Dev Diary #5 — Environments in Battlemarked
You return, Adventurer, and it is with an exuberant joy that I once again welcome you to take a moment’s respite from your daily doom Scrying. Rally your mind against the Dissonant Whispers, and let us Enthrall you for just a short while with the next chapter from the development saga of Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked. Take it away, team!
Hello folks, and welcome to our fifth dev diary!
Don’t worry, we’re not going to cast those spells that our excitable announcer suggests! But it is our hope to captivate you with a deeper look into some of the game’s environments and provide a sneak peek of the feeling you will get while playing. In the game, you will be spending a lot of your time from the top-down perspective looking at the encounter maps. Today we are presenting you with some of the artwork you'll see in the game's Quest Log and Load Game menu.
First and foremost, Neverwinter Wood is where your intrepid heroes will start one of the campaigns. It is a neutral, familiar setting for a fantasy world that lets new initiates to Dungeons & Dragons get their bearings before setting out on the adventure proper. Of course, no starting quest is complete without a little goblinoid menace, so we’ve opted for a relatively classical introduction. This scene is one that you have no doubt spied from our trailers and videos from a fresh new angle!
An area that we’ve not previously shown is a “sleepy little settlement” that has seemingly been set up to do a lot of industrialization. We’re almost certain that many of you are suspicious of how quiet and tranquil this seems, but we promise it is completely safe and calm. By the way, give us a Perception roll really, really quickly…?
What is an adventure without a small sprinkle of tension, delving into dubious cave systems of glowing fungi, drifting spore clouds, and that big sense of unease of “calm before the storm” tattooed into your soul?
Now, we’re not saying that this is a door that leads to something ominous and violent, but now would be the perfect moment to recover some of your lost Hit Points, as well as mentally and physically prepare.
You will face a range of creatures, lovingly referred to as “bitey-friends”, “poison-friends”, and “smashy-friends”. In the more common Dungeons & Dragons parlance, these are creatures that you will know as rats, kobolds, goblins, myconids, and trolls to name a few. The rest you will have to discover when you embark on your own adventure in Battlemarked.
This is one of the campaigns that will be available in Battlemarked, and each of these can be played in any order that you wish; though for those who pay attention to the story, you may find that the narrative threads cross over and intersect in places. Okay, enough with the teasing for one day!
For now, we’re going to wrap up the dev diary here without spoiling the really cool areas you’ll see in the later campaigns.
Bonus!
Here we have the Neverwinter Wood encounter map from within the game shown from a top-down perspective. This one is just a fun one because we’re excited. That’s it!
We’ll be back again in a couple of weeks with another dev diary that will give an introduction to the four heroes that we’ve shown so far and give a little more background on their origins. Until then, keep rolling Perception checks on our social media and Discord for more.