Umbra Interview
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SolarFall Games' Daniel Dolui took some time out of his day to chat with PC Invasion about their development plans and design strategies for the crowd-funded action RPG Umbra, the result of which is a 41-minute podcast audio clip with an accompanying transcript. A little something on its likenesses with the Diablo series:
PCI: You said you were a fan of the Diablo series and other ARPGs?
DD: I play a lot of games, but ARPGs are one of my favorites. Early on in Umbra I had the idea of creating a modding platform, and the more we worked on it the more ideas we had for the game mechanics and the game universe. So we put more of our content into the platform system, and that's how the game was created.
In the main game we are influenced by Diablo 2 of course, Diablo 3 for the quality of action it has, particle effects and such are very nice. Path of Exile has a lot of influence as well. We very much like the potion system and we've somewhat copied theirs after viewing potion systems in every game. We are going to implement some mechanics on top of that to customize potions via crafting recipes.
What we tried to do with Umbra is have a very free development for your character. We want players who want to play, for example, a Barbarian, or an Undead, to do so. We have mechanics to balance the gameplay so you can't use too much of a resource for free. There are 3: rage, stamina, and mana. When you Rage you lose some Mana, etc. In the end the game balances the play styles and players have to be careful in how they play.
PCI: The character creation looks very free form. Obviously with your small team you can't make tons of different graphics, so you've made one character model but he can transform into lots of different things. You are making the variety in how players specialize their character, so they can build a melee tank, or a caster, or other variety.
DD: There are 2 main things to consider. We make a big difference between character building and the character visuals. We're a bit more limited in the visual options since as you say, we're not a huge team to make all the different art. The thing is that for the basic visual appearance of your character; his face, hair, beard, etc, we have some few customization possibilities. but also from my own experience in these sorts of games, once you have armor on you don't care about their facial features anyway. Though it's nice to dye your gear. So we just have basic appearance changes; skin color, beard style, hair style. We'll add a female character if we meet that stretch goal, but for the basic funding we wanted to spend our resources as carefully as possible on graphics.
As for character building, we're much much more free and much more open. There are let's say 3 layers of powers in Umbra.. actually 4 in some ways. You can, for each level, affect points into the four attributes, which are close to the basic Diablo stats. Strength, dexterity, constitution, and magic. Each of these points have an impact on your character; if you have a lot of STR you'll be able to stun enemies when you hit them. with blunt weapons, for example.
If you have a lot of dexterity you'll be able to dodge better. Constitution will increase your armor, that sort of thing. Every point you actually put into a stat will really affect your performance.
We also have passive skills, which can be something very classical like movement speed, more gold find, more magic find, etc. And we have several trees where you can assign points, and the more you add to the skills the more powers you will unlock. At some point you will be able to get new skills in your spellbar. Active skills you can use, I mean. Basically you can use six active skills, but one passive skill unlocks new skills. Dual wielding two-handed weapons, for instance.
Mercenaries, for instance. You can use a skill to hire more mercs at once, but they'll take a higher percentage of the gold you find. And you'll be able to do many other things with passive skills.
The active skills are looted as books, just like in Diablo 1. I really like that finding skill mechanics. You'll loot them according to how you play. So if you use a lot of fire skills, you'll most likely find more books with fire skills.
We also add the Apocalyptic Form on top of the three layers of power. We'll talk about that later.
