Lichbound a roguelite dungeon crawler
As the controlling influence of the Lich spreads across the Spirit Realm, a lone spirit's fury is ignited. Confront the shadowy Beasts and absorb their power as you fight your way through the Lich's domain to put an end to his tyranny.
Slay the Lich
Discover the hand-drawn world of the afterlife - the Spirit Realm - and set out to free its inhabitants of the ever-spreading influence of the Lich. Slash, dash, and shoot your way through the twisting paths and halls of the Lich's domain. Defeat enemies and become stronger, then make your enemies stronger to then become even more powerful yourself. Evolve your strategies and venture forth, until you finally defeat the Lich and break his all-controlling curse.
Upgrade your enemies
You absorb the powers of your enemies as you slay them, so why not make them stronger first? By Empowering the enemies as you go, you control how tough your enemies are. Take some time to learn the ropes as a new player, or go all-out and enjoy the power fantasy as a skilled player. Improving gets rewarded; feed power to your enemies and reap the rewards.
Find new synergies every time you play
Every run is different. Do you slash and dash through the rooms, or invoke earth-shattering explosions? Experiment and come up with new combinations on the fly. This game is not a deckbuilder - but it feels like one.
We started the development of Lichbound with a team of 4 people in September 2022, we had 2 programmers (including me), one designer and an artist.
During this time, we mostly worked on the initial gameplay and our general idea of what we wanted to make.
We wanted a roguelite dungeon crawler game that would be easy enough for non gamers to pick up, but deep enough for hardcore gamers to be able to put so much time into the game that they can optimize the way they play. For this reason, we had to come up with some interesting mechanics that would influence difficulty and give players enough freedom. This is when we came up with the idea to make your enemies your powers and to increase those powers you have to increase the power of your enemies. This made the gameplay easy for anyone just getting into the game, since the enemies are really weak when you start. But if you want strong and big powers, you'd have to increase the difficulty.
This became the main identity that we want to shape in our game: empower your enemies, fight hard and get stronger.
As of right now, our team has grown since, after half a year, we really needed more people to fuel our art team.
With a game like this, we would make so much content that we really required more artists to help out with making assets. With a team of six now, we were ready to get cracking. And that's what we did, we explored numerous possibilities for our game and worked on them, mostly first streamlining what we had and making sure that everything we made in the first half year would work properly. We made more assets, got our environment into the game and created more enemies to increase diversity.
We showcased our game with great success, we had so many positive reactions and plenty of people enjoying our game so far.
But that doesn't mean that we should stop working on our game, the game currently is nowhere near finished. We are currently looking for investors or publishers, so we can work more on the game and preferably full-time. We did figure out however that right now the game is lacking a bit. This is why we are figuring out new mechanics and systems and reworking some of our previous work to make the game more unique and bring the feeling of: “empower your enemies, fight hard and get stronger” to life.
Some images from Lichbound and the team.
Credits to the other members of the dev team of Lichbound:
Yara Hussein (Character artist) https://yarahappy18.wixsite.com/website
Luuk van Leeuwen (VFX artist) https://www.artstation.com/scytha
Jaydee Alkemaa (Lead Developer) https://www.jaydeealkema.nl/
Idsander Vroom (Environment artist) https://sites.google.com/view/idsander-vroom/home/
Max de Wilde (Lead Designer) https://sites.google.com/view/maxdewilde/home?authuser=0
