Site relaunched + first blog post!

Hey Everyone,

First, a few things about ourselves. We are a small company (a crew of 2, my wife and me), working at home in our office-livingroom hybrid, located in Budapest, Hungary. My name is Peter Hargitai, I’m the developer behind our games, and I will write most of the blog posts here.

It was more than a year ago when we released our last game, GemCraft chapter zero, and since then, we haven’t given any lifesign, except a few comments here and there, and replying to e-mails asking whether we’re still alive. Now it’s over, from now on, you can follow us here (put our RSS feed in your feed reader, like Thunderbird) or on Twitter, and you will get first hand info about the things going on here.

And so, what happened since last May? Why does making a new game take so long?
Our plans changed constantly, we spent months on planning a multiplayer game, then an other one, in the end abandoning those projects because they would have taken too much time to complete. In about November, we started working on a sci-fi themed base builder/shooter game, which is now on hold, but will be continued once we release our current project.

This March, frustrated for not being able to at last release a game, we switched to making a new chapter for the GemCraft series. I thought it would be done quickly, after all we have a working GC0 base, we don’t have to write all the game mechanics from scratch. But as the project progressed, it became more filled with new features, and now we can say it will be a full chapter (and major part of the storyline), not just a cheap repacking of GC0.

So now we have a project on hold, named “Terran Twilight episode I: New contact”, and an ongoing project, “GemCraft Lost chapter: Labyrinth”. (GemCraft chapter two: Chasing Shadows is still in our plans, we didn’t forget about it)
The events of GemCraft Labyrinth will happen after chapter 1 and at roughly the same time with chapter 2.

We’ll get back to telling you more about the delayed sci-fi game when it’s time, but for now let’s see some of the changes in GC Labyrinth:

• The game’s area will grow to 800×600 pixels (GC1 was 640×480, GC0 was 690×540), which means bigger stages.
• The game will take place in a labyrinth having 13×13 stages (1..13, A..M grid).
• Monsters can now roam freely in wide open areas (depends on stage layout), you can build towers and walls on the path tiles.
• You can pick what type of gem you want (each stage has its available gem types just as before, but now your success won’t depend on what random gems you get).
• You can create gems up to grade 12 without mass combining, gems from grade 1 to 12 have distinct looks.
• New summonable structures: walls (build a labyrinth cheap and fast) and amplifiers (use them to boost your other structures) – walls can be further upgraded to either tower or amplifier.
• Towers can attack enemy buildings now when no monster is around.
• Drop gem bombs on your structures to destroy them (it takes time until a structure disappears completely).
• Shrines can be built now; simplified shrine system (2 types left: charged bolts and beams); Shrine projectiles depend more on the gem inserted; Charged bolt shrines have a limited range; shrines, instead of having a use limit, recharge slowly after each use.

Coming next week with screenshots!