The first video game based on the popular Rooster Teeth anime, RWBY was announced at New York Comic-Con last year. Grimm Eclipse is a hack and slash co-op multiplayer that allows players to control our favorite ladies against the monsters of the world of Remnant in an original story.
RWBY: Grimm Eclipse is currently available as a part of Steam Early Access and has the same feel as Dynasty Warriors , Hyrule Warriors and others in the genre. Grimm Eclipse senior game designer Abe Robertson explained how the game came to be in that style, revealing it all started with a fan project.
“So here’s a little bit of RWBY lore. This game was actually started as a fan project by this guy in Canada named Jordan Scott,” Robertson said. “He’s this young game developer, incredibly talented dude and he made a prototype, then Monty [Oum, creator of RWBY ] reached out to him and that’s it got started. What you see here is an extension of that. Moving forward we can totally make a RWBY RTS or something else but in reality we had a game and we decided to just take that.”
After a few months on Steam, Rooster Teeth brought Grimm Eclipse to the showfloor of Pax East 2016, where a new version of the game was showcased. This version of Grimm Eclipse , tentatively called the “combat revision” by Robertson, is the same build as the Steam Early Access but with some major changes to the combat system.
“In the initial release we got a lot of feedback that the combat system was a little bit shallow and it was just basically an X button masher game where all your attacks were on the X button,” Robertson told iDigitalTimes. “So we basically wanted to branch out. Added an additional attack, added some interplay between X and Y, which are light and heavy attacks.”
Players of Grimm Eclipse are now able to not only have the light and heavy attacks, but the heavy attacks can be charged as well as counter enemy attacks with the press of a B button.
Even more interesting is how the development team has made the AI of Grimm Eclipse more complex, and how they fine tuned the “moment to moment” gameplay that feedback from Early Access users brought up.
“It’s kind of divided out depending on which AI type you’re talking about. We’ve introduced the concept of a ‘guarded state’ where when initially attack some enemies they’re guarded so they take half damage,” Robertson said. “And to break them out of the guarded state you’ll have to hit them a number of times or hit them with a heavy attack. And this is another way of encouraging people to play the heavy attack system that we added. So there’s a bunch of features that all kind of play back into each other. Extending the AI to encourage certain aspects of the moment to moment gameplay.”
Robertson admitted that he never watched an episode of RWBY before getting to Rooster Teeth but immediately fell in love with the style and how entertaining it was. But as we found out, taking the RWBY property and making a game out of it was a bit simpler than you may think, especially when it came to designing how team RWBY moved and fought.
“Really the way we approached it was looking at how they operate in the show. It’s extending that because we don’t want to jump the shark and do something that isn’t canon,” he said. “The interesting thing about the RWBY show is, the way it’s constructed feels like a video game already and that’s because Monty Oum was a big video gamer and the Rooster Teeth founders were big gamers that sorta through osmosis all the video game stuff made it into the show and that made it easy to create the game.”
Yang’s shotgun gauntlets, combat fighting style and her ability to get stronger when damaged are some specific examples of how RWBY is easily translatable to video games. But with a drastic change in the combat system up and running, where does Grimm Eclipse go from here?
“We have a pretty big update coming very soon. I can’t say when but keep your ear to the ground. That‘s going to add new content to the game,” Robertson said. “Probably the biggest aspect of the updates is adding additional content. The Steam early access version had only four levels and that’s pretty small amount of content and we want to extend that. That’s our main focus and polishing all the gameplay aspects. But we feel this version is pretty solid.”
RWBY: Grimm Eclipse is now available on Steam Early Access.
