Swords and Sorcery: Underworld Gold Development Update

In his latest development update, Classic Games Remade’s Charles Clerc talks more about the graphical enhancements, balance tweaks, encounter design changes, and sequel preparedness that will be rolled into the upcoming “gold” release of Swords and Sorcery: Underworld.

A few issues and suggestions about game balance have been reported. In short, the game gets too easy in the end. This is due in part to levelling that becomes increasingly easy beyond lvl 9. There’s also the rogue’s Bleed ability that kind of makes him overly godly. Then there’s the immobilization spells that work almost systematically but that is linked to the levelling that is too quick (monsters do resist, but not if they are way surpassed by your party’s strength). All these aspects and a couple more are taken into consideration again to maintain a tactical challenge all the way to the final encounter. The difficulty is to not turn the game into a grindfest. That will be thoroughly avoided through careful playtesting.

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I’ve started work on a map building utility (about 50% done). Right now I use. A text file! Plotting codes needed to be painstakingly written with a few hundred lines per map. With this new tool the process will become much more visual, way faster and much less torturous. That means much faster level design for the sequel which, having an overworld, will need quite a few maps.