Posted May 19, 2023
Greedventory – an awesome pixel-art RPG adventure is now available on GOG! If you somehow missed it, be sure to check it out, because gems as unique as this one are an absolute must-have in everyone’s library!
We’re super excited to have this title in our catalog and equally as excited to share with you an interview with Oleksii Naumenko, one of the developers from Greedventory creators – Black Tower Basement.
We had the pleasure of asking him about the idea behind the game, its uniqueness, combat system and more! Hope you’ll enjoy the read.
Gorgeous pixel art, side scroller view, sassy humor, action RPG adventure – Greedventory seems like it’s going to be an absolute must-have in any video game enthusiast’s library, especially our community. Could you tell us how the idea behind the game was born?
Many years ago, when playing WoW, Diablo and dozens of other games I learned that players’ adventurous spirit and virtue is fueled in most cases by greed, an insatiable desire to have more and more of, you know, everything.
But there was a funny moment when it did manifest itself to me in its full glory. My friends and I were playing Diablo II on a local server, and the last party member decided to join us at the middle stage - we already had advanced through the game enough and he was just starting. So we all agreed that in order to catch up with us quickly he would "dupe" some gems, upgrade enough and chime in. "Duping" is an exploit where you can drop items from your inventory on the ground, and then replace your save files so when you load again, you have the same items both on the ground and in your inventory - duplicated. Hours and hours passed by, not a sound from the guy, so at last I went to check up on him. And boy, what did I see! For some reason he decided to return from Lut Gholein, the location where you get the quest Cube needed to fuse the gems, to the very first location. So I came to Rogue Encampment to see it absolutely flooded with gems, and skulls, and other stuff, tons of them lying all over the place and there he was - standing in the middle of the shiny piles and duping, and duping, and he just couldn’t stop. Obviously, he couldn’t make use of such quantities, but was hypnotized with the process. Our whole voice chat burst in laughter, sure, disarmed with this Ultimate Player’s Greed.
As for the sassy humor, the atmosphere and the overall look there were a lot of influences accumulated through the years. The irony of the idea of the “ideal, the very best RPG” you will create yourself is one side. The other side is the bizarreness. I’ve always appreciated it, but the bizarreness alone can be empty and pointless, it has to be supported with some feelings. Beauty in ugliness and beautiful wickedness are my cup of weird imagination tea, so we tried to do just that.
Mechanically it comes from the idea of an ultimate constraint: can we create a truly intense and interesting combat using the mouse as a main medium between the player and the enemy? And don’t end up with a simple clicker.
Greedventory stands out from the very first look at it. But what would you say makes this title special the most?
It’s really hard to point out something the most special in your own game, but I think I have one thing, which I couldn’t predict from the start. It’s the amount of love the team put into the small details. In some passionate cases, maybe even more than I was ready for them to. We hope that the players will be able to feel that! In terms of the game itself - this is up to the audience to decide.
Striking, parrying, casting powerful spells on the enemies – all with the clicks of our mice. As an action RPG we expect combat to be one the main focuses of Greedventory, and a very intriguing one too. Could you shed more light on it?
Sure, we do love intense combat systems in games. An obvious inspiration is the Souls series: immersive and demanding combat, obstacles and bosses that are interesting to learn and overcome.
We wanted to make the fighting process to both absorb the full player’s attention and feel very reactive and fun. The combat is fast-paced and it involves two levels of thinking - your brain for the builds and strategy, spell combinations, pacing yourself, your muscle memory, and your spinal cord - requiring accuracy, reaction and remembering timing patterns.
Apart from the reactive parrying there is a spell system with a few experimental things in it too. There are different kinds of rings (and the rings you wear give you the spells), some of them are Vibrance rings. Vibrance spells allow you to stack a damaging status of some Element on your enemy, and the second part of each Vibrance spell interacts with a certain Element, so you can combine your rings in the chains of effects. And the spells' usage is fused with your basic moves and strikes, so the spells supplement the main combat and add variety.
And what about the difficulty of the game? It seems like the encounters won’t be a piece of cake, but should we expect to grind our teeth on some enemies?
Yeah, the game is designed to be hardcore-ish. During the development process and the playtest sessions we carefully observed the reactions and feedback to tweak it, balancing between being too hard and ‘designed level of frustration’ while being rewarding. For some of the players even the nerfed version appeared a little too unnerving, but some of them have beaten the most brutal version with glory, but not without struggle. Amazing streamer Dan Gheesling even came up with the term "suffercore" in the process. We love it, to be honest!
Still, the feedback was different and the mechanics are unusual, so we had to make a difficult decision - to add a difficulty setting. We won’t tell you what it does, but it’s there.
We hope the audience will enjoy the challenge brought by the bosses and various events we created.
Were there any challenges that you’ve managed to overcome during the development process?
Well, a large part of the development process was going under the war, so it was a challenge itself to restore, continue and finish it. Apart from this, the game is large and involves a lot of technology tricks in graphics, mechanics, etc. Making those pixels dance as we want them to is a sweaty job. So we had to come up with a lot of pipelines and processes for the art, coding and tools for game design.
Anything you’d like to say to our community before they’ll go on an amazing adventure within Greedventory’s world?
Have fun! Share your sick looks built from the items you’ll manage to hoard and come brag about defeating the final boss to our Discord!
We’d like to thank Oleksii for his great answers, as well as the whole team of Black Tower Basement and Nordcurrent Labs for making this amazing game happen. There’s one thing left to do – time to explore a brutal realm of Greedventory!
We’re super excited to have this title in our catalog and equally as excited to share with you an interview with Oleksii Naumenko, one of the developers from Greedventory creators – Black Tower Basement.
We had the pleasure of asking him about the idea behind the game, its uniqueness, combat system and more! Hope you’ll enjoy the read.
Gorgeous pixel art, side scroller view, sassy humor, action RPG adventure – Greedventory seems like it’s going to be an absolute must-have in any video game enthusiast’s library, especially our community. Could you tell us how the idea behind the game was born?
Many years ago, when playing WoW, Diablo and dozens of other games I learned that players’ adventurous spirit and virtue is fueled in most cases by greed, an insatiable desire to have more and more of, you know, everything.
But there was a funny moment when it did manifest itself to me in its full glory. My friends and I were playing Diablo II on a local server, and the last party member decided to join us at the middle stage - we already had advanced through the game enough and he was just starting. So we all agreed that in order to catch up with us quickly he would "dupe" some gems, upgrade enough and chime in. "Duping" is an exploit where you can drop items from your inventory on the ground, and then replace your save files so when you load again, you have the same items both on the ground and in your inventory - duplicated. Hours and hours passed by, not a sound from the guy, so at last I went to check up on him. And boy, what did I see! For some reason he decided to return from Lut Gholein, the location where you get the quest Cube needed to fuse the gems, to the very first location. So I came to Rogue Encampment to see it absolutely flooded with gems, and skulls, and other stuff, tons of them lying all over the place and there he was - standing in the middle of the shiny piles and duping, and duping, and he just couldn’t stop. Obviously, he couldn’t make use of such quantities, but was hypnotized with the process. Our whole voice chat burst in laughter, sure, disarmed with this Ultimate Player’s Greed.
As for the sassy humor, the atmosphere and the overall look there were a lot of influences accumulated through the years. The irony of the idea of the “ideal, the very best RPG” you will create yourself is one side. The other side is the bizarreness. I’ve always appreciated it, but the bizarreness alone can be empty and pointless, it has to be supported with some feelings. Beauty in ugliness and beautiful wickedness are my cup of weird imagination tea, so we tried to do just that.
Mechanically it comes from the idea of an ultimate constraint: can we create a truly intense and interesting combat using the mouse as a main medium between the player and the enemy? And don’t end up with a simple clicker.
Greedventory stands out from the very first look at it. But what would you say makes this title special the most?
It’s really hard to point out something the most special in your own game, but I think I have one thing, which I couldn’t predict from the start. It’s the amount of love the team put into the small details. In some passionate cases, maybe even more than I was ready for them to. We hope that the players will be able to feel that! In terms of the game itself - this is up to the audience to decide.
Striking, parrying, casting powerful spells on the enemies – all with the clicks of our mice. As an action RPG we expect combat to be one the main focuses of Greedventory, and a very intriguing one too. Could you shed more light on it?
Sure, we do love intense combat systems in games. An obvious inspiration is the Souls series: immersive and demanding combat, obstacles and bosses that are interesting to learn and overcome.
We wanted to make the fighting process to both absorb the full player’s attention and feel very reactive and fun. The combat is fast-paced and it involves two levels of thinking - your brain for the builds and strategy, spell combinations, pacing yourself, your muscle memory, and your spinal cord - requiring accuracy, reaction and remembering timing patterns.
Apart from the reactive parrying there is a spell system with a few experimental things in it too. There are different kinds of rings (and the rings you wear give you the spells), some of them are Vibrance rings. Vibrance spells allow you to stack a damaging status of some Element on your enemy, and the second part of each Vibrance spell interacts with a certain Element, so you can combine your rings in the chains of effects. And the spells' usage is fused with your basic moves and strikes, so the spells supplement the main combat and add variety.
And what about the difficulty of the game? It seems like the encounters won’t be a piece of cake, but should we expect to grind our teeth on some enemies?
Yeah, the game is designed to be hardcore-ish. During the development process and the playtest sessions we carefully observed the reactions and feedback to tweak it, balancing between being too hard and ‘designed level of frustration’ while being rewarding. For some of the players even the nerfed version appeared a little too unnerving, but some of them have beaten the most brutal version with glory, but not without struggle. Amazing streamer Dan Gheesling even came up with the term "suffercore" in the process. We love it, to be honest!
Still, the feedback was different and the mechanics are unusual, so we had to make a difficult decision - to add a difficulty setting. We won’t tell you what it does, but it’s there.
We hope the audience will enjoy the challenge brought by the bosses and various events we created.
Were there any challenges that you’ve managed to overcome during the development process?
Well, a large part of the development process was going under the war, so it was a challenge itself to restore, continue and finish it. Apart from this, the game is large and involves a lot of technology tricks in graphics, mechanics, etc. Making those pixels dance as we want them to is a sweaty job. So we had to come up with a lot of pipelines and processes for the art, coding and tools for game design.
Anything you’d like to say to our community before they’ll go on an amazing adventure within Greedventory’s world?
Have fun! Share your sick looks built from the items you’ll manage to hoard and come brag about defeating the final boss to our Discord!
We’d like to thank Oleksii for his great answers, as well as the whole team of Black Tower Basement and Nordcurrent Labs for making this amazing game happen. There’s one thing left to do – time to explore a brutal realm of Greedventory!
