Game design is a careful balance between the familiar and the innovative. When we developed the first CastleStorm, we purposely kept a narrow focus on our target genre: lane-pushers. And then we used player feedback and our own growing RPG experience to introduce several new twists on the genre in CastleStorm II.
We took the Hungarian lore of the Buso and used them in Operencia as the keepers of the gate of the underworld, always guarding it to keep the gate closed preventing catastrophe. Download our Buso PDF for your next tabletop game!
Pat Holleman takes a deep-dive into how Ultima Underworld and Final Fantasy changed the landscape of modern RPGs.
Operencia was born from three loves: our infatuation with tabletop roleplaying, our deep roots in grid-based RPGs, and our passion for central European mythology. Many of the ideas we developed for Operencia started years before as experiments in Dungeons & Dragons campaigns—the stories, the enemies, and the dungeons. Sharing those experiences with players around [...]
While we wanted gameplay mechanics and early enemy encounters to feel familiar to players, we wanted to show players early-on that the world of Operencia was not typical medieval fantasy and that we were putting our own twist on the grid-based RPG model.