Nyligen hade vi möjligheten att testa Rever Games dungeon crawler-actionroguelite Clockfall. Spelet ska snart släppas via Early Access till PC via Steam och det nyskapar roguelike-genren genom att ta den i en något annorlunda riktning. Fokus ligger mindre på svåra strider och mer på att ge spelaren en begränsad mängd tid att uppnå sina mål på, en tidsgräns som kan utökas genom att genomföra fler rundor och ta sig längre in i spelet.
Med den unika synen på dungeon crawler-roguelites i åtanke fick vi nyligen chansen att prata med Rever Games, där vi frågade utvecklaren varför de ville skapa Clockfall och var idén kom ifrån. Grundaren och CFO:n John Pirson förklarade:
"It was a bit of a complicated production. So at first, Clockfall was never supposed to be what it is now. At first, we were supposed to do a roguelike. And then through production, after a year, we separated from Zero Games, which we're working with. And I ended up a bit going on my own with the Alexandre [Dournel] and then Florian [Meskers] and then the team picked up a bit. We decided that as roguelike fans, we would be more into a true crawler, but with a small twist. So therefore, that's why time got involved and the village defence, which made it quite... So after a few tries, we tried and we thought, this is fun. And so there was a lot of balancing, a lot of development, a lot of fails, obviously. So it went quite slow as we tried to connect two, almost three different types of gameplay together. It makes things quite complicated. But in the end, we ended up with a result that is quite satisfying, even though it still needs a lot of work. But the idea for us is quite something that we're really happy to work on."
Vi frågade också hur Rever tänker få Clockfall att sticka ut bland konkurrenterna, varpå huvudprogrammeraren Florian Meskers sade:
"There's one thing that we wanted to have different. So it's the time USP. So in every roguelike, you have time to explore. The difficulty is not dying, basically. Here, we want you to work with the time. We want you to feel pressured to explore as fast as possible, but also make sure you build your character as you go along with your run, because once the timer is out, then you're back to defending your village for as long as you can. So it's really quite critical that you manage your time properly and manage your time in a way that you're going to be strong enough to each time go further in defending your village. So that's where we separate from classic genre, I would say."
Du kan se hela intervjun med Rever Games nedan för mer information om variationen mellan spelets olika biomer, studions långsiktiga ambitioner för Clockfall och vad man kan vänta sig av Early Access-versionen.
