Dragon Age Legends: Remix 01

acc

Play it now!

About a year ago someone at EA got the crazy idea to take the social turned-based RPG they were making, Dragon Age Legends, and get an indie developer to remix it as a fast-paced brawler. They came to me and, being a big Dragon Age fan, of course I said yes After nearly a year of working & waiting it's finally done and live as a week-long exclusive on IGN.

Really embarassing having my name plastered in the subtitle; it was supposed to be "Pixelante" but some other indie dev went and got a similar trademark in the US :poly127: Not happy about that and it worried legal, so we used my name instead. In hindsight, I should've changed my name to Canadian McDweeb first.

Did all the programming and the vast majority of design on my own.

In terms of art, I did a few misc things in the levels and UI, but mainly I did optimizations of existing assets and lots of animations (most of the main character animations from scratch, and lots of adjustments and tuning of existing player/enemy animations).

nullfed

That was pretty cool - I thought the movement/combat dial thing was a bit clunky at first but after you get used to it, you can get some good jumping/power strike combo action going. Stabbing the massive ogre in the face repeatedly was a good laugh too. Cultists weren't much of a challenge after that!
Nice stuff. If I used facebook, i'd play more.

Anuxinamoon

Oh wow this is really great! The big ogre boss fight was fun! My click and drag special move took me a while to get right, I was so bad at it, but once I got the hang of it it proved very useful!

Curious to know how long the development took, as you said a year but was that total dev time? I don't mean to be nosey, its just that indy dev is really interesting

Makkon

This was fun! Just wish it had a full-screen mode so I didn't have so much trouble with the mouse flying off of the screen and pausing the game.

nightshade

that was freakin awesome, i had more fun playing that then playing DA2
<edit> i agree with Makkon, it kept making the screen go dark too

acc

nullfed >> It took a long time and a lot of iterations to come up with that control circle. Cramming movement, combos and skills onto the left mouse button was hard!

If you can believe it, the original system was way more complex on that one button, but I realized it would take longer to teach how to use it all than the length of the entire game

Anuxinamoon >> Good question. I'd say somewhere around ~4 months fulltime, give or take a few weeks.

There was a big hiatus in the middle while I dealt with health problems, a few months were spent waiting for the Legends team to get back-end systems & assets ready, and I worked on a lot of other stuff in that timeframe as well.

Makkon / nightshade >> There is a fullscreen mode! Press 'F'

Makkon

OMG, of course!

I'm playing it again

Vysuki

Hmm, seemed pretty good, the only problem I found was it was easier and I lost no hardly any hp by just spamming normal attack, I didn't need to use the specials at all, as long as you kept clicking anything died.

Still quite addictive =D probably one of the better flash games I've played recently

Maph

Very addictive game! Action is really fast paced and just plain fun. I do think the controls are a tad wonky with the whole mouse only thing...
Is there a reason why you didn't go for a more classic control scheme ie.keyboard + mouse combo.

divi

awesome

acc

Vysuki wrote: »

Hmm, seemed pretty good, the only problem I found was it was easier and I lost no hardly any hp by just spamming normal attack, I didn't need to use the specials at all, as long as you kept clicking anything died.

TBH, insane mode is the real way to play the game, but a lot of people who play Flash games are at a much lower skill level than you'd expect (shockingly lower), so it's important to keep the regular difficulties super easy.

Maph wrote: »

Very addictive game! Action is really fast paced and just plain fun. I do think the controls are a tad wonky with the whole mouse only thing...
Is there a reason why you didn't go for a more classic control scheme ie.keyboard + mouse combo.

You'd be amazed how many people can't handle keyboard+mouse, WASD, etc. It's crazy. I've seen a number of people who never figure out that you can actually use both your hands at once! They sit there swapping one hand between keyboard and mouse :poly122:

I mean, had it been a personal project, I would have done WASD+Mouse (see: Forever Samurai), but I thought mouse-only would be a pretty crazy challenge to try and pull off and I do sort of appreciate the casual nature of just using one hand. Kind of relaxing in an odd sort of way.

Mark Dygert

Wow that's a pretty awesome game. The controls are surprisingly tight given the way they are implemented, but it would of been nice to have a jump button, running and jumping is kind of hard.

Micah

just spent a few seconds on it aannndddd love it... now for some more