We have been working on things that are needed for the first pre-alpha and which will be available for all the people who will have pre purchased Full Mojo Rampage (Thank You!).

These are some of our goals for this pre alpha:

Play a full campaign

We expect the player to be able to create a new game, and play from start to finish the first campaign of the game. The idea is to have different campaigns in the final game. Each one of these will represent different challenges and goals. These quests are all related to the Voodoo gods (also called Loa). For example, in the first quest you are asked to fix some problems caused by a tipsy Baron Samedi, who made mistakes during a spell, and left enemy portals open all over the world.

Basic weapons gameplay

The main weapons of the player are the Voodoo wands. Right now we have about 10 of these that we consider “final”. The idea is that each wand provides different gameplay. Some shoot more projectiles, some rays, etc.

One of the problems we have found balancing the game is that some wands are very powerful compared to others. One of the wands shoots 3 very fast projectiles and applies tons of damage. It’s similar to a shotgun in FPS games. What we found is that once somebody had this wand, he didn’t pick any others, thus limiting the interest and sophistication in the playability of the game. As a solution to that we developed the concept of “wand energy”. This means that you will only be able to use weapons for a limited amount of shots. This amount is not always fixed, since you can increase this amount with mojos and voodoo pins.

Mojos and Abilities

Some weeks ago we incorporated the concept of “abilities”. We have now changed the original concept.
Abilities were learned at Loa shrines and allowed you to cast powerful spells unlimited times. They were very powerful, but we found that we never used them. Once you had a good wand and good mojos, abilities were forgotten. We have changed the concept and have incorporated the gameplay of abilities into new mojos and special God quests.

Mojos are the most important items in the game. Without them, your character will be weak. The more mojos you find, the more powerful you are. They can have passive bonuses (extra health, extra damage, increase your wand energy, etc.) or active bonuses (fear enemies, move faster for X time, etc.). The plan is to have a huge amount of these mojos in the game, so we have spent some time working on them, but there is still work to be done. We are open to ideas for new mojos once the pre alpha is released!

Balancing:

Balancing this game is a huge task! There are many variables that the player can choose and which will change how powerful he is. We are spending a lot of time balancing stats and values. We want the first version available for play to be as balanced as possible, but we expect that we will do some tweaking after playing with a wider audience after pre alpha release.

Random fixes:

In our game everything is random. From the drops and level layout to the quests cards structure you can chose when starting a new game. After playing a lot of games, we noticed a very clear pattern in drops and behaviours. We checked our random number generator and noticed it had some big flaws that were not noticeable until we started balancing things… funny for a game where everything is random; but we fixed it (we had to completely change it) and now it its working like a charm. Our team will make an update about how this works in the next weeks, since it can be very interesting (specially if you are a game programmer).

And last but not least, we have revamped the vendor and store in the game. Let me share with you a screenshot:

During this week we plan to release a new video with some gameplay footage. Stay tuned to discover more of Full Mojo Rampage!

Have any questions for the team? please ask in Twitter, Facebook or register in our forums! We will gladly answer any question!

When we started to develop Full Mojo Rampage, we set as one of the most important objectives to have levels that are interesting and beautiful in 3D.

At the same time we wanted everything to be random and procedural. If you decide to replay this game, levels will be totally different.

We came up with different dungeon and maze generation algorithms to create the basic shapes of the levels. Levels are based on tiles: think of them as a big array of squares that can be either “floor” or “wall”.

Once the general layout is calculated, we need to add art and eye candy to the level. This is done automatically for us at this time, but it required artists to create a lot of small art pieces that are placed procedurally. These are called tile sets. Each tile set has a different style.

The image above shows two different tile sets used in sceneries. We have tile sets for the floor, the walls and the top of the walls.

Once this is done, our engine then places decoration objects (DecoObjects) in the walls, the floor and the top of the scenery.

In the video you can see our game editor that we use to select the different sets and tweak the light and “mood” of an scene. In the game you will find different basic environments (the swamp, the cemetery, etc.) and those will use the visual and generation parameters we configure in the editor. This way we can make sure that the layout is fully random, but the light and the colors match the style of the setting.

The GUI (graphic user interface) and minimap on the top right corner are using some temporary art. Those will change in the next weeks to be more interesting. We are still working on that!

Soon we want to release some gameplay footage of Full Mojo Rampage. Please be sure to follow us in Twitter or Facebook. Drop us a line and tell us what do you want to hear us talk about in future Dev Diaries.

Welcome to the development blog of Full Mojo Rampage!

Today is an important day for the team at Over the Top Games. We can finally show you a bit of our new game that’s under development. Remember to keep coming back, as we plan to post regular updates and share details related to the development. Full Mojo Rampage is still in its early stages, so we would love to hear feedback from you as well as offer suggestions as to how we could make it even better. In the following months we plan to have an open Alpha available for everyone that pre-orders.

So… what is Full Mojo Rampage?

Full Mojo Rampage is a fast-paced exploration and action game that takes place within the confines of the Voodoo reality.  In this realm only the most powerful rites and powers can provide a safeguard against evil. The player controls a guardian of Voodoo, the so called “Voodoo keepers” and goes in different quests and pacts with the Voodoo gods.

In this game, players will explore random generated 3D dungeons and constantly discover new powers and mojos. Want to learn more? We have prepared an About section, where we briefly discuss some of the main points of the game. Go ahead and start learning about the awesome world of Voodoo!