The Creation of Regions of Ruin: Runegate

I thought I'd explain a bit about why we decided to create Regions of Ruin Runegate. Something a lot of people told me after playing Regions of Ruin was "It's great fun, but I want more of it". ROR scratched an itch that a lot of people had, but it didn't quite scratch that itch hard enough with only 8-10 hours of content. This stuck with me for quite some time.

ROR was actually my debut into the gaming industry, I always considered it a prototype. It was a short term project where I wedged a lot of ideas together to try and make something fun. Fortunately it worked, but less fortunate was the uh... codebase. Let's just say, it got the job done but it wasn't pretty.

When I saw how well received ROR was, I earnestly wanted to expand on it. I wanted to flesh out the lore and balance the gameplay mechanics. Unfortunately, it was an uphill battle with the codebase. It wasn't going to cooperate without a strong foundation. I quickly realised it wasn't going to be feasible.

I decided if I came back to ROR it would need to be justifiably better than the first game. We needed better graphics, better audio, better combat, better story, and an overall better experience. I think we’ve managed that largely - I’m really proud of the world building, story, and overall feel of the game and I really hope you all will be too! We’ll definitely talk more about the world overall in another blog - it would be far too long to fit into this one!

But there was still one more thing that stuck in my head "There's nothing to do when you complete the game". I wanted to solve this. But in an exploration game there is always going to be a finite amount of content. It'll have to end eventually. I didn't want to rely on procedurally generated content because it doesn't have the same depth behind it.

We might have cracked the code on how to resolve this though, at least from a community standpoint. However we’re keeping that to ourselves until a future date, so you’ll just need to excitedly speculate until then!

Overall, we’re really excited to share this next installment of RoR with all current and future dorfs. If you haven’t already, please do wishlist the game, it really helps us out - and feel free to check out our demo for a taste of what’s to come on 14 April.

Yours, Steve