Dungeon Keeper Preview Pt. 1 – Rooms and Traps

During gamescom we had a nice long chat with Jeff Skalski, senior producer on Dungeon Keeper at EA’s Mythic studio. They’re remaking Dungeon Keeper from the ground up as a free-to-play mobile game. Yes, there are in-app purchases, which we’ll go into in another post but here’s a video gameplay demo from Skalski, showing off the dungeon-building features. There’s a written summary below.

[UPDATE: Also see part 2, where he talks about the Dungeon Keeper game modes, minion types and in-app purchases]

Your mentor in Dungeon Keeper was always the huge red demon pictured above, named Horny. Mythic have brought back his original voice actor, Richard Ridings for those familiarly ominous warnings like “It is payday“.

Your essential rooms are, of course, the treasury for keeping all that sweet dungeon loot and the hatchery for chickens to feed your minions. These are fixed sizes now, rather than the free-room room-design of the original games. Mythic felt that since there was always an optimal size for each room, better to just let players place that and add extras as and when they need them. You can move rooms as well, so there’s no worry about screwing up the space for future expansion.

You see, Dungeon Keeper on mobile is about optimising your dungeon against human enemies, not the AI controlled opponents of yore. There are no levels – you build a persistent dungeon and other players have ~3 minutes to attack it, taking your dungeon heart. Once the attack is over, you can watch the replay and spot how they broke through your defences.

If you switch Push notifications on, you’ll be told when someone attacks. Assuming you’re not on an important business phone call, you can swing into action as the Keeper, casting spells like Cluck Off to turn your opponent into a chicken, or summoning a dragon to breathe fire across the enemy.

Check back tomorrow when we’ll have another video up showing combat and talking about the in-app purchases.

Dungeon Keeper will be out on iOS and Android later this year.