Paradox Interactive has just released the first developer’s diary for Dungeonland, Critical Studios’s upcoming game about sheep tossing and the exploits of adventurers trapped in a deadly medieval theme park.
According to the diary, the developers’ goal was to create a dungeon crawler where players would actually play together. When they say play together, they don’t mean a game where the players can go through their typical roles (e.g. player A tanks, player B heals, and player C throws sheep) simultaneously without actually talking to each other.
Instead, the Brazilian developers wanted the players “to collaborate in a meaningful way, to constantly talk, shout, laugh and curse at each other as they play.”
After a few prototypes, including one where different colored balls fight to survive 12 waves of monsters, Critical Studios came to the conclusion that, if they wanted people playing “together” rather than “simultaneously,” they would have to make the game play out differently each time. They’d also have to make it pretty hard, forcing players to make the best possible use of each others’ skills.
You may read how the developers hope to do this, in their own words, after the trailer.
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