Almighty: Kill Your Gods
Developer Chat
Greetings Alphas!
As we eagerly look forward to the release of 1.0 together, we sat aside some time to chat with the gods, wait – Almighty dev team (same thing, right?) – and talk about where we’re at versus where we came from with Almighty: Kill Your Gods. A good ol’ sentimental opportunity to reflect on a couple of Almighty’s mightiest roots – are you in?
Join us as we stroll, er… “run, leap, and fly” down memory lane to appreciate the detail of some of the title’s most evolved features and the impact of player feedback and diligent playtesting!
One of the important pillars of development the Almighty team wanted to focus on from the very beginning, was to iterate and evolve the game based upon the feedback they received from the community and playtests. There’s no contest: you all truly helped grow the game into what it’s become today (and ‘what we cannot wait for you to experience’ on official release)!
Looking back at the earliest versions, Almighty started out with a style a lot different than the game we are currently heading towards in 1.0! A lot of the basic principles are still there fundamentally, but it’s pretty fascinating to admire Almighty’s evolution as a bigger picture.
Originally, Almighty was much more modest in scale and scope. For example, the character models we saw back then were a lot more cartoony and simplistic so that the devs could quickly produce art assets, and the islands were significantly smaller in size.
My how times have changed!
As their ambition grew, the dev team’s scope changed with it – which leads to a great example they wanted to share; and it lies within Almighty’s Offering Towers. The screenshot below shows the team’s initial concept and also pays respect to the earlier cartoony version of the main character – which has certainly evolved considerably!
During prototyping, the Towers were much more involved than what you see implemented in the game now. The Offering Towers had basic co-op logic puzzles with switches on them to open force fields that contained the Reliquaries… and even moving physics-based platforms! They would magically assemble into elaborate structures in real-time, and then disassemble afterwards.
While the Towers provided the vertical gameplay the team wanted, the more the devs played around with the concept, the more they realized the platforming elements and logic puzzles felt tedious – especially while under fire from numerous enemies. They decided it needed to be simplified.
The physics of the moving platforms and giant structures assembling/disassembling were causing technical headaches within multiplayer gameplay, and it was difficult to balance while keeping everything in sync. The team decided they needed to move on to a revised concept. While the current Offering Towers still have some platforms that appear with Reliquaries on top and offer the player a good vantage point, they ended up being a much less significant feature than initially intended.
On the surprise end of the development process, something that proved to be a positive implementation and player experience, was the extraction of carriable loot items! The team knew they wanted to do something a bit more interesting with loot, but didn’t want to just have the traditional loot drops and collection method. The Almighty devs wanted something that was a bit more integrated into the faster minute-to-minute style of gameplay.
Fun Fact: the Reliquaries were actually the initial theory for how they could let this idea unfold, and potentially work in Almighty!
In early development, the Reliquaries were much larger. Players had to push and pull to get them to extraction portals, as there was no ability to pick up items back then. Players could move the Reliquaries significantly faster if there were more players helping, which the team thought was a neat co-op mechanic.
Initial feedback the team encountered was focused on a slight discontent surrounding the Reliquary task. Players felt the system in place left little option for personal preference and choice in the player experience. That feedback became a crucial turning point in the outlook for co-op play integration and future plans. The devs wanted to provide natural opportunities for players to co-op, but not at the expense of forcing them to do so wherever possible. They wanted to maintain the clear notion that to cooperate with other players would be beneficial – but not a necessity or a requirement.
Once the Almighty devs reduced the scale of the Reliquaries and allowed players to carry them above their heads, it became the jumping point to their grand idea – “why don’t we shoot bits off enemies and extract them?” This proved to be a fun and beneficial progression that grew into allowing players to hit enemies with the items they were carrying.
Finally, the idea progressed full steam ahead to one of everyone’s favorite Almighty combat features: allowing players to throw those same objects at enemies to inflict damage. Not a bad chain of events if we do say so ourselves! Shooting a claw off of a Mite and then using it to defeat them sounds pretty mighty to us – wouldn’t you agree?
That’s all for today! Thanks for joining us for another quick look behind the scenes of Almighty: Kill Your Gods!
As always, if you have any content to share or questions for the team, please feel free to reach out. You can stay in touch with me and the rest of the Versus Evil team by joining our Discord and following us on our various social media channels.
– VE Renee
