Dwarrows - A Peaceful Adventure/Townbuilder

Community Showcase Game Development
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Hello Unreal community,

We (Lithic Entertainment) are a small team of 3 who have been working on this UE4 game for some time now (started back in UDK) and we’ve been Greenlit on Steam Greenlight, and have been successfully crowd funded on Kickstarter.

Development is fairly far along, though we are still considering it early or pre-alpha stages. We welcome any and all feedback! I intend to update this thread with updates along the way, so feel free to subscribe to it.

Gameplay Trailer

Kickstarter: http://kck.st/2dx4wXk
Website: http://www.dwarrows.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LithicEntertainment
Devlog: https://lithicentertainment.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lithicent
Steam: Greenlight

Pitch
Dwarrows is a Peaceful Action-Adventure game, where the player uses the resources and treasures to build their own town.

About the Game
The Wood-Elves need a new home. With their land destroyed, the Elf Queen of the commonwealth has enlisted her finest colonizers to assist them in relocating and building.

Gameplay
In this peaceful Town-building, Adventure game, take control of three uniquely skilled characters to leave the confines of the town, explore the lush forest surrounding it, and work together to solve puzzles. Gather resources to build your town, invite the wandering elves to join it, and discover treasures within the ruins of a forgotten civilization.

City Building Details

  • Discover new buildings by trying new recipes at the blueprint design station

  • Strategically build structures that will maintain your town and unlock new abilities.
    Examples:

      - Build markets to better the economy and add to your town’s resource capacity
    • Build houses to increase population capacity
    • Build farms to feed and maintain your population
      • Build recreational and entertainment structures to keep your townsfolk happy and productive

Adventuring Details

  • Discover artifacts that provide bonuses to your heroes and your town
  • Encounter puzzling trials left behind by an ancient people (Metroid-vania style puzzling)
  • Find new building blueprints by solving the trials
  • Invite wandering Wood Elves to live and work in your town
  • Meet strange and interesting characters, and quest to help them
  • Switch between 3 uniquely skilled characters and combine their abilities to solve puzzles (Similar to Trine and The Cave)

Explore the woods to gather useful resources to help build your town

Discover new structures at the blueprint table and build a sustainable city


While searching the world for ways to help in your town-building goals, you will encounter the ruins of an ancient civilization. Scattered throughout are trials and barriers you must overcome, and puzzles to solve.

You will find treasure hidden throughout the ruins as well as the woodlands.

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Area Contrasts

Much of Dwarrows takes place in a calm/happy place (Dusken Woodlands):

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But other areas of the game have a different emotional beat, more sombre (Vigil Pines):

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The above two areas are part of the open outdoor world above, but there are also ancient underground passages.
These are the ‘dungeon’ or ‘temple’ levels in Dwarrows where the player goes through trials in order to find new building blueprints for their town and other treasures.

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This looks amazing nice work!

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:o Thank you!

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Looks super good! Is there going to be any combat in the game?

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Awesome!
Really Love it , Good luck!

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There won’t be any conventional combat system, no; If there are confrontations (maybe some ‘boss’ fights), it will be through puzzling mechanics, like in “Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons”.
We’re really pushing for the calm/peaceful feeling in the game, which has it’s own set of challenges.

Thank you :slight_smile:

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wow looks amazing. Love the art style

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Looks amazing.

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Thanks for the kind words :slight_smile: I’ll pass it on to our artist!

While not an update on the game (we’ve been in bug fix mode over here), this is how we’re doing on Greenlight at the moment.
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Late Update: Greenlit!

Hey all, I neglected to update this thread: We were Greenlit!!

We updated our blog with our Steam Greenlight experience: DevBlog#5 - Greenlight On a $0 Ad Budget

While we’re at it, some more screen grabs from the game:
One more for Vigil Pines
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And a peaceful group of birds in the delightful forest
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Our artist has been putting together a new area for Dwarrows called “Stone Man Falls”. The “Stone Man” is named Promet, he’s a main quest character in the works:

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He’s a big dude, so we placed down our Halfling nearby for comparison sake. When interacting with him, we want him to feel like a large lumbering type of character, kind of goofy but with a not-so-goofy story to him.

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This is the first area that we do with water and water falls. We’re aiming for cartoony and refreshing.

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Nice. Glad for your greenlight:)

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Thanks, and best of luck to you in your campaign! I was already following you on Twitter, so I’ had already voted for it (I like turn based games, gave it a yep)
Your game looks like a good one to me, I doubt you’ll have any problems getting Greenlit :slight_smile:

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Thanks for nice words and support:)

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I haven’t posted here in a long while, mostly because I’ve been working on business-y things, save games, level streaming, and bug fixing.

I’m still doing boring things, but we are inching our way through development and we’ve officially committed to doing a Kickstarter soon and I thought that warranted an update!

Look how official it is! :

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So official :slight_smile: ! Been following your guys work on twitter so far, looks lovely!

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Thank you!

Looks like I’m already a follower of yours too :smiley:

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Because the world is so large in Dwarrows, and it’s sometimes necessary to bring one of the three characters your controlling to an area, we felt it needed a waypoint system to help the player get around. We’re using an unlockable ‘shrine’ type of construct that we’ve called “Friendship Stones”. It’s still a WIP, but this is the gist of what they’ll look like:

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One of our newer efforts was updating one of the main playable characters in the game, the Gnome character. She was originally built for a completely different game (a team combat game), but we hadn’t had time to change her until recently (well, we didn’t have time, but we took the time to do it :stuck_out_tongue: )

Knowing how to use the animation tools far more than I did with the original character, I was able to get secondary motions on her hat and backpack using the Spring, Trail, and AnimDynamic nodes, as well as morph targets. We’re quite happy with her now :slight_smile: