The Darkness Below – This upcoming dungeon crawler for the PC looks amazing!! (+Demo)
First Person Dungeon Crawlers have a huge fan base on Indie Retro News, so many of us love games such as Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Ishar and even ones just released on the Amiga such as the great Shadows of Sergoth or Black Dawn Rebirth. Well here we are with another special announcement especially if you love dungeon crawlers, as Sabbas Eleftheriadis has shown off some brand new screenshots for the work in progress PC game of The Darkness Below; A first person grid based dungeon crawler that is sure to excite many in the RPG community.
Here is what the creator ‘Sabbas Eleftheriadis’ says about the game via the Dungeon Crawlers Facebook group…
“This was probably the longest period between any update, excluding some breaking hiatus some years ago… I had to fix issues and implement loads of necessary functionality and also revisit lots of stuff here and there to fine tune everything. In short, I am pretty much satisfied with current technical level of The Darkness Below ; in fact, I have already developed some real D&D inspired content for the game, some screenshots of which you can check in the end of the update. Given this progress, the upcoming “demo” will never come. Instead, I decided to release a smallish version of the game, a “prelude” if you like, which will contain everything you might expect from this game, except for its duration..”
“Given that the current ETA was to release this before the ending of 2022, I decided to dedicate the remaining time to complete as much content as possible and release this minor version, to serve both as a “big demo”, as well as a “small release”. There’s simply not enough time to produce all of it, test everything, do the planned crowdfunding before 2022, getting greenlights and stuff while working a full demanding job as well. Doing my best is not enough, so I have to take some shortcuts.”
“Yet at the same time I don’t want either to get out of ETA and frustrate even more the game’s fans. So, those are my reasons and why I concluded this is the best solution. Regardless, enough of reasoning and theories. The highlights of this update are numerous (some of these may have appeared in previous updates so bear with me as my changes.txt is huge now), just showing for information before the small release:”
- added: increased maximum spell number to 280, 40 spells per element, 8 spells per expertise per element. Hopefully, the majority of them implemented in the final game.
- added: ability to cause damage against all targets, instead of only a single target (previously), for some spells (party) and actions (monsters).
- added: new town textures and multifloor capability, allowing a bigger variety on town levels.
- added: implemented all shop types, fully tiered (4 levels), with a matching soundtrack per shop, as well their associated owner(s). Buy and sell is implemented, as well as shops dealing with specific item types i.e. weapons only.
- added: weapon slash effect to all weapons, similar to spell effects, increasing the immersion. Now every attack / action has an animation.
- added: character generation step by step, adding to previous ‘prebuilt characters’ mode.
- added: implemented ‘special’ and usually more powerful actions to monsters that can be used sparringly by chance. Think of those ‘recharge’ actions on D&D, which allows the bosses to kick butts more efficiently.
- added: completed the game’s introduction sequence, which shows when the player clicks the ‘Start the Game’ button from title screen.
- fixed: entrances and exits to dungeons are now more immersive. Specifically, exits are now showing a part of the “outside” i.e. some forest or similar, in the likes of Lands of Lore.
- fixed: added active skill checks, along with the passive ones. On active checks, a roll is made and skill expertise bonuses are applied against the challenge expertise difficulty, making the final outputs a lot more random than passive checks.
