Hellenica Party Intros: Scylax, the Wandering Magian Part 2!

We're finally wrapping up Hellenica's party intros with some of Scylax's unlockable skills!

Before jumping in, there are only five days left until Hellenica is released! Hop on over to Steam and wishlist us if you haven't already.

Alright, so last time we introduced Scylax, one of Hellenica's magic users. (Check out Part 1!) Today I'll tease a couple of his other skills, starting with Fire Wave.

Fire Wave is great for close quarters, especially when you can group up some enemies using your other party members' pushes and tosses.

Once Scylax has powered up his Intensity, Fire Wave becomes even more powerful.

The empowered version of Fire Wave shoots out a line of flames in four directions, dealing a massive amount of damage if you're able to position Scylax just right.

The next skill, and some of our testers' personal favorites, is called Fire Blast.

Fire Blast combines Scylax's affinity for area damage with the joys of tossing characters. Also, he can use it on himself or party members for a classical take on the rocket jump:

When empowered, Fire Blast deals more damage and launches targets even farther, which can be very useful on boats and other tight levels with a lot of verticality.

Just be careful you don't knock your own party members off the edge!

Friday I'll be putting together a post on combat in Hellenica in general since our turn structure is somewhat unique. Check back then!

And let your friends know Hellenica is launching Monday!

Hellenica Party Intros: Scylax, the Wandering Magian

Hellenica launches in one week! Tell your friends on Twitter and wishlist the game on Steam!

And since it's Monday, here's the next character intro: Scylax, the Wandering Magian! Scylax is an expert swordsman traveling the world on a quest to find the True Fire.

His adventures have brought him experience, wisdom, and even a powerful weapon, but if you've ever played any role-playing games, you already knew that.

All of Scylax's skills, including his basic sword attack, deal Magic damage, which is doubly effective against Heavy defense types.

In addition to his sword, he also controls powerful fire magic thanks to his training as a Magian. Cauterize is a starting skill that can be used to damage an enemy or heal an ally at range.

Anytime Scylax uses one of his skills he gains a level of Intensity, his passive skill. These are represented by tiny flames hovering around him.

Once he reaches level three, his flames will turn blue, and his next skill will be empowered. An empowered skill is much stronger than the normal version, often dealing more damage, affecting a larger area, or even having a new unique effect.

An empowered cauterize, for example, has its damage and healing scaled up two-fold, and it affects an area instead of a single target!

There are few things sweeter than a 5-target blue cauterize.

On Wednesday I'll show off some of Scylax's unlockable skills and their blue-flame variants. Come back then! (Part 2 is now live!)

Also, please help spread the word about Hellenica's launch! Here's our launch trailer for easy linking:

Art updates!

Sorry for the delay folks, I've let the blog slip the past couple weeks.

In hopes of winning back the favor of our Internet patrons, I have a couple offerings in the form of consumable digital media! Yum.

First off, I've been putting a lot of work in over the past two weeks adding some new features to our level editor and environments. Specifically, the ability to shape and paint the level however the designer likes.

After the addition of just a couple new shapes, I did a quick remodeling of one of our first combat levels. Here's the before and after:

I'm still just using our 3 test textures, but it already looks much, much better.

The second big update this week came from Valery. She finished up a huge batch of animations that I've been busily plugging into the game. Here's a little teaser I put together for the new Scylax animations:

The game's really starting to come alive!

Hellenica Characters: Scylax

So, we've revealed three characters thus far, and each of them have been female. As I write this, it occurs to me that our readers may think the world we've created for Hellenica is solely populated by female warriors. As intrigued as I am by the concept, that's actually not the case. Fleshing out steampunk ancient Greece is challenging enough without contriving an explanation for the loss of an entire gender!

As proof, I present to you Scylax, the wandering swordsman:

Scylax is an expert swordsman who has been travelling the world for over a decade on a quest to restore the sacred fire to his temple. His adventures have granted him experience, wisdom, and even a powerful weapon, but if you've ever played any role-playing games, you already knew that. Don't worry, he's got a few surprises up his sleeves yet.

This is the initial sketch put together for us by the people over at YDY-CG. We had a lot of elements to fit into a single portrait given his extensive travels. We envisioned influences from Greece, Persia, and even the mystical (eastern-styled) realm of Hyperborea. The talented artists over at YDY were able to make it work for us though, and after a few minor tweaks we moved on to some coloring.

Our first pass looked promising, but we felt the dark colors gave the impression that he is a villain when actually he is quite the opposite.  Additionally, we still had some qualms with his upraised, fireball-wielding hand. It's hard to keep someone comfortably engaged in a conversation when you're threatening them with immolation at point blank range! Since we're using these portraits for the dialogue portions of Hellenica, we thought we still needed to tone it down a bit.

Here's where we ended up! The color palette feels more strongly tied to his relationship with fire, and the matching beard and hair in addition to some facial expression tweaks gives him the age that he needs to seem older and wiser.

What do you think?

If you'd like to check out more character art from Hellenica, head on over here!