Recent content by Highelfwarrior

A wild highelf appears. Still around. This place means so much to me, when I browse through the old threads and see all the familiar names from back in the day tears literally come to my eyes. I'm here now rarely but I'll never truly leave.

Kissaki said:

Downloaded and tried out. You made me late for work this morning.

Edit: ok, first question: What determines training cost? With my first dude (surname Diccus - so of course I added the nickname Biggus) training equipment was 50 gold a pop. My next dude, it was 150. Ok, so maybe my first dude had some perk I hadn't paid attention to, but after a couple of fights with my second, price went up to 165. Same happened to my third dude: at first it was 150, then 165. Does this have to do with favour with my sponsors, perhaps?

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The training gear price starts at 150 and slowly increases as you level up.

The time it cost 50 was because of a backstory perk (professional aspirant gets cheaper gear)

After 7 years of solo development, the game just released in early access!

I've been focusing full time on the game for the last few months and I'm very happy to announce the game will be releasing in Early Access in less than a month - november 15th.
If you're interested and want to help + get a notification, wishlisting is the best easiest way to do that: https://store.steampowered.com/app/973230/We_Who_Are_About_To_Die/

Check out the new trailer I made here! Exciting times

Orion said:

I keep forgetting to join the Discord, but I do shill for your game occasionally.

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Thank you!! that's what I need

Count Delinard said:

I keep hoping it’ll be a spiritual successor to Colosseum: Road to freedom

That was my favorite gladiator game of all time

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It shares a ton of similarities. Basically merge Colosseum: road to freedom with M&B with Exanima and a few others and pour it into a roguelite genre

Eärendil Ardamírë said:

Big question is: Will it be modable?

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Its some kind of mortal sin as an ex modder but, unfortunately no. Simple answer is I had enough on my plate as a solo dev and I'm also not techncially the strongest + unreal engine is not exactly modding friendly. If I ever do another project I will focus on this a lot more now that I have some more programming experience.

Adorno said:

The camera being so up close makes it look much more brutal.
I remember in the beginning it looked cartoon'ish (incl. the character design). Now it's bloodbath mayhem

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Over the years it gradually became less and less stylised yeah! I just followed what the reponses were of the community and the project itself definitely 'matured' so to speak. There's still a bit of that idyllic larger than life stuff in there which is nice, particularly on the environments but I'm glad I got great feedback along the way to move away from the heavily stylised stuff.

Double post - sorry TW gods!

Hello everyone! Thanks to Gib and Noob for reminding me (accidentally) in the discord to post here!

Wow! A lot has happened. Development has progressed very strongly the last year and I'm happy to say the game has a rough blockout of all gameplay features, after 6 long years of dev. Its currently in the last stages before early access release.
I've added a load of career menu/strategic management features as well as kept refining the combat and all other aspects of the game.

I'm currently in another wave of playtesting and bugfixing and have recently given out access to a few hundred people to playtest the full game. If you're interested in joining future playtests request access (and wishlist!) here:


The Steam page also had a decent update so you can see the current state of the game a bit better.
Pop in the discord and join us, lots of people sharing screenshots and characters already: https://discord.com/invite/eCdUxht

The upcoming milestones are the Steam Next Fest where I'll have a public demo for all to play!
Here's some random imagery, mostly from the last months:

Lost-Lamb said:

He's streaming again in case you lot like me missed the last one.

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Thanks! Dont wanna spam the forum too much. I remember when double posts were a mortal sin.

Hey all, been doing some Game Dev streaming on this game, so people can see some of process and see some playtests, and its a bit less boring for me. I figured I'd start posting announcements here too, I'm live right now, gonna be for a few hours! Come hang out:
Questions very welcome.

Bloc said:

I know it's a completely different gameplay/type but since you are sharing more or less the same era, you can take a look at Domina as well. I'm almost certain that you already know it but still it was - and still - is a very nice game with different art-style. Since your game is not about managing the ludus but being part of it and ranking up, I guess their implementation of different gameplays/arenas would interest you more.

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I have played and like Domina! My game has a lot of small inspirations from everywhere. What I got from Domina is the bracket system, which has been in my game from the foundation. Every time you return to manage your career, you are given 4 different random match options to pick from. They fit inside brackets: 1vs1, many vs many, 1 vs many, and so on. They each level independantly so you could specialise in duels for example as a run. Domina has those brackets too, I thought that was super cool.

The nemesis thing was suggested to me before, it'd be a great fit. In fact, in the first game design doc I toyed with the idea of making each character that wins your next Big Boss and other variants like that. I wanted to give gladiators a lot of personalities and make them more persistent in various ways.
Unfortunately I cut all of the major stuff as its outside the scope of the project. Perhaps for a DLC or something if the game is received well.
I still try to add small stuff, like every gladiator has a name in the game as well that shows up when you target them during combat etc.

Bloc said:

Looks amazing! Also wishlisted now.

I had some research about such games before doing Ludus mod but I couldn't find any. Well, at least I couldn't found any which is made in this century with fine-good graphics. The only one that I found was Gladio and Glory and to be perfectly honest, G&G now looks like a crappy mobile version of your game


I know it's not the point of this demonstration but I think blood splatters can use some bump/normal map. I think you don't even need to overthink and simply slap a basic smudge normal/bump map. Currently, they look mirror-shiny on the surface, not sure if this is your art direction or not but I'm guessing it's not since you used normal maps on other surfaces already.

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You're totally right, I should get around to that at some point! Its just that my todo list has thousands of things (literally) and visual things always end up on the bottom : (
Most things in the game either dont have a normal map or a quick once-over heightmap-to-normals on top. I would give people aneurysms I bet if they saw how many shortcuts I take everywhere, just to get stuff done.

I played G&G and talked to the developer, its definitely similar in some ways, but in the end it plays really different and its a different sort of fun. (and its really fun to play, dont judge by the cover hehe) The pacing is all different and my game is a roguelite first, so its not all that comparable in the end.
The only other similar game I know of in terms of combat is Exanima/Sui Generis but my main goal was to take the jank out of that

Adorno said:

Have you considered getting a publisher?
So much work is done that a publisher has a good idea what the game is like.
Steam also has these demo festivals for games about to be released. That gives some exposure.

It looks super cool. In the video I don't see the player getting hit to the ground. That makes me a little nervous if the AI is any good.

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I'm open to a publisher but not actively seeking it out (yet). Wouldn't really know which one(s) to contact anyway. In terms of indies getting published there are a lot of horror stories too, so I think that put me off early on in development. But yeah, who knows!

I definitely have my eye on the festivals, I was thinking about joining the next one or the one after.

Thank you! About the AI, I won't claim I wrote a groundbreaking AI but they have some stuff up their sleeve for sure. They have a personality and will shift from aggressor to defender and such. In terms of difficulty, I've been playing the game for 5 years and I still routinely lose a few matches into a run :') I even lose 1 on 1 duels with the AI from time to time. I just don't add those into my edited videos heh. I've done playtest streams though where I showcase this stuff. Pretty happy where the difficulty/AI is at already, but it can always be better!

Eärendil Ardamírë said:

Damn, I swear, I just made two days ago a post at the modding discord about your project when I saw that trailer at some place and figured out that it's the project of a former M&B modder. Really nice work you are doing there! Keep it going!

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Wow! Due to the game having no budget etc, these kind of things are exactly what I need. Really, thank you

Do not look here said:

It's the worst when hiccups just keep escalating.

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Hehe, for context, I was showing off the progress on the physics when shields are hit (just testing it there of course)

So cool, I hadn't seen this post! Its crazy how many game devs have spawned from this forum.I'm sure there's many more.

To help expand:

Yoshiboy (Dan Holden) is working as a high level animation researcher at Ubisoft. His work is/will be likely in every major Ubisoft release in some way. Hard to quantify that though, of course, but I figured if you're in this thread you'll find that interesting!

I also have had my work in these games (as a team member):

Divinity: Original Sin
Dragon Commander
Rage of Bahamut (the card game - mobile)
Mayan Death Robots

KoA John said:

@Highelfwarrior I remember reading your old wings 3D tutorials back almost a decade ago, I stumbled onto this tonight. What a treat!

Best of luck with the project, it looks amazing!

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Thats amazing haha, its hard to believe but those tutorials are closer to 2 decades old now. What the hell...! :')

Orion said:

Highelf hasn't logged back into this forum for nearly a year, but if he does check up on us I want him to know I've got this game wishlisted on Steam and I check its progress periodically.

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I really do appreciate this, small comments like this are what makes me keep going every day