Hi Unity people! This is Trial by Viking, a side-scrolling platformer where you are a viking working as an agent of Odin. In unfamiliar lands, you will meet friends and foes, solve a few puzzles, and gain the powers needed to stop the trickster god, Loki. If you are able to survive tricky gauntlets of magic and steel, you will find yourself face to face with some of the worst terrors that the nine worlds have to offer. Good luck!
Features:
morph into a polar bear
control a flying Valkyrie through mazes of hazards
ride on the claws of a great owl like a zip line
fight a Kraken in a swimming pool
bombs, double jump, dash, grappling hook
an ice axe for freezing enemies and turning them in to stepping stones
ride on a viking ship while having axe battles with Kobolds
keys, switches, gears, ropes, hidden areas, and other tricky elements
130 levels
27 intense boss/miniboss battles
20 permanent upgrades
Over 75 unique ai/enemies
power ups like mini viking, metal viking, and time slow
Development of Trial by Viking started at the end of 2013. Honestly this game started out with an idea of mixing Ghosts and Goblins with Cut the Rope, because I thought that would be weird and cool, but it has grown into something so far from that. I really wanted to give the game a great feel, and some of the earlier concepts just weren’t right. I still make use of ropes and being able to cut them to solve puzzles, but I have changed it so that you use an axe to cut ropes instead of some sort of mouse/touch system.
150 levels so it’s not metroid like ? As metroid games are one or few big maps , castelvania games beeing mainly one main big level.
The background will need more work, is there any video ?
Hello zenGarden! Yeah, you are right. A true Metroidvania has a seamless world. This does however focus on the idea of exploration, seeking permanent upgrades, and needing those upgrades in order to gain access to certain areas. I am still trying to work out my pitch at this point.
I have been shopping artists for backgrounds. Since the game is orthographic, I have been playing around with the idea of layered 2D parallaxing backgrounds.
As for video, I haven’t released any significant video yet, but I do have some animated gifs that I plan to post. I will post one later today when I get to my desktop.
One of the things I had liked about Spelunky, is how different elements in the game can sort of interact with each other. I made sure that many of the elements in Trial by Viking can affect each other in maybe unexpected ways, which sets up some interesting situations. For instance, you may throw a boomerang to activate a switch that turns on a fan that can blow a block upward enough for you to push it onto a ledge with a pressure plate that opens a door.
I will add some more gifs soon so you can see some other interesting mechanics in action, and probably some combat as well.
Thanks! I’m trying to hold off on releasing any video until I have some of the new backgrounds finished, so the ETA on that is sort of up in the air. I will keep posting more gifs here until then though.
There is one programmer/designer (me), and one 3D artist (Cameron Orr) mainly. We have been working on this since the end of December 2013. I am hunting talented free agents for backgrounds. Erik Braa, the voice of Jax and Draven in League of Legends and some stuff on the Telltale Walking Dead series, will be helping with VO work for the cut scenes. Erik is a viking himself, so it’s going to be awesome.
I will be launching a campaign on Steam Greenlight probably at the same time as a Kickstarter that’d I’d like to create in order to get console devkits, and pay for some of the audio work. I am waiting on the new backgrounds to launch these as well though, so it’s hard to say when at the moment. I will keep people posted on timelines here in the future if they are interested.
This has a nice old school feel, even though the graphics are high resolution. I like it. The effects are nice as well. Like with many games, the stills don’t really do it justice, I feel. The gifs are awesome
Thanks! Yeah, I’m using 3D with orthographic projection, and I think it turned out to be a good balance of old and new school feeling as far as sidescrollers go. I agree about the stills though. I’ll just have to keep putting out more gifs I guess! The stills hopefully will start to look better once I have the new backgrounds in though.
Hey guys. Here’s a quick gif of the gear mechanics. Gears can control a bunch of different level elements. You might need to connect certain gears together in order to be able to rotate them the correct way to unlock a passage for instance. I added this because it’s something I haven’t really seen around. It opens up some interesting situations level design wise, because it’s not just an on/off switch, you can use it to move things between two values.
Working on all new parallaxing backgrounds, which I’ll show some screens of soon.
Hey guys, I finally got some new animations for a Valkyrie character that’s in the game. The idea was to have a few entire levels where the Valkyrie picks you up and flies upward as you steer her through hazards collecting sunstones. Here’s the initial takeoff sequence so far.
Thanks! Yeah, there will definitely be a Windows PC build, as well as Mac. Likely I will make a Linux box and make a Linux build as well. I plan on running a Kickstarter campaign soon in order to afford console devkits, as well as improve a few other things in the game, so we will have to wait and see how that pans out before I promise any other platforms.
Runs fairly well on a four year old Win7 laptop with onboard Intel graphics, so the requirements to run it are pretty low. I’ve even tried running the game on mobile, and it runs decent there too. A bit of profiling when I’m finished, and it should be pretty smooth all around.
