Quillbee’s Insane New Game: NOT Minecraft?!

This is not Minecraft but it’s hard to miss the similarities and there’s a good reason for that this is eldrich and according to developer David Pitman Minecraft was one of a few key influences in fact my first prototype of an eldrich level was built in Minecraft Minecraft validated my personal

Assumption at the time that audiences could forgive simple Graphics if the gameplay were great as someone who grew up in the era where 16 X6 pixel square tiles were the norm for 2D Graphics I felt like 16 X6 txel cubes were an obvious way to translate that look into

3D and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before but why am I talking about this obscure 10-year-old indie game today the short answer is because I really enjoyed it as an indie game developer myself I see eldrich as a fascinating and inspiring case study so

I reached out to Pitman directly to Ask for the full story on exactly how this game came to be but first what is eldrich eldrich is a roguelike action stealth game with a love crafty and horror theme don’t be deceived by the Cozy Library home world and the cutesy

Lowii aesthetic this game gets real creepy real fast what the heck is that dead now oh no you’re not to beat the game you have to collect three Souls from these magical books Each of which acts as a portal to an eerie procedurally generated world if you die

Then it’s game over you lose everything except for the books you’ve unlock and any currency that you’ve stored in the bank chest in other words you have to collect all three souls in a single life difficulty and progression curve are hard to get right in any game especially

Rogue likes I wanted some element of retained progress between runs but if the player retained the souls they would have no reason to revisit earlier stages on subsequent runs and the the game would have been very short where’re alrich significantly departed from Minecraft was our goals in the gameplay mechanics even in its

Earliest days Minecraft clearly aspired to be a broad open-ended game I took the aesthetic Simplicity of Minecraft and ran in the other direction going for a narrowly focused game with a rigid structure that borrowed more from Spelunky and Bioshock and Dishonored that ended up creating some marketing confusion because people expected a game

That looked like Minecraft to also play like Minecraft the mechanics of eldrich are simple and elegant you can carry two items at a time plus one special item which grants a passive bonus such as this Compass which reveals the location of the level’s exit you can find various

Weapons scattered around the map each with their own advantages and disadvantages for example the gun has long range but limited ammo while the knife can be used indefinitely but requires you to get up close and personal to the Target sometimes stealth is preferable to combat so items like the Rock and

Bottle can be used not only as projectiles but also to create noises that enemies will go and investigate you can also Crouch to move quietly and peek around corners to look ahead without being seen I won’t spoil all the surprises here but there are plenty of other interesting elements to discover as well

Such as Keys fountains ability statues and shops friendly faces are rare in eldrich so these shops provide a welcome relief from the otherwise constant tension uh-oh there’s a fish man please buy something do that do the voice I think you should do it with a glass of water so as you’re drinking you

Have to talk as if you’re underwater pleas why it’s hard to describe how it feels to play eldrich but it manages to create a very unsettling atmosphere this is especially remarkable given the game’s simplistic graphical style but I wonder if this Simplicity actually helps in this regard by removing distractions forcing you to

Focus on every sound every shape and every trace of movement so what oh I can hear something in the back like in the distance one of eldri’s greatest strengths is unquestionably its sound design but interestingly most of the game sound effects find their roots in samples that are freely available online

The way I look at sound design any Sound Source whether it’s a creative common zero sound from freesound.org or a purchase sound from an expensive Hollywood library is just a brush to paint with I have rarely if ever put a wave file that I found somewhere directly into my game instead I’ll take

That way listen to it over and over and find the qualities I like in it and then chop it up and EQ it and mix it with pieces of two or three other sounds until I have the result I want to illustrate this here are some of these

Raw samples followed by the final sound used in ID eldrich was developed on a limited budget with limited time so free sound effects were an invaluable resource that said let’s talk a little more about how eldrich came to be eldrich is by no means the first game

To be made by a single developer and I’m sure we’re all familiar with success stories such as Cave Story Star Valley abicus and of course Minecraft but while most other 3D games use existing engines such as unreal or Unity Pitman built his own engine from scratch my path into the video games

Industry started at SMU Guild Hall in Dallas Texas as part of their curriculum every programmer had to write their own 3D engine after I graduated in 2007 I continued to work on my engine as a hobby hoping to eventually make an indie game with it one advantage of using a

Homemade engine is that it is extremely lightweight the entire game once extracted is am measly 40 megabytes most of which is dedicated to audio which is indicative of the extreme care that has gone into making eldri’s engine as lean as possible the engine is also completely open source I’m not precious about

Source code and I’ve never seen a good reason not to release a Game Source I had learned a lot from the source code to big games like quake as well as smaller games from other Indie developers and I mostly wanted to share eldri’s Source in the hope that it could

Be educational to someone else it’s a simple lightweight engine and not of much immediate use to anyone else but there are good patterns in it the entity component architecture and AI Behavior trees are probably the things I was proudest of at the time with this engine already built it became the obvious

Choice to use when in 2013 Pitman had the financial opportunity to try making an indie project as a full-time gig this is always a risky move for any devel but did it pay off 10 years on eldrich is still the most successful thing I’ve made independently and I’m very proud of

The game it was but when I play it now I can also see it as other people probably saw it at the time the weirdly stiff firstperson hands the lowii aesthetic that doesn’t really give Elder chor Vibes it was an eight-month project made by one person and it looks like it and

It was too short and it was too easy but also too hard this last comment sounds cryptic but it makes total sense to me having beaten the game at first eldrich feels brutal and unforgiving but once you pass a certain skill threshold and you get some powerful upgrades under

Your belt the challenge is significantly diminished personally I enjoyed this aspect of the game because when I reached that point I felt like I’d earned it I felt powerful and the creatures that once struck fear Into the Heart of me now seemed like mere inconveniences Pitman has worked on several Indie

Titles since eldrich but eventually the money ran out and he returned to full-time employment Pitman sees this as a valuable opportunity to learn from other developers though while continuing to work on other projects in his spare time what projects are these you ask and then there’s Aldrich 2 I don’t have

Anything to share about it yet but it’s happening I really hope you enjoyed this video obviously this is very different from my usual content so please do let me know if you want to see more like this in the future as always thank you so much for watching and I’ll see you in

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