Eitr - Gameplay Video - Action RPG [ Isometric Pixel Art ][New Trailer]

www.EitrTheGame.com​

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"Eitr" is from Norse mythology, it is a black poison substance that corrupts whoever or whatever it comes into contact with. The story of the game is based around the world tree, Yggdrasil, the connector of the 9 Norse worlds, which becomes poisoned with Eitr, spewing darkness into each world.

You play as a Shield Maiden, her name yet known.

- Walk and Run cycles


- Concept Artwork​

Eitr is an Action RPG which takes inspiration from games such as Path of Exile, Dark Souls and Diablo. The game will be challenging and require timing and precision to progress through the environments. Players will need to use a combination of blocking, combos, buffs and positioning to succeed in battle.

- Combat System Previews

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PRESS COVERAGE
Some of the articles I've picked out that journalists have written about Eitr! *gasp*

PC GAMER
"An isometric action RPG with incredible pixel art."

Rock, Paper, Shotgun
"Even at this early stage, it feels great"

Escapist Magazine
"This is definitely the sort of game I could see myself spending hours playing"

Destructoid
"Eitr. Well, this looks lovely."

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-Stress Testing the engine with a screen full of Scrubs!


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Please post any opinions, feedback and criticism you have, it will all be greatly appreciated.
We hope you feel as excited as we do about Eitr, we can't wait to show you more!

Please Follow, Like, Rate and Share us on Steam Concepts!

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Looks niceeee

 

I worked a little with pixel art back on the days of RPG Maker VX, and this looks gourgeous, yet simple at the same time. I love it! (or maybe it's because I have a thing with redheads, who knows...).

 

Thank's! hoping to reveal some more updates in the next couple weeks.

Thank you! I started off with RPG Maker, and I think we all have a thing for red heads deep down inside

 

The pixel work is really good. I played Dark souls 1 &2 and you must learn ennemies behaviour, as you progress through the game you become better and learn how to deal with mobs.
I hope we will find same style of mobs where you must go carefull sometimes.
Will it be wepons, armors to buy and find and hidden ones in the game ? Some equiment rings , some bows weapons ? some classes ?
What tool did you use to make sprites animations ?

 

Thank you for your feedback! Yes there will be a limited amount of armour to use because creating extra sprites for the armour requires a lot of work, however there will be a range of weapons and other equipment to choose from.

 

I really hate this challenging game trend. I think its very stupid. The game looks nice but I probably wont buy it. I want to play games that are fun, not overly frustrating. That is wrong. Anyways, good looking game

 

There are waaay too many easy games. All AAA titles are made for "casual" gamers and don't offer a challenge even at the highest level for any decently experienced gamer. I applaud any attempt at making a really hard game that requires at least half a brain.

 

In Dark souls once you beat some boss after learning hwo to deal with it, thgis is just so much rewarding.The game is not cheating you, this is to you to buy/find armor and weapons, and learn hwo to deal with bosses.
It's a long learning curve before you master rolling moves or afficent use of a shield, as more as you play , the more you become expert and have pleasure mastering your moves and how to dal wih mobs.

Yes old school difficulty, but rewarding, i hope we will have more in that style.
Many AAA titles have casual difficulty for casual gamers , let us enjoy some hard game

 

Even though I don't like games that are too challenging, this looks totally awesome Great pixel art graphics and animations and the combat seems to work really nicely already

Seeing this motivates me to work some more on my own pixel art RPG

 

The ennemy on pics above have colors too dark, we can't see it's legs or torso , perhaps use some contour color around silhouette ? I thaught it was a skelleton the first time.

 

Thanks for the feedback, we don't want to scare people away by stating that the game would be challenging, we are going to be designing the game to try and appeal to both crowds. So some events in the game can be skipped by taking a different path to allow players to take an easier route to completing the game, but at the same time there will be parts of the game that are crushingly difficult for the more hard core crowd.

That is great! I'm chuffed to think that our game actually motivates others to works on their own game, seeing this has boosted on my confidence on the game itself!

I see what you mean, we will try and see what we can do, and your first assumption was correct they are actually skeletons.

Just a quick update to show the walk cycle animations when out of combat. Hope you like it!

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I react more to how a game looks than how it might play, so: I don't care if this is difficult, it just looks great.

 

I dont like easy games either. When a game is over challenging that it becomes frustrating, that is not fun. How is frustrating fun? Also, there arent a lot of easy games out there anyways but way too many hard games like Dark Souls. Even if a game was super hard, the game itself sometimes isnt as great because the devs have put too much time in making it difficult. Also for the other dude, seriously you dont have to make fun of me because of my opinion. I think this game has a great art style and perspective. I havent seen gameplay except for those gifs so I wont say much about that.

 

Spoiler: Casual Vs. Hardcore

Challenge is fun! The Dark Souls series is great, if you died it was your fault and not the game. I personally find it a little boring that in most new games the character is running around and doing all kind of stuff with a simple button press. Looks cool, sure, but makes you somekind of a zombie

Project looks and sounds cool! My only conern is how well the combat works espcially if the enemy is diagonal from you, as I found it most of the time in other 2D fighting games disatisfying.

Keep it up!

 

In Dark souls this is more learning after you fail multiple times on the best way to take out a boss or what to do in some situationas with ennemies around.
As level don't change, the paths you take are the same , so each time you can try other strategy or really quickly improve how you go throught a level to reach the boss with minimum amount of damage.
It's not programmed like hard to make you loose, but hard to make you master the game.

The frustration can exist on some exagerated bosses, but rest of the time is learning , patience and pleasure to to get more and more better at the game and earning Xp or objects that will make you it easy.
Hopefully their are hidden secrets some simple to get where the reward is a big weapon or armor that will help you a lot even from the beginning of the game.

I would say this is a game for people that are already acomoded to play fighting games for example where you need quick reflexes and fast evaluation of the situation.
I hope we will find some really good challenges in this 2D good looking game.

 

Thanks for the feedback! to answer your question the AI has been programmed to always position themselves either to the left or right of you and never at a diagonal point, similar to the AI on the golden axe games which line up with you first before they try to attack. This only applies to melee type enemies, it is not the same for ranged enemies who can attack you from any point .

 

Thanking everyone for their feedback and comments, just another update to show off the animations. Here is our protagonist running!



Stay tuned for more updates.

 

Enemy concept!

 

Interesting art style. It looks really promising. Looking forward to seeing an actual gameplay video

 

Very nice work

 

Cool visuals! I'm impressed!

 

Will the hero be able to attack and block in 8 directions ?
One female character only , no male character choose ?

 

Love the art. The bonfire immediately reminded me of Dark Souls, which I suppose isn't a bad thing.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys!

She can move in all 8 directions, and we have designed the combat the game to be similar to games like Golden Axe, Street Fighter etc, where you can only attack horizontally. The AI in the game has also been designed to behave like the enemies in those type of games.

When it comes to additional characters we are still looking at our options.

 

Another enemy! This time a more slow paced one.

 

Looks cool! I like the art style and the combat seems pretty interesting. The animations are quite smooth as well. Very nice work so far

 

Thin lines to draw arms and legs is a good technique to make characters very quickly.

 

Thanks for the feedback, we're working hard on making the animations look as smooth as possible. Not everything you see may be the final product.

Yes you're correct, we're glad that we chose a style that is simple and quite detailed .

 

I'm in love with the art style, big fan of pixel art games when they are done right. A+

 

Just a question, what is the tools you use to make 2D animations ? A paint program with layers or some specific 2D Tools ?

 

Thanks alot! really appreciate the feedback.

We're actually using just photoshop to draw the sprites and animate the sprites.

 

Another update showcasing our first mini boss!

 

wow, this looks menacing! I like it a lot!

 

I would like to play this, are you done yet?
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How about now?

 

Glad you like it, she plays a lot meaner too .

Haha, like the enthusiasm! hope you can wait just a little bit longer.

Just finished working on her light attack animations, hope you like it!

 

Another update with some death animations, been working hard on improving them to give the game more impact.

Hope you like them!

Infested rat


Our protagonist
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There are more death animations to come and here is an in game screenshot while we doing some game play testing, was quite fun to watch some people play through and be challenged!

bloody rats!
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At the moment we are working on improving the level editor, as it was too time consuming to place tiles and encapsulate them with walls, just finished creating an auto tiling system with the basics working and hopefully this will increase the speed of creating levels.

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oh wow this looks good, watching...

 

Looks amazing! Let me know when I can buy it!

 

Thanks for the feedback guys!

A sneak peak at our UI mock up designed on photoshop, with a couple of items.

 

Quick update with our menu design.


Also a look at the custom font made specifically for the game, the font was made using this program BitFontMaker2.

 

While I was initially turned off by the overwhelming similarity with a certain popular franchise, this is one of only a few projects on this page to show real progress, realistic goals, and good asset work.

Looks professional!

P.S. Dark Souls isn't even a hard game, someone's showing their lack of age Try Battletoads, brother.

 

Looks really cool I like the font, it's unique (compared to mine ) and still very readable. Looking at this makes me want to work on the UI in my own game ^^' Maybe I should just make it my own way and not with the new GUI system, at least then I know it's 100% pixel perfect.

 

Thanks again for the feedback and responses. Since we started development we kept everything quite secret and didn't want to go public until we where comfortable enough with the quality of the game. So what we have decided to do is start a historical log to give some more insight into where Eitr started.

As we've shown quite a bit of our main character, the Shield Maiden, our first throwback is going to illustrate how her art has developed from start to now. As we are a team of two, there's me who is in charge of programming, and then Derity who is in charge of the art.

I will be showcasing Derity's thought process throughout our protagonist's creation and he will give a little insight as to how he works as an indie artist.

The Evolution of the Shield Maiden​

The Shield Maiden from the beginning has been the driving source behind Eitr. We came up with the idea for the game whilst watching the TV Show "Vikings", it literally all began with the words "Would'nt it be dope if there was a game where the main character was like Lagertha?"​

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Lagertha Lothbrok is a Shield Maiden in the TV Show, The Vikings. For at least a week, we went on a Vikings marathon, we fell in love with the show and it's characters, we watched every episode and during this time we often talked about the idea of a game centred around a Shield Maiden.

At the time, we were already prototyping a different game, one that we weren't particularly excited about - and after finishing watching Vikings, it was obvious to both of us what we wanted to do, we wanted to make a 2D Swords and Shields Viking game where you play as a Shield Maiden. Almost immediately we sent our previous project to the good old external Hard Drive and started development on a game soon be be named,Eitr.

As the artist, my first job was to come up with a prototype of the main character. We planned on pixel art and originally the game was going to be mostly side-scrolling like Golden Axe / Streets of Rage / etc, also I had an idea of how I wanted the character to look... the problem at the time was, I had essentially no experience in pixel artwork. So I looked to the internet for some inspiration, one of the first things I found was the game "Swords and Sorcery" I really loved their art style, but I didn't want to completely copy their style as it is so unique, so I searched more for art that wasn't really directly from a game, but still looked somewhat similar to Swords and Sorcery, eventually I found these fashionable pixel characters.​

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Out of all the reference I was looking at, I really liked these and as I had no experience in pixel art, I wanted to start with something simple, and these looked simple enough - so I decided to try emulating a similar style. So I took to photoshop, put some pixels on the screen and after a little while I came up with the first prototype version of the Shield Maiden.​

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Looking at it now, kinda looks more like a UPS salesman than a video game heroine, lol. But at the time I thought it was pretty good! However, I did want to change her colors because I wasn't too happy with the all brown look she had. So I went back and looked at Lagertha from Vikings and based our Shield Maidens colors on one of Lagertha's blue outfits.​

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I knew this probably wasn't going to be her final iteration, but being so happy with it at the time (I was new to pixel art!) I settled with it and started to animate her, we used this character in our prototype game for quite a while!​

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Whilst animating her and drawing her in different directions and poses, there were times where in some animation frames, the character was a few pixels smaller or taller, but as we were just prototyping I didn't worry about it too much so I just carried on making more and more animations, but I couldn't help but think she looked better when she wasn't as tall...​

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This was her original attack animation, notice her her dress isn't as flat and she isn't as tall and some of the frames just outright make her look better than when she is standing idle. I kept all of this in mind for when going forward with improving her.​

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When I drew her combat walking animation, her whole stance changed from her idle combat stance, she got a little smaller again, her shield became visible and changed completely into a shield that looked more like a viking shield.

Most of her prototype animations were done at this point and I moved onto making enemies and some environmental content for a while. Whilst doing the environments, we had quite a game changing few days where we decided to make the maps fully isometric, whereas original plans were that the levels would be linear and horizontal, like the original Golden Axe games. This meant that we would need 8 directional walking and running for the character, as this was such a big addition to her sprites, I decided that I was going to redesign her.

Instead of jumping straight in, I took some time researching and reading pixel art tutorials, I wanted to improve my skills before remaking the Shield Maiden's sprites. This tutorial in particular helped me a tonne! If you're new to pixel art and want to improve, I highly recommend reading this tutorial: (http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299)

One problem I always had with the prototype character, was it never matched what I had in my mind, so I set myself a task to draw a concept of our character in a style that I'm more comfortable with, this task ended up being quite a high quality peice of work that we plan on making into a poster in the future.​

Please note: This image is incomplete, rough around the edges and a fraction of the actual image size.​

I spent a solid week in Photoshop painting this concept/poster (It's actual size is 4000x4000) and it still isn't finished! At the time of painting it, I really wanted to continue, but I had to get back to making sprites and animations, so armed with my new pixel art knowledge and a huge concept poster, it was time to go back into photoshop and draw up the new Shield Maiden!​

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This is what I came up with, in comparison to the prototype version, she's even shorter, she has a bigger shield, her legs are two pixels in width, she has shading, some dithering and she has hands! I was really happy with her improvements and was ready to start animating!

So I did, I spent the next week redoing all her animations in her new style, when I had finished, I couldn't help but feel like she was missing something and after a while I realised it was her hair... to put it bluntly her hair was boring and I found that it was too short to make good use of it in her animations, so I gave her longer hair and set up a color chart which I also showed to a few people and asked which they preferred.

Note to self: Make sure to be more than happy with your final concept before going onto animations, otherwise it could mean making additions to every single animation frame later on! Not to mention your 4000x4000 poster! ​

If you notice the bottom row of sprites here, she also has two-pixel armoured arms.​

The red and ginger options were the popular choices, my favourite was always the ginger, haha. I did really like the red and I'm sure some of you will too, but I felt it was a little too cheesy and overused, so I ended up merging the red, ginger and one of the brown hues to come up with her final hair color. As for the two pixel armoured arms, we all seemed to agree they looked better than the one pixel naked arms.​

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Since then she has had some slight pixel adjustments, like the removal of the "ear-pixel", some shield tweaks and contrast adjustments, nothing major, she's come a long way from her original sprites, I feel like she is now at her final stage, but only time will tell if I get picky again!​

All together now!​

That's the end of this throwback, thanks to anyone that took the time to read! ​

 

Great write up! I'm currently practicing pixel art. Hope this makes it's way to Steam

 

Thanks for reading we where hoping it wasn't too much to take in. We also hope to get on steam by using steam greenlight.

The main artist has been spending the last few days getting some props ready for building the next scenes for the demo map. Getting us prep'd and ready to start building extra rooms and scenes as soon as the updated level editor is ready to go.

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That's awesome. Thanks for sharing your journey to get to this point. I think all of us who have worked on games can relate. Going back and reworking because it just nags at you. lol Great job!

 

You're right GarBenjamin, especially because I'm a programmer I always build something, and a few days later look at it again and can't be helped to make changes to improve it. It's a never ending cycle.

We've been working on the new level editor and prop editor for our new map, and everything seems to be coming along nicely. Here is a screenshot of the work in progress map.

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Some additions to the lighting in engine, and some adjustments to the way the camera renders.
- Circle of light added
- Contrast Enhance
- Bloom Post Processing (This is a little more noticeable whilst moving. )

 

Simply gorgeous pixel art - amazing stuff!

In particular I love the bonfire and the dying rat (Never before have those 2 things been liked in the same sentence...)

 

Haha, thanks for that!

So for the past few days we've been working on adding new improvements to the level editor and trying to make the process of creating levels a lot quicker and less painful.

Working in isometric is a lot more tricky than working with a flat surface, had some troubles trying to work my head around that.
Here's some animated gifs of the level editor we are using to make the maps.

Painting the layout


( Sorry about the gif size tried to get it as small as possible, will only upload two of these rather than 3 )


Placing some props


Just a bit more and then lighting things up!

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One of the main problems with the old level editor was the time it took to create a simple layout with the floors and the walls to surround it. With what we have now we can spend more time on adding more polish to the levels.

With a bit more time, effort and better planning, the levels turn out a lot nicer than those above .