Fantastic news! As promised, we have tweaked the game a bit, added support for online multiplayer, added several new maps and exited Early Access, which means our main goals are fulfilled. There are still things to do to make game even more polished and challenging, which we plan to work on in the following days, but the majority of the things we wanted to implement are in and working great.
The game is best played against your friends (or foes, if you happen to keep in touch with them), and can be a great friendship building (or friendship ruining) experience. Just check the crew of Youtube channel ChilledChaos and their impressions about the game, and you’ll see what mayhem can be unleashed in a good company.
Next on our to-do list is improving the AI, so all of you who would rather beat the hell out of a AI bot than the human opponent, can get some satisfaction. Stay tuned and head over to Steam to try the game for yourself.
My name is Damjan Mravunac, and you might know me as the composer and sound designer behind Croteam’s old school FPS series Serious Sam and the philosophical puzzle gem The Talos Principle.
What you might not know about me is that I’m an avid board game geek. My collection is not that big (less than 38 but more than 36 board games) but it’s quite diverse, and I enjoyed playing them before I was married. Now, I’ll just have to wait until my kids grow up to be able to enjoy getting all these games out in the open and not worrying if those cute little devils will eat my figurines and tear my gaming cards, while making paper airplanes out of manuals…
But, enough about me. The reason I’m writing here today, and not composing music for Serious Sam 4 at this very moment, is quite simple. For the past two years I’ve been working on a digital board game, together with a few friends of mine. The idea was to create something I could play online with (or against!) my friends and not have to worry about reflexes and lag and me not being as fast in FPS games as I was twenty years ago.
Enter Battle Bolts. It’s a video game with a board game aesthetics, which might look simple at first, but takes some time to master. The basic premise is to fight against your friends in an 8×8 arena, full of stuff that can either help you or set you back. The trick is to program not one but several (in this iteration: 4) commands ahead, and hope you are better at predicting your opponents than they are at predicting you. All commands execute at the same time (mostly), and Battle Bolts soon becomes a game of cat and mouse. Except both have four moves to plan ahead.
The game went through several iterations and was showcased at both local and international gaming shows. Seeing how much fun people had with it, we decided to show and share one of those earlier versions on itch.io and gather your thoughts. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but basic movement and combat mechanics are here and will be preserved in the full version, which we plan to launch via Steam Early Access on March 25th, 2019.
For the best experience, grab 3 friends, 4 controllers and 4 beers (if you are of legal age to buy beer, of course). You can play against bots, but mind that AI leaves a lot to be desired, so real people are your best option!
The game changed a lot from the initial idea, and we had many iterations trying to make everything feel and play right, as you can see in pictures. Full version will differ from this one (hopefully all changes will complement to a better experience), some things have been changed, some have been replaced, but in its essence, core gameplay will be very similar to this one.
In short – have fun with this early prototype of Battle Bolts and don’t forget to check our Steam page for updates and news!
