MythForce, the ’80s cartoon video game, comes to Steam and eyes a console launch

After a year of synthesising the awe-inspiring, 12-frames-per-second, primary color, cel-shaded glory days of Thundercats, Masters of the Universe, Silverhawks, and the like in a video game, Trent Oster, the CEO of Beamdog, admits he’s been thinking about how much fun it would be to make the studio’s action-RPG MythForce at one point in a real cartoon.

But that will have to wait. The roguelite adventure, which burst into early access on the Epic Games Store in April 2022 (with an awesome theme song to boot) is now available on Steam, featured in its Steam Next Festwith versions slated for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox later this fall.

Still, Oster grins at the thought of that MythForce, the homage to syndicated children’s cartoons in the afternoon, just might become one of them. “We’ve seen people literally make fun of us, hey, this must be real; it has to happen,” Oster told Polygon.

“We have had discussions with companies about this MythForce become a full-fledged cartoon,” Oster told Polygon. “It’s something I’d like to see happen because I think there’s a lot of fun here.”

MythStrength, the first original work of Beamdog (now best known as a postage shop for RPGs) launched with an out-there premise that the studio wasn’t really sure it would work. Fortunately, they found that dressing up a first-person, procedurally generated dungeon crawler as an 80s cartoon works really well in terms of streaming and viewability. MythForce not only has it developed a cult following worthy of a console launch, it also has a merchandise store.

The latest release of the game, available today, will lean more on character and player progression, says Oster (thus placing MythForce square in the Category “roguelite” instead of “roguelike”). “A lot of the feedback was, ‘Hey, we love the game, but we really wish there were more progressions, or ways to develop your character, and in some cases personalize your character and give them more of the style you want. want. play,” he said.

The latest launch will lean more on character and player progression, says Oster (and thus place MythForce square in the Category “roguelite” instead of “roguelike”). “A lot of the feedback was, ‘Hey, we love the game, but we really wish there were more progressions, or ways to develop your character, and in some cases personalize your character and give them more of the style you want. want. play,” he said.

That means tuning the “outer loop” of MythForce‘s gameplay to add a “constellation system”, which allows players to place bonuses they’ve earned into a tree that suits their play style for each of the four characters: Rico (the villain), Victoria (the knight), Maggie (the magician) and Hawkins (the hunter). Players earn a gem through their continued gameplay, that gem gives an advantage to that particular character somewhere in the constellation. “Based on where you place the gems and what kind of gems you place, you can increase your attack damage, increase your energy, and increase your mobility,” explains Oster.

Oster himself plays the leading role as Rico. “My Rico is all attack speed, power and punch, and once I blow it all up I have to run and hide in a corner,” laughed Oster. “I really optimize the recharge speed of my ultimate ability, Rico’s backslash. For me it is a gift from God.”

Players can respect their characters’ zodiac signs at any time. “The goal is for you to really have that agency to figure out what kind of character you want to play,” Oster said. “And if you mess up, you can just roll it back and try something else.”

The constellation system and hub world (“The Citadel”) that further supports player customization with things like weapon upgrades and emotes (with other customizable options coming later) are the latest features for now. MythForce still only has one “chapter”, Bastion of the Beast Lord – a procedurally generated level that players can take on, both single and multiplayer. A step-by-step plan outlined last year called for two more chapters (Crypt of the Necromancer and Cauldron of Bats) by this spring; Beamdog pushed back those and other aspirations because “to begin with, we radically underestimated the cost of creating content,” Oster said.

“Unreal [Engine 5] is expensive to make art; especially to create level art,” Oster said, referring to the time costs of such assets. “If you build a lot of level art and you literally hammer it to look like an 80s cartoon, we totally underestimated what that would cost. It’s hard to make those environments interesting, and in the volume that we can entertain players.”

So, MythForce won’t have much of an in-game story for now. “There was a point in the project where we thought, look, we have 40 pounds of ideas to fit in a 10 pound bag,” he said. “So which ideas are alive and which ideas are waiting?” One of the ideas that couldn’t wait much longer, though, was gamepad support, absolutely essential for any kind of console launch, which arrived with an update last fall.

“Let’s say the projected budget and the actual budget have deviated quite significantly,” Oster said. He is one of the co-founders of BioWare, and as such he has to think in bottom-line terms no matter how cool or creative something may seem at first. “Aspyr has been incredibly supportive of us,” Oster said of Beamdog’s parent company. “They get it, and they get what we’re trying to do here. They’re very excited about its potential, and I think […] they understand the potential of the product.”

MythForce is now available on Steam as a playable demo which is “essentially the same version we have on Epic Games,” said Oster, “now that we’ve patched it. This is probably the closest thing to what the 1.0 version later this years will be.”

A console launch on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X will follow in the fall. The 1.0 release contains the two additional chapters. Two more unlockable difficulty levels (in addition to the current version’s easy-normal-hard) will also be added, as well as drop-in/drop-out online co-op play.

But it’s clear that the really-a-cartoon opportunity excites Oster and his colleagues at Beamdog. This spring comes the fourth installment of the streaming series I woke up a vampire (Amazon Prime, but only in Canada) Featured MythForce while the game played the characters in an episode set during a gaming tournament. “They just loved the look of the game,” Oster said. Beamdog, based in Edmonton, sent them builds of the game and promotional materials, which were used to complete the scene and MythForce seem even more like a pop culture phenomenon, not just a video game.

“One of the downsides of making something new is that you have no idea if it’s just your own internal madness saying, ‘This is great,’ or if your internal madness is happening to enough other people that it’s really a viable product. said Oster. “So this was confirmation. It’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re chasing something that’s potentially successful here.’”