About this project
Undead Legions - Resurrection
€3,292
70
Link zur deutschen Übersetzung
Contact us for a Steam Key for the preview demo!
Undead Legions – Resurrection combines fast and frantic top-down shooting with elements from the Rpg and the Tower-Defense genre. You can play with and develop four different unique characters that each have their own strengths and special abilities. Progress through dozens of increasingly difficult levels, show off your skills in unlockable arenas, upgrade your gear, and score for global leaderboards. The game will be released on Windows PC and Linux (XBox as a stretchgoal).
Undead Legions offers fast paced and chaotic shooting fun while still rewarding actual player skill and tactical awareness. There’s a huge variety in the types of enemies you will encounter and an increasing number of unlockable elements available for your support as you progress through the levels, including powerful magic circles that aid you in battle. Level up your heroes and upgrade your gear in order to enter the most challenging stages and arenas.
Heroes
There are four different heroes that you can play with and level up individually. Each have their own starting gear and a set of special abilities that they can learn at certain points. The Gunner comes with a slow firing, heavy spile gun and uses several types of explosives as a backup, depending on the skills he’ll learn. The Rogue carries a fast firing crossbow and places different kinds of traps, while the Mage relies on flames and fire in everything he does. The Priestess can heal team members and give them useful buffs and thus is a powerful backup character in co-op games. Apart from that, each character has a devastating super-special that you can use tactically when things tend to get out of control.
Magic Circles
Next to our heroes, magic circles are a central game element in Undead Legions. During your battles, they provide healing capabilities, produce power-ups, slow down or damage creatures, allow you to build and upgrade turrets inside them or help you in yet other ways. These circle abilities can be upgraded to a maximal level which depends on the specific type of magic circle you are playing with. Magic circles also differ in their available abilities, so each of them has its own specific benefits. There are many different types of magic circles that you can unlock throughout the game and these circles become more and more powerful. In any case, you will have to plan your tactics during battles and find a circle with the abilities you’ll need the most to succeed.
Power-Ups
Power-Ups are probably the one most desired thing in heavier battles. Once generated by a magic circle, they’ll be fired somewhere on the playfield and stay at your disposal for some time. Power-Ups are either supportive or destructive. Supportive Power-Ups will give your character one of several temporary boosts once picked up, like e.g. multishot or shielding. Destructive Power-Ups will unleash a destructive force that will most likely kill A LOT of undead enemies around you, giving you some breathing air for a short time. The rate at which Power-Ups are generated depends on the upgrade level of the corresponding circle ability. Later circles will shoot out Power-Ups in rapid succession once fully upgraded and will help you gain the upper hand against an increasingly overwhelming opposition.
Enemies
There will be a huge variety in the amount and types of encounters in the game, including bosses and semi-bosses, but also structures like evil (undead) towers and treasure Goblins. We won’t go into more detail here to keep the tension, but be certain that you will have a hard time with a long lasting fun factor.
Items
Last but not least, there’s dozens of different unique items that you can find and equip for your characters.These items will come in varying rarities and powers and will increase your chances of survival.
Progressing through the game means playing through or repeating available maps, earning gold that you can spend to upgrade your magic cirlces, and leveling up your characters until you're strong enough to succeed in a challenging boss arena. This will get you to the next Tier of available maps where your heroes await new types of enemies, new types of unlockable magic circles, new Power-Ups, and an overall greater challenge. 7 Tiers are planned for the release version (which makes around 70 levels), and more Tiers will come in regular intervals. While progressing through the Tiers is your primary challenge, there'll also be a couple of other game modes for you to unlock. All this will make sure that Undead Legions won't be a game you just play through one time and then forget about it. (see also section "Updates/Special Events").
Please note that all screens, especially the shell screens like the Map Selection and the Hero Stats, are all in alpha state.
Players will be able to create their own levels and share them via the Steam Workshop. Since the game will receive frequent updates (see below), there's a pretty good chance that some of those user levels will find their way into the official game content in coming updates.
The one most important thing for us is that Undead Legions will be a game that you can always come back to, so we’ll put great emphasis on long-term replayability. We will achieve this by adding new content and more Tiers frequently and setting up special events. How far this will go, of course, greatly depends on the success of the game. In the best case, there will be weekly special events along with digital prizes, like e.g. unique gear for your characters that you can only obtain during these events.
Current
An early alpha version of the game exists and is good fun already, but there are still a few months of work before we are there. Building suitable content out of the presented game elements and getting everything to fit together perfectly requires several iterations of content creation, playtesting, balancing, tweaking, and polishing. We don’t just want to get the game done, we want Undead Legions to stand out from the crowd and deliver a great shooter that you can come back for and play for months if not years.
History
We started our Greenlight campaign for Undead Legions in April 2013. The version we presented there was actually a fully functional game which has had already been made available for the XBox 360 and for non-Steam PC platforms. It was a very short game though, and lacked most of the features we are presenting here today.
Since then, we didn't work so much on the game anymore, until it got greenlit in January this year. Getting a Steam licence for our game was great of course, but we didn't actually really like it anymore. We knew that the core gameplay was good fun though, so we decided to rebuild everything around that core. We completely reworked the art style and began prototyping several new game elements until we settled on what we have now.
We are a team of 2 individuals, Christian Werner and Sebastian Braun from Aachen in Germany. We founded Key17 Games in early 2012. Our first game that we officially released was Battlepaths, a turn-based, loot-centric 2D Rpg, which is available on Steam since May 2014. Before starting to remaster Undead Legions for Steam, we worked on a successor for Battlepaths, "Battlepaths Ultimate", which we will continue to work on after Undead Legions.
Christian works full-time on designing and coding our games, while Sebastian is employed as a programmer elsewhere, spending most of his free time working on the graphical game assets.
There are so many ways to make a top-down shooter much more than just another game of its kind, but certainly, we can't keep adding features without knowing if people are actually interested in such a game. Every new feature means more time to develop and time for extensive testing and balancing once implemented. So one reason for doing this campaign is to find out if we are actually presenting something you gamers want to have in the first place.
Second, there's no mentionable revenue remaining from our first game, and Christian won't be able to continue working fulltime on the project until its done without additional funding. The targeted 3000€ (~ $3300) are the minimum we need to keep him at his desk for the next three months after the campaign, which is pretty much the time we anticipated the final development phase will require.
We have a couple of initial stretch goals set-up, and we'll definitely add to those once (and if) we reach the 3000€ mark. The game engine allows for so many additional features to be implemented, and we already have several ideas of how we could further extend the game.
We want to give a special thanks to Florian Braun from the band Hyems for delivering the awesome heavy metal soundtrack for the game free of charge. Likewise, we'd like to thank freesound.org and their community members for providing some of the sound effects we use in the game. While creating many of the Sfx ourselves, we still search through this site from time to time and in most cases find something that perfectly suits our needs. A complete list of the processed sounds and their creators can be found on our homepage.
You! If you read this, you have probably read through the complete presentation, which hopefully means that you liked what you have seen. That means a lot to us!
Risks and challenges
There are no actual risks and no real challenges remaining in the current state. Since Undead Legions is already greenlit, it will be available on Steam from day one. As pointed out before, the one most important thing now is to concentrate on creating suitable content for the game and make everything to fit together into an overall solid and well balanced game. If the campaign fails, we will still try to deliver just that, but in this case, it would certainly take us indefinitely longer, and we might be forced to cut away parts of the planned content and rush playtesting.
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- (30 days)