About this project
Dungeon of Zaar: a Fast paced tactical.
€26,250
553
Dungeon of Zaar is a turn-based strategy game taking place in an ancient and magical castle where Explorers fight for treasures! For PC/MAC/Linux at launch.
- Turn-based Tactical gameplay
- Single player DRM free missions and training.
- Fight other dungeon raiders in online PvP matches, or play with your friends in local mode on one device
- Hire mercenaries from around the world and build your dream team.
- Easy to pick-up, yet deeply strategic games
- Fast battles (around 15 minutes)
- No RNG shamelessly stealing your well-deserved victory
- Craft items from materials won after every battle (armor, artifacts, potions) and use them to get the edge against your enemies.
- Progress through the dungeon with your victories, and try to sit on the Throne of Zaar.
- Premium Game. We think that it's better for everyone to have a lot from the start!
HD Version of the Trailer >HERE<
On the edge of a magical world, awaits the Dungeon of Zaar, home of the great, eponymous Archmage. Over a century has passed since his last appearance, and now all eyes are on the Dungeon, eager to claim a share of the spoils within.
You are an Explorer, leading a team of mercenaries (Knights, sorcerers, and monsters of all kinds) to plunder whatever treasures are hidden in the depths of the Dungeon. But beware! You are not the only one who has had the same idea…
Dungeon of Zaar is inspired by classic tactical games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Advance Wars and by great strategy games such as Warhammer, Pokémon and Magic the Gathering. Nevertheless, the game is different from your standard tactical-RPG, we want it to be focused only on strategic decisions and have a huge emphasis on combat.
Players will create their own Dungeon Explorer and take part in intense battles in the Dungeon either on single player mode or PvP online or local hot seat mode with their friends around one computer.
Explorers don't come alone into the Dungeon. They are the brains, but not the brawn! They are escorted by a squad of Mercenaries recruited from around the Kingdom to protect them and help them forge onward.
One of our goals is to put a strong emphasis on creativity in team building and let the players find new innovative strategies. Players will have the freedom to play the composition they want and try many fun team combinations. Explorers will be able to associate each troop with any other one, there are tons of possibilities, combos and crazy tactics to try!
Fighting in the dungeon grants Explorers experience points and random rewards to claim after the battle, such as ancient forgotten weapons, magical gear, or crafting materials used to forge new consumables and equipment ready to use in the next battles, allowing for even more team customization.
At launch, all mercenaries will be available to play from the start, but Explorers will begin their adventure only with a few basic items, the rest will be up to them to discover and craft! There is no adventure without a little challenge!
In Dungeon of Zaar players are « Explorers » of the dungeon, they will be able to choose their physical attributes and the goals of their quest. Explorers will also gain experience in combat, level up to unlock new outfits and rewards, craft and use items. We want players to feel that they are personally on a journey to the heart of a dangerous Castle.
The Pre-Alpha demo of Dungeon of Zaar is now live for PC and MAC! Everyone will able to enjoy multiplayer battles only: online or local hotseat with a friend on the same computer! Share it with your friends!
Get it on PC > HERE / Get it on MAC > HERE
Remember that it's still a Pre-Alpha and the game is far from completion. The online can occasionally be a little temperamental, but nevetheless we are sure that everyone can have fun fighting in the Dungeon and trying out fun team compositions!
Also, please keep in mind that there are not that many players on the servers right now, so queuing might be a bit long when finding an opponent. We recommend playing locally with a friend to avoid any inconvenience!
Don't hesitate to share with us your experiences, comments and remarks!
Players can recruit a wide range of mercenaries coming from around the kingdom. Powerful mages, righteous knights or weird monsters, it’s up to you to choose your troops and build your strategy the way you like. Each mercenary has its own strengths and weaknesses with unique gameplay and abilities.
A typical mercenary team is composed of 5 mercenaries and you can pick two times the same kind of troop to maximize you tactic! We aim to offer at least 15 mercenaries at the time of game release.
Each mercenary has simple attributes: Damage output, Health points and Movement, and powerful unique abilities like magical spells, special attacks and morphology atributes. We try to make each mercenary original, easy to understand an use. They can all have a huge impact on the battlefield and can be useful in numerous situations.
In the Dungeon skirmishes can take place everywhere, from the gates of the Castle, the Courtyard Garden, to the Library, each map has a unique layout with particular look and features.
One of the things we want to push forward is « Map events », each map will have a special gameplay feature that players will be able to use to their advantage whether it’s a drawbridge activated by an attackable pillar, an empowering rune, burning tiles or dangerous spikes trap.
Each arena will also feature « loot bags ». Those bags magically pop on the arena after a few turns and are here to give an advantage to players who takes more risks! Each bag contain powerful items to use during the battle, they can give you a bonus or help you recover from your mistakes.
Explorers didn’t come to the Dungeon with empty pockets! Potions, armor pieces, fairy powder and other charms grants additional power to their mercenaries.
Before entering the Dungeon, customize your strategy by choosing between multiple items you looted or crafted. In the game all items have the same "potential strenght", players with more crafted items will not be stronger than the ones who just started the game.
After a first turn used only to deploy mercenaries on the starting areas, mercenaries will be able to fight!
Each competitor plays all the mercenaries of his team during his turn in the order he wishes, then gives the hand to his opponent. You can move and attack with every troop you own in any order without any speed, initiative or action points constraints, that makes the gameplay really flexible.
Each turn players are allowed to use one item, may it be equipping a Cursed Blade or using a Health Potion. To win the fight, you have to slay three mercenaries of the enemy team before you loose three of yours!
One important feature we like is the "Soul Items" system. Those items are given to a player who have lost a mercenary in battle, its here to help him get back on it's feet and extend his strategy despite the loss of a soldier. It's of way of keeping the game fun, even if you have lost an important piece of your team. At the moment we only have one and only soul item, but we plan to let the player choose between 3 different items for 3 different tactics.
The game will be available on Steam for PC, MAC & Linux in English and French at launch.
If you pledged more that 10€ you'll have a steam version of the game + a Nintendo Switch version for FREE when released.
We love Nintendo and if everything goes well, the Nintendo Switch version will come a little later alongside additional languages! Questions regarding the Switch? Check our FAQ at the bottom of this page.
It’s been awhile since we started working on Dungeon of Zaar, it begin with plastic figures and cardboard tiles! The game was way different back then, but years after years we managed to make the game more fun by removing useless mechanics and keeping the focus on our core ideas.
The game had tons of iterations, and a we even made a digital version of the tabletop game, played by moving numeric layers by hand! *nostalgic tears*.
Finally we started prototyping it as a video game one and a half year ago working on our spare time, making the game bigger every week! We finished the game prototype last winter and took part to several video game conventions in France! We were really happy about how well the game was received, we even won the Jury award at Lyon Esport 9 (a big Esport event in France)! But the best thing was seeing players having fun playing the game, trying new strategies and giving us feedback!
Now the game is about 40% finished! The « core gameplay » is here, we have 9 playable mercenaries, 4 arenas, and an embryo of online mode, nonethelessthere there is still a lot of work to make Dungeon of Zaar the game we want it to be!
We have of lot of work for the single player mission mode, to be sure that we have a good AI and interesting content that requires tactics and strong replay value. But we would really love to add a story driven campain with epic boss fights! To give you a hint, it's not that far on our stretch goals!
We plan to have at least 15 mercenaries, 8 arenas, 30 different items and tons of explorer’s and mercenary’s customization for launch.
The « Explorer » part of the game is non-existant yet. We want players to be able to create and customize their avatars, win experience and level up. We also want to add the crafting and loot mechanics that will make each battle rewarding and will immerse players even more into Zaar’s kingdom. Furthermore we have to make the online experience smooth and we would like to experiment on other games modes.
Finally, the music and the sound design will require a lot of attention too! We don’t want to spend money on useless features that will drown the game down. We have a strong idea of what the final product will be like and we will keep this goal during the development process. We have planned about 6 more month of game development before releasing it to everyone.
Dungeon of Zaar is half the way!
We have been so far only with our personal investment, working on our free time between office jobs, trying to add one stone after the other as complete indie developers.
We hope that with this kickstarter we will jump the big step to work full time on the project, have strong deadlines, quality graphics, code, music and finish the game in a reasonable time while staying true to its original vision!
Check out the reward's descriptions on the right of this page for more details!
If you want to add any of those physical rewards just:
- Click "Manage your pledge"
- Click "Change your pledge"
- Add the costs of the add-ons to your first pledge without changing your tier.
The shipping is Free if you have already pledged for 75€ or more for international backers or 20€ for French backers. Otherwise just add 10€ for shipping costs to your pledge amount.
Your are done! We'll ask you details about your pledge short after the campain.
The game without stretch goals will already be a rich experience! But we are really excited about adding new content to the game. If the kickstarter campain is successful it will be easier for us to add new game modes for multiplayer and SOLO as well!
Risks and challenges
Dungeon of Zaar is our first game, but we have come so far fueled only by motivation! Our only goal is to release the game and let players have fun and try all the things the game proposes. For now we have been reaching our deadlines even when working sometimes at a distance, so we are confident that we will be able to deliver a good product by mid 2017.
But there is still some challenge for us with this game, and one of them is balancing all the gameplay options. The game will have plenty of mercenaries and items to choose from so it's gonna be a challenge to make all of them strong, fun, unique AND balanced. But we hope that the community and the backers will help us during the beta by giving their feedback!
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Funding period
- (35 days)