Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition

• Genre: 2D Top-Down Gauntlet-style Hack 'n' Slash
• Full remake of the original Hammerwatch game
• Release Date: 15 Aug, 2023
• Developer: Crackshell
• Publisher: Maximum Entertainment

Full remake of the first Hammerwatch game, a top-down Gauntlet-like Dungeon Crawler game.

Currently my proudest work, as part of a small 5-something team, I ended up working on almost everything, from design direction for the new Shaftlocke Tower campaign, to level design, enemy and boss design, gameplay design, balance, and even some spritework!

The Shaftlocke Tower Campaign

The big new content feature of Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition was a complete remake of the "Shaftlocke Tower" campaign from the original Heroes of Hammerwatch game

Originally it was a campaign based on procedually generated levels for a roguelike game, for this one we had to actually create all-new levels. Concepted as a "small mini-campaign", it eventually grew into the longest campaign of the game. Created a small design document for it to present a vision of the overall design for the campaign.

Then I worked on several 2-3 levels long "acts", that being the Mines (with help from the rest of the level designers, it was a team effort), the Haunted Barracks and the Vampire Chambers. I also suggested to use color-swapped tilesets compared to the original Heroes of Hammerwatch campaign, as it used the same tilesets as the original game's Castle Hammerwatch campaign.

Enemies & Bosses

Besides implementing most enemies from the original Hammerwatch and Heroes of Hammerwatch, also worked and re-worked several bosses of the game as well. The Maggot Queen, Skeleton Knight, Arch-Lich, Worldfire the Red Dragon, Dune Sharks, Sha'rand, Stone Golem, Watcher, Vampire bosses were re-implemented by me, including redesigning some of the Shaftlocke campaign bosses completely to work with the original gameplay.

I also created all new enemies and added new boss attacks for the new Serious difficulty option. The overall design idea of this new difficulty option was to change up the original gameplay loop of the game by introducing new enemy types, variations and enemy attacks, especially to surprise a veteran player.

Spritework

Althought I don't consider myself a 2D Sprite Artist, I created many placeholder sprites for specific enemies. I also cleaned up some of the boss sprites provided to us by a contractor sprite artist and created scenes that weren't provided, including some attack animations and all the death animations. They were all meant to be temporary placeholders, but due to lack of time and the artists' focus on Hammerwatch 2, many of these made it into the final game.

Equipments

One of the new gameplay features are the "Equipments". It enabled the player to equip a single special item that would provide a special effect. After a few examples, I implemented and sprited each of them, based on Hammerwatch 2 item sprites. Halfway through development, created a "summon" equipment as a test; this was found to be really found by the team, so implemented more, creating the summoned creatures as well in both script and sprite. Also wrote every single flavor text for the items.

Survival Mode

The original Hammerwatch had a side-mode called "Survival Mode" that was a single level of challenge. As a side-project meant to be a mod, I recreated this level with new mechanics. Then created 2 more levels, using the themes and enemies of the other campaigns in the game. On game release, this mode was actually included in the game as officially!

Mod: New Classes

Had the idea of creating two new classes for the game, the Dragonslayer and the Druid, to challenge myself with creating actual playable classes and skills. I released these as a mod for the game.

The Dragonslayer class was meant to be a slow and tanky character that can take hits and deal melee damage. The Druid was created with the idea of "what if there was a support class purely based on creature summons?" As such, even the Druid's basic attack is summoning a stationary exploding creature.

Download the classes on the following links: Dragonslayer; Druid

Mod: Mysteries of Mistdeep

Originally concepted at the start of the work on Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition, it was meant to be a whole new campaign. However, I used many ideas of this campaign for the design of the official Shaftlocke Tower campaign.

In the end, only the Swamp area was finished, released as a mod on the Steam Workshop. The main difference of this campaign compared to the originals is that instead of splitting up an Act to several levels, instead it's one large area; of course, I found out this caused performance issues, but it was a worthy experiment.

Download the campaign!