Legend of Grimrock Development Update, Interview

There’s a new intro-teasing development update up on the official Legend of Grimrock website, though in addition to pointing out the progress the team has made over the past week, it also alerts us to a new interview on Games On Net. A snip from the former:

‘¢ Player movement has been adjusted: the screen now bobs when you move. Also if you carry too much stuff, the movement slows down.
‘¢ We added potions and a system for mixing your own drinks from herbs found in the dungeon.
‘¢ We added sacks and crates for all you pack rats out there!
‘¢ There’s one entirely new monster in the game and a ranged weapon variant of one of our older monsters (I suppose the word (old) works here on more than one level! (And the word (level) works here on more than one level!)).
‘¢ A new spell has been implemented.
‘¢ Plenty of small balancing touches: monster stats, item attributes and level design were improved in many places.
‘¢ The end cinematic graphics are in progress. Juho will probably finish them during next week.
‘¢ More items! In the beginning I never thought that it would be a problem during this project but the atlas texture that contains the graphics for the item icons is starting to be pretty full! I think we’ll add support for multiple textures here once we hit the limit, it’s something that we would have had to do sometime in the future anyway. The texture has space for 157 item icons and there’s only 13 slots left!
‘¢ We’ve been playing the game here for the whole day today! Miscellaneous bugs and balancing issues were ruthlessly eradicated in the process.

And a bit from the Q&A (which also includes a fantastic screenshot of an ogre):

When you look back on Dungeon Master (all the way back to 1987!), what do you see in that game that modern games are lacking? How are you going about re-capturing that feeling with Grimrock?

We are reviving gameplay aspects like puzzle solving and tactical fighting that we feel are severely lacking in current AAA RPG’s. Legend of Grimrock is a party-based game which allows more variation and tactical elements than is available in action-oriented single character RPGs nowadays. Difficulty level of the game is also more towards the old school level. Naturally we’ll have difficulty levels that scale the enemy toughness, but some the puzzles are pretty hard (if you don’t google them of course). Personally I still haven’t finished the game because I haven’t solved one of the puzzles and I don’t want to look the answer from the code.

Given that you’re using a text-based level editor, is it possible for somebody to look at a level’s text file and glean the answers to any puzzles?

We have actually moved from text editor to more proper-looking map editor that kind of looks like graph paper where you “draw” the dungeons, but it’s essentially the same thing as we did with the text editor. The level functionality comes from Lua script files that are not viewable in the final product. The text files are just authoring method for us, so you won’t find any answers in say level01.txt.