red fat bearded men, presents and all…

So there you have it! The Druidstone team wishes you an awesome new year and merry winter solstice! See you next year!