screwdriver-game

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Public TECH demo release

After a long time of no updates, here is the big one we planned for a while! A (tech)demo! Only game mode available is multiplayer, instructions on how to use it in the end of the post.

Download the demo HERE

You might ask why such emphasis on the TECH part. Well mostly because the game is bare bones, with core systems working but with fairly minimal content for demonstration. The idea is to show something tangible for fans, who had doubts that this was getting anywhere past concepts.

Feel free to leave feedback in our discord HERE

Instructions on how to use multiplayer: After downloading the game and unpacking the rar file, you should proceed to our discord channel and type in “!key” in any of the channels, you will receive a direct message from our bot with your personal key. The game will ask you to enter this key upon trying to queue into any multiplayer mode.

Quick match is identical to custom game except quick match automatically puts you and another person in a lobby if both are queued in. Once in a lobby, you preselect your team members without exceeding point limit and press “ready”. The game ends once all enemy units are eliminated.

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Combat

Here is another horribly overdue update on Screwdriver project. On the bright side, this time we will talk directly about gameplay.

As mentioned before, Screwdriver will be a top-down isometric-ish RPG with a turn based combat system. While RPG elements and other campaign stuff will covered in later posts, today we will talk about combat.

For each combat sequence you will have control over 1 or more team members. In solo campaign your team size can vary from 1 to 4 (not counting temporary summons), while in multiplayer mode your team size is generally higher, but depends on match settings and player setup.

The combat field is divided into small hexes, with most of the characters standing on 7 hexes, with some bigger characters taking up more space.

Each character has several resources to keep track of. One of the main resources are Ability Points(AP).  Each character, depending on their abilities, get their own amount of AP every turn. AP can be spend on walking, using abilities and attacks, or replenishing Endurance(END).

Health Points(HP) and Endurance(END) are also important resources. HP is a fairly known and easy concept: If it runs out, you die. END works similarly to mana in other rpg games, but is spent on most actions performed in combat even if they don't have anything to do with magic. If a character goes into negative endurance, he will recieve "exhausted" status, and thus be forced to skip all next turns until his endurance recovers to 0 value or more.

And here is where differences between solo campaign and multiplayer start. In solo campaign you lead a team of your main character and pre-created companions gathered during your adventure. Combat can be started almost anywhere on the map. In Multiplayer, the player controls a handpicked team of in-game characters(mostly consisting of average enemies\friends from campaign) and fight other players with their own team. All combat will be limited to handcrafted small arenas, and generally doesnt involve real time elements from solo play. Unit balance is likely to be different for both modes to keep things interesting and fair.

Additionally in solo mode, players will be able to customise their teams with additional gear, leveling up, and stat management. While in Multiplayer, unit stats and gear will be predetermined to avoid unfair advantage over newer players.

All visual representation is work in progress.

Additional information on specific units will come later.

If you want to know more information about the game or join the creators fan community, consider joining our discord server HERE

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The Screwdriver Editor

It was a while since last post, core team was(and kinda still is) busy shitting bricks how lighting works UnrealEngine4. So to compensate we will share more info something more tangible than concept art and lore.

(top side editor view, bottom in-game render)

The Screwdriver Editor (SDE in the future). Probably our biggest time investment in the project, took us around a whooping 1 year to develop a standalone piece of custom software which is nicely synchronized with UE4. 

So why spend so much resources on just one tool? Wouldn’t it better to work on in-game mechanics and content? Several reasons:

1st Game is in its nature is supposed to be an oldschool-ish RPG where player has decent freedom of movement. Which often requires quite big world compared to more linear games, which is quite a task for a small team like us. Solution was to rely on reusable assets with grid-based placement for simplicity, something UE isn’t tailored for. And by having editor at our disposal, something trivial like creating a building is matter of hours not days.

2nd Screwdriver changed as concept. Initially game was supposed to be 2.5D game with 2d scenery and 3d characters, which seemed reasonable with artist+programmer duo as core team. Sadly UE while “supports” 2d games, it done quite poorly, specially on level design perspective. Which is also why our floors have this specific 2d feel, thats one of few things which survived concept change - tile-based floor creation. Which lets efficiently creating detailed floor with interesting look with minimal effort, something also not possible in UE alone.

(floor tiles in SDE)

3. SDE is quite good chore reducing tool. While it doesn't sound too impressive, things like automatic sorting of items where they belong on the level saves up lots of time on low man-power team.

So what does all of this means? Firstly a decent developed big world to explore in solo campaign without simplifying it drastically or hurting visual aspect. Secondly after game is finished, SDE can be potentially reused for expansions(or modding) making next delivery much faster. Thirdly, its a very cool thing i wanted to show off.

(general look of SDE)

This puts some smaller limitations on our games. I already mentioned grid based placement of building geometry, this will result in many buildings having similar angle like in old isometric games. Insignificant downside, given plenty of modern games have same approach without people really seeing it as a downside. Additional limitation for us would be no camera rotation, something what can be softened by proper level design.

(top in-game render, bottom SDE view)

In conclusion

A solid tool, optimizing workflow and giving a game its own look. 

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Screwdriver lore

Before we dive into this bix wall-o-text let me give you friendly reminder we have a discord channel HERE. 

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Demon are quite a unique race to Screwdriver world. They are widespread in many cultures despite that they originated from Hell. For a long time it was believed Hell is an additional dimension, while in reality it was on the other side of the disc shaped planet. The very harsh natural conditions took a big part in forming demons as a species and society, forced to live underground to avoid the frozen desert outside they developed a tribal caste-based system where brute strength is valued above all. Divided into hundreds separate clans, demons are stuck in a constant power struggle with The Devil ruling the biggest and strongest clan. The Devil’s authority is enormous, but even he cannot fully control all the wild tribes around him, who want to take over the status of the strongest clan.

This constant conflict continued for centuries until elves from the other side managed to open a portal to Hell. Seeking potential power and allies they found demons very useful, little did they expected that demons weren’t interesting in negotiating, brutes didn’t even know how to write. Discovering a much more gentle and hospitable side of the planet, demons finally put aside all their disputes and poured in with the intention of conquering the new world for themselves, led by The Devil. Demon mages quite quickly developed their own portals to be independent from the elves, and thus, The First Demon War began. After a year long exhausting war, the demons were defeated and had to retreat back to Hell. As much as it seemed a victory for Helio (other side of the planet), The forces of Hell gained the most benefit from whole conflict. Previously illiterate demons saw concepts of writing and an abundance of scientific inventions from more developed cultures. Now more technologically prepared, they attempted conquering Helio twice, both of which failed, yet each time demons kept acquiring more and freshly developed technology for themselves.

Helio did get something during all those Demon Wars - demons. Small clusters of the invaders deviated, tried to negotiate or even help the Helio forces. While strongly shunned in the beginning, those demons managed to settle down and even integrate with other nations later on. Now demons are divided in two types: The wild and The civilized. Wild demon still reside in Hell with its tribal culture, and civilized demon are offspring of those who managed to settle down on Helio. Because of the strong caste system, wild demon vary greatly in shape and form, from small imps to giant monsters. Civilized demon on the other hand, after centuries of crossbreeding with other races and having no caste, became much more alike to the native races.

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Screwdriver lore

Screwdriver is based on its own lore, has lots of races, many of which take part in “civilized” life. One of them are Undead, deceitful name for those who didn’t die in the first place. 

Before I dive into a dreaded wall-of-text, have a friendly reminder that we have a discord channel now. Feel free to join!

Wallpaper download

 Undeads are now present all around the world at this age, but of all races they are the youngest while being the only artificial one. The originator of all the undeads is a human named Ansgar. As many men, he was dreaded by inevitability of death. While you can potentially fight off illness and violent enemies, age is something human kind couldn’t even try to defeat. While other races usually didn’t have issues of getting old at all or were completely content with their lifespan, humans, due their ambitions wanted to overcome their nature.

  Ansgar was a prodigy in experimental magics, so after the First Demon War, he dedicated all of his time in studies, trying to find a salvation to humans struggle with aging. Understanding how to beat it came gradually. Humans can’t fight aging, so they have to become something else. Asgar designed a spell so complex that to this age, best minds can’t fully reverse engineer it or make a proper analogue. The purpose of this spell was to completely rebuild human body, to make it feed on magical energies instead of common biological chemistry. The result was a success, people that survived the changes of this spell suddenly stopped aging. The process was supposed to happen only on healthy subjects, and cannot occurs on someone who is severely weak or just dead. Additionally it appears that only humans could undergo the changes, other races were less adaptive and their body rejected itself after the change.

 Problems arose later, while the aging process halted completely, the regenerative process slowed down drastically. This shortened their lifespan beneath the average human one. So the solution was to make supportive magic, which could manipulate bodies of the undead. The so called “Dethdoctrine” and its practitioners, Dethdocs, helped to restore undead bodies to their previous state, and as it turned out it could be used to make undeads even more bizarre. But a well maintained undead would completely resemble a human, with only pale skin giving them away. The only issue is that this process is very hard and exhausting. So to minimize need for dethdoc services, many undeads undergo special mummification processes, slowing down their decay drastically but making them look even more dead to their human brothers, which caused them problems.

 The time when the Undeads were invented was still quite medieval, and the view of grotesque, almost corpse looking people scared most of the humans, who presumed they were the risen dead, thus the name. Undead folk was branded as an heretical cult and was hunted down by most of the human kingdoms. The hunt on the newborn race resulted in the assassination of Asgar before he managed to perfect the spell. So leftover undeads had to use the old spells he taught them to turn new undead.

Pursued by humans, undeads lived a nomad life looking for a new home. After decades they finally found a suitable place for their new home. Which they named Necropolis. This enraged most nearby human kingdoms, who waged a merciless war against the new state. The unexpected savior of undeads were the demons. Who started a new invasion later named The Second Demon War. Humans had to pull off their armies back from the tiny Undead state, to unite against the demon invaders on other side of the world. This gave Necropolis a window of opportunity to forge an alliance with the demons, so they pillaged and raided the back lines of human kingdoms weakening them drastically while main forces were away. Once the demon war was over, the kingdoms were too exhausted to fight entrenched undead forces, and the temporary alliances with other races were dismissed once demon threat was over. Humans were forced to make a truce and acknowledge the new state.

In Asmodeus city, where the Screwdriver game takes place, undeads happen to be the lowest class. Most of the undeads are forced to live in the lowest district out of the city bounds, “Slums” as most call it. With very low financial power many of them can’t afford proper dethdoc services so they degrade drastically. In some cases their health goes so bad that it affects their minds, slowly chipping away at their sanity until they become completely feral and aggressive to outsiders. Those crazed undeads solidify other races dislike to slum inhabitants, seeing all of them as potential uncontrollable monsters. While some undead travelers, merchants and mercenaries are present in the higher districts, the majority of them hide below the city.

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Screwdriver

Welcome to Screwdriver the game tumblr blog. We are a small enthusiast indie team Dead Deer, developing a daring project as our first game, called Screwdriver. The game is still in early stages of development even after a year+ of work, so we have a long way to go.

Screwdriver is a game inspired by old classical RPGs, but is in no way an indie copy of existing titles. We are going with our own universe and mechanics, putting our own ideas to test.

Wallpaper download The game is going to consist of 2 major blocks: Solo story driven campaign and Multiplayer PvP arena-like mode. 

Solo campaign will revolve around lore, story and characters. Player will be able to pick up companions along the way, creating a party of up to 4 characters to fight enemies in turn based combat, and explore an urban open world, where decisions will matter and don’t expect everyone to like them.

Multiplayer mode is the ideological extension of our turn based combat. Players are be given a set amount of points to spent to compose their dream team from characters, monsters and others you saw during campaign.

Our current plan is to keep game development transparent and keep tight connection with our interested audience. Game potentially would be crowdfunded through Patreon (sorry Kickstarter :[ ) to help developers focus more. No release date yet. Platform PC, Steam. First thing you can expect you’ll be potentially touching is the standalone MP mode alpha test. When that will happen, we can’t tell yet.  

But for now we invite you all in our public discord server HERE.

Stay tuned for more information about the game and development process.