Hammerwatch is an upcoming Gauntlet styled hack-n-slash that was recently submitted to Steam Greenlight. After watching the trailer I was floored with how awesome this game looks. I have thought for many years that there needed to be a modern Gauntlet styled hack-n-slash and Hammerwatch looks to be that game!

I immediately emailed the developers of Hammerwatch a few questions about the game mechanics, Steam Greenlight and more. Enjoy!

jdodson: Hammerwatch is a Gauntlet styled Hack and Slash that features LAN and Internet Co-Op. The video looks absolutely incredible and can’t wait to play it! How does the game play now as you are doing your testing?

Niklas: We're currently working on balancing the difficulty and finalizing the player skills, but other than that the game plays pretty well. We do still have some other issues, mainly related to online multiplayer sync and enemy AI, but the main thing now is really just to get all the levels finished.

jdodson: What are the different characters you can play in Hammerwatch? What are some of things that make each of the classes unique?

Niklas: We have a paladin, a wizard, a rogue and a warlock. The paladin is a close combat fighter with skills like healing, stun and block. The wizard is a medium distance fighter with a lot of area of effect skills and slow effects. The rogue is the longest distance fighter who can snare enemies and also has a close distance bomb. We're currently in the process of completely redesigning the warlock, he had a chain lightning and summoned creatures, but that didn't play very well so we're going to need to do something else with him, maybe something with poison.

jdodson: What is your favorite item in Hammerwatch?

Niklas: Jochum really likes the potion of speed, but Niklas prefers the extra life.

jdodson: You took your game to Steam Greenlight, wondering how that is going for you? I am wondering what threshold you need to achieve to be able to sell your game on Steam when its ready?

Niklas: We're getting a really good response from users, 70% of the people who vote give us a yes vote and most of the people who comment really seem to like it. We have no idea about the actual threshold to get in though, so basically we just have to wait and see.

jdodson: Does the Wizard need food in Hammerwatch?

Niklas: Badly.

jdodson: How long has your team been in development on Hammerwatch from the initial concept to now? Anything crop up that surprised you about development?

Niklas: We started on Hammerwatch back in december with a simple gameplay test to see if we could get a fun game out of the concept, but the engine and editor had already been in development for a couple of months when we started. There hasn't really been any surprises in the development, at first we had some issues with drawing the characters, but in the end a friend at Mojang helped us by making them.

Niklas: You plan on supporting Windows, Mac and Linux at launch. What's the tech stack that makes such Sorcery possible?

Niklas: We use a custom engine written in C# and we use OpenGL for rendering. We started out with XNA but replaced it with OpenGL to be able to support other platforms than just Windows.

jdodson: Do you have any plans for procedural level generation?

Niklas: We have certainly thought about it and we do have ideas on how we could do it, but it's not something we will launch the game with. We might add it in later on.

jdodson: Thanks for answering my questions, did you want to mention anything as we wrap up?

Niklas: Anyone who is interested in the progress of the game can look at our devblog over at the TIGSource forums, we would also like to thank everyone who is visiting our Greenlight page.

Vote for Hammerwatch on Steam Greenlight now!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=122788084
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=30519.0
http://www.hammerwatch.com/

Blue_Element wrote on 02/04/2013 at 07:59pm

Wow, that does look amazing! I am definitely buying that if it comes to Steam!

jdodson   Admin   Post Author wrote on 02/05/2013 at 01:10am

Yeah totally, me too!

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