Grim Horde

Design Ownership

An arcade style, roguelite game made in less than two months with the awesome team at RedKoiBox.

Gather your minions, conquer the lands and become the Darklord!

Grim Horde is a fast arcade game with roguelike elements, where you lead your armies through the lands of the mortals, raze villages and claim souls.

Visual Buffet: a treat to die for

Classes and card upgrade system

Visual Buffet, or thinking in abundacy terms, responded to the need to offer players a tasty, immediate treat. I wanted to give the player a “sugar high” right from the start by purposefully providing a very unbalanced relationship between action and feedback.

The Player is able to spawn a Tower and attract dozens of minions on this side. The minimalistic, arcade-style design of the game engages the Player with an addictive core loop while giving a surprising degree of agency.

To embrace the fundamental OPness of the protagonist fully felt acceptable, as long as I could develop a constrained framework where such power play could follow the rules of a fair progression curve.

Gameplay by SplatterCatGaming
(118k+ views)

Each new class of the game takes inspiration from a popular dark fantasy trope (Necromancer, Banshee etc.).
Stats and power levels reflect the tropes of these iconic lords of evil.

The game uses a deck-builder style progression system. Player deals with interesting, fast-paced choices that alter the gameplay significantly and may turn the tides of battle.

Contributions and daily tasks

  • Researching hardcore old school experiences and identifying the spirit of arcade games to create a new vision based on roguelike principles

  • Design and assist the programming dept. in the implementation of a fast-paced, incremental gameplay loop

  • Design and assist the programming dept. in the implementation of a deep progression system

  • Create and edit pixel art assets (using Aseprite)

  • Balance the game playable classes, enemies, upgrades, levels and challenges

  • Regularly introduce and balance new content following a Roadmap

  • Listen and select the useful player's feedback to iterate on the game

  • Adhere to an agile development system and hold interdisciplinary conversation in a remote working regime

  • Write the design section of the devlog and assist with marketing materials