Hey folks! My name's Stephen and I'm the main game designer on Dragons of Elanthia. Today, we're going to talk about the next game mode we're working on, called Siege.
When we talk about Siege mode, it helps to think about King Kong. Specifically, the iconic image of King Kong surrounded by swarms of biplanes. Except now, think of dragons replacing the biplanes. And instead of King Kong...
...see that guy in the middle? That’s a Titan. Enormous and deadly, Titans are this world’s living siege weapons. Got a problem that a dragon can’t solve? Well, just convince one of these guys to go smash it to bits! Of course, they’re not very bright, so they tend to just keep moving forward and smashing anything that gets in their way.
Currently we’re working on importing the Titans into the game, but in order to test things up until now, we’ve been using a scaled-up version of one of our riders, the Valkyrie. Now, we still have the Titan’s animations hooked up, resulting in a drunk-looking Valkyrie, which is hilarious when we’re testing. This is closer to what the Titans actually look like:
Siege mode features a team on offense and one on defense. The defense is trying to protect a castle at the center of the map, and the offense is trying to destroy that castle. The offense also has several Titans on their side to bash the castle to bits, and the team wins by keeping their Titans safe long enough to destroy the castle. On the other side, the defense wins by destroying all the Titans. Oh, and the Titans can swat dragons out of the air like they’re flies, which is honestly a pretty accurate size comparison.
Now, for a game mode that’s this focused on ginormous Titans and epic action, we need an epic map… both in terms of the scale and the action. A big part of the map is that there have to be obstacles in the Titans’ paths, because otherwise it just ends up being Team Deathmatch with some Titans walking around. So we’re working hard on getting good secondary objectives into the map, to give both teams something to do other than just “kill the other team”.
The map we’ve been testing on is divided into three lanes. Each lane has a Titan spawn at the start, and the offense has a spawn point at the beginning of the lane. However, as the Titan moves down the lane, the offense’s spawn point moves as well. And if the Titan dies? Well, then that lane’s spawn point won’t be moving any more, so it’s in the offense’s best interest to keep the all of their Titans alive as long as possible.
Right now, we’re working on building out the map, and we look forward to being able to show off Siege mode live! If you’ve got questions about the mode or anything else, let us know in the comments!
