The Future of Catacombs of Grim

In the beginning Catacombs of Grim was a spur-of-the-moment game jam game I decided to do when I was on holiday and just sitting at home. I entered the 7-day jam (it was called the Honest Jam) midway through, thinking I’ll see how far I get but I have nothing else to do and loads of time on my hands. The deadline came and went but I spent the remainder of my holiday tinkering and adding content and solving problems, and I had a tremendous amount of fun making the (still unfinished) game.

The nature of game jam code tends to lean towards ‘just get it working, it doesn’t have to look good’. This was certainly the case for CoG and it didn’t take long before I started hitting code that just wasn’t suited for some of the changes I wanted to make, and very little planning went into anything, really. So, development stopped. Then my holiday ended, I started entering other game jams and life just started happening again.

Since the Honest Jam, I have been an avid member of Honest Dan’s community. Check him out on twitch, he’s a lovely person. Trust me, it’s worth it. Lately Dan’s been interviewing some indie devs on his stream and all these people had at least one published game. This has inspired me to get something out there.

So, I am currently in the process of completely redesigning Catacombs of Grim. Almost everything is changing. I am keeping the basics, but the graphics are changing, the combat is changing, the UI is changing. In fact, I am completely rewriting the code. I am keeping the dolls, the party structure and the overall dungeon-crawler feel, but I plan to get this on Steam, so everything is getting an overhaul. The future of CoG looks to have less boring combat, NPCs, traps that are not just exploding doors, and lots more monsters, weapons and armor.

Initially, CoG was a tribute to ‘Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World’. A lot of the layout, combat, magic, etc. is based on M&MII and frankly, it has to change. It matches the original game far too closely. And I want to change it.

So, over the next few months I will try to post updates here regarding progress. I am not one for ‘blogging’, so we’ll see how that goes.

There is a lot to get done, so stick around while I explore the world of creating an RPG and publishing it on Steam.

bix out…