Legend of Grimrock II Reaches Alpha

The Almost Human team has announced that Legend of Grimrock II has officially reached its coveted alpha milestone, meaning that the game is now playable from beginning to the end (despite still being rough and not quite ready for prime time), and celebrated with a new screenshot and a brief write-up on what’s coming next for the team, from which I’m going to quote our customary snippet:

And like the natural order of things typically is, after alpha comes beta and that’s where we’re heading next! To get there, me and Petri have been doing a systematic polishing round for all the levels. Or maybe I should be talking about (areas) instead since each area that we tackle contains, technically speaking, 1-4 levels of varying sizes. Each day we pick one area of the game that we concentrate on and for the duration of the day we work only in improving that one place. Basically what we do is that we fix the biggest issues that arise from playing the level but we don’t limit ourselves on only improving the levels themselves (like the level layout, monster placement, puzzles, items and secrets) but we also work on game design issues (for example underwater gameplay, herbs and potions), visuals (lighting & atmosphere, particles, items & environment objects), audio (ambient & environment sounds, monster sounds) or even the game interface (automap and such) if need be.

One day for each area is not a lot of time but doing a pass like this over the whole game really improves the overall experience since this way we always tackle the weakest spots of the game without getting stuck into details for too long. This also helps us by breaking down the game into more digestible bits that we can focus on since trying to polish the whole game at once feels like an overwhelming task and it would always be difficult to decide what would be important to do next.