Odin is getting ready for battle!
Written by Petri Pekkarinen
We are doing the final crunch to finish Gunnheim 1.0; the full Steam release will be on Friday Oct 16. The game’s current Early Access version includes 4 episodes with their unique bosses, and as the grande finale we have the final boss fight which introduces the unholy intervention of Odin’s apocalyptic binge in closed testing. (Read: played and tweaked over and over again by our dev team and some friends.) Our next step of course is to update the game in Early Access to include all the content intended for the full release. That way we can still get the final touch from the players that have been helping us develop Gunnheim from the start. Unless somehow after the final update no one comments on anything for a week. That would be the first time ever!
Let’s talk about the Odin fight, as some of you are probably already eager to kick his ass and fulfill the Gunnheim legacy. He is a colossal viking god, and his reckless partying alone has already caused the world to crumble. However, to stick with the whole vikings with guns theme we decided to arm him with quite unique weapons. In one hand he’s is wielding a tank like a giant hammer and in the other he has a chaingun, that makes the usable Gunnheim minigun feel like a peashooter. He is still trying to the take the edge off by gulping some intoxicating mead – also healing him in the fight.
Odin and his very distinctive choice of weaponry
The fight itself takes place in Odin’s throne hall that has nearly flooded with lava from the usual end-of-the-world side effects. He is not very happy about the fact that the Gunnheim heroes have come to wreck his party. The heroes need to reach him via two ledges, that will collapse down in the lava when Odin smashes his hammer… I mean tank… on the ground. Dodging hails of chaingun bullets and explosions while trying to interrupt Odin’s drinking will keep the players constantly on the move.
The model, scene and mechanics of the fight are currently being tested by our team. As this fight completes the (very light) story of Gunnheim, we want the challenge level and the feel to differ from the previous episode boss fights. After we feel that the boss fight is enjoyable and nothing is broken, we gladly give it to our Early Access community for the final test, hopefully with still several days before launch.
The full release version will also include the possibility to unlock and play Hardcore mode. After finishing the game once on “normal” the checkbox for Hardcore is available when creating a new game lobby. Hardcore mode has friendly fire always on, and on death players are taken back to the hub level and must start the current episode from the beginning. On normal mode, players can still retry any given level times. Beating the Hardcore mode further unlocks two playable class variants, that we will introduce in more detail once the Early Access community first gets the update.