![]() One of the main challenges in roguelites is balancing speed and setting up the right flow of movements. Your mind needs to be even more engaged than your fingers. The best shooters are never just duck/shooting exercises. How to deal with a room full of major enemies? How to juggle multiple enemies? How to strategically use power-ups? Even when you go back to the roots, to Doom 2 or Quake, they were full of questions the player had to find answers to. ![]() ![]() Just a different kind of challenge.Ĭhmielarz: My philosophy is that a great shooter game is a great puzzle game in disguise. That does not mean we’re offering a reduced challenge, though. Sure, you will be handsomely rewarded for your great control over your character and the ability to accurately click on heads, but we want to offer alternatives, too. More importantly, though, I think people think of roguelites as games that require a lot of manual skill. It sounds like a paradox, it sounds impossible, but the solution we have is very much real. We’re experimenting with that aspect while still trying to keep the randomization and freshness of each run. So you cannot memorize it like a car track in a racing game. For example, in most roguelites, you cannot master an encounter because they are usually all random. They offer a persistence layer, you get to keep some of the stuff you earned during a run, and you don’t lose everything. Basically, many people didn’t enjoy losing all progress after death with having learned more of the mechanics as the only reward. You describe your game as a roguelite for people who hate roguelites, can you elaborate on that?Ĭhmielarz: It’s a good question because roguelites already are roguelikes for people who hate roguelikes. So, we’ve already been using the engine for fifteen years. Two, we’ve been working with Unreal Engine since we made Gears of War PC–that was People Can Fly’s first project with Epic–and then, of course, Bulletstorm. And Unreal Engine is mature and proven, and overall just fantastic. One, we believe that it’s pointless for an indie studio not to use an game engine. What made Unreal Engine a good fit for Witchfire?Ĭhmielarz: That was one of the easiest decisions ever for two reasons. It’s a pretty good motivation to go out there and hunt witches, getting all of their Witchfire to keep yourself alive. Magically altered in the dungeons of the Vatican, the hero is a great warrior but needs a constant supply of Witchfire–a corrupt form of ether, the fifth element that witches use to create magic–to live. Our hero is a Preyer, which is what the church calls a certain type of witch hunter. Maybe, it’s all three or more, but long story short, when we switched from sci-fi survival to dark fantasy shooter with guns and magic, we immediately felt at home.Ĭould you tell us about the game’s universe and its story?Ĭhmielarz: It’s a grim alternate world, one in which witches are very much real and evil, but so might be the church fighting them. Maybe The Witcher awakened some desire for good Slavic mythos. Maybe, it’s because Dark Souls heavily influenced the way we think about gameplay, story, and visuals. Maybe it’s because of our Painkiller roots, which was a game full of hellish demons and monsters. But somehow, we naturally drifted toward dark fantasy. Actually, the work on the prototype was quite fun. For the life of me, I cannot recall how and why we ultimately decided to change direction, but it’s not because we had any issues with the original idea. How did you get started with Witchfire, and what was the initial plan?Īdrian Chmielarz, creative director and co-founder of The Astronauts: Witchfire is a dark fantasy first-person shooter that started as a sci-fi survival game. Right now, the team is working on Witchfire, an Unreal Engine-powered dark fantasy roguelite first-person shooter that promises to offer a challenging but satisfying gameplay experience with multiple roads to victory. Over at The Astronauts in 2014, Adrian developed and published the studio’s debut game, the first-person adventure The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Ten years after that, in 2012, Adrian left People Can Fly and formed a new independent studio–The Astronauts, the third studio of which he is one of the Founders and the Creative Director. In 2002, after leaving Metropolis, the developer founded video game development studio People Can Fly, known for the Painkiller series and Bulletstorm. Over the next ten years, Adrian co-developed and published such games as Teenagent, Katharsis, and Gorky 17, a.k.a. Born in 1971 in Poland, Adrian Chmielarz has been a part of the game industry since 1992 when he and Grzegorz Miechowski co-founded video game developing and publishing company Metropolis Software, where he mainly worked on adventure games.
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