While walking around Gamescom last year, we spent some time in the Sweden Game Arena booth. Within its boundaries we found Carry Castle’s Source of Madness an action platformer with roguelike elements. This year we found it again and goodness me, it’s had a major visual overhaul.
Still in development, the most impressive thing about Source of Madness‘ progress is simply it’s look. Previously, the game had a lot of blank space and was missing detail. Even though the physics kind of worked with the hand-drawn artwork, its new appearance is leagues better than the previous iteration.
But first, a bit about the game. You take on the role of a cultist who is looking to defeat the various horrific monsters that have appeared in your land. These monsters are made of bits and pieces of other things’; tentacles, huge eyes, strange limbs — each procedurally generated. In the last year, the developers of the game have been working to make the enemies more intelligent. They’ve made it so that single-limbed beasties are much smarter and can even continue to attack you when reduced to a single tentacle. This makes them look almost feral in their rage, scrambling over each other to try and get to you as you rush over them.
Watching these monsters move is very interesting, as they squirm and crawl like the things of nightmares. As you battle through them and move forward, you’ll start to find artifacts that can give you spells and abilities to help you out. These artifacts are nice to find, especially as you go up against much more powerful monsters.
The graphics have had a huge overhaul thanks to a helpful AI. Carry Castle’s Per Fornander explained that they used an AI to color and texture all of the current art within the game. This was done by feeding in the old sketches from the previous version of the game to the AI, setting up some parameters and seeing what exactly it spit out. The result is gorgeous and really takes Source of Madness up to the next level.
Source of Madness is set to release in 2020. You can check out a demo of the game on GameJolt or find more info on the developer’s website.
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