The Blog

Latest from the Team

Torchlight
Posted on August 4, 2009

Crunch mode!

Hi, I’m Erich Schaefer, one of the co-founders of Runic and a designer of Torchlight. This is the first time I haven’t been the lead on a game. I’m taking more of a support and mentor role and it feels great; passing the baton on to a younger and smarter team.

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been knee-deep in item design, giving stats, names and powers to what feels like millions of magic items. More accurately, I just cooked up 20 ‘Sets’ which are groups of armor, trinkets and weapons that combine to give additional magic properties to a character as they equip more than one. I’m sure this is a familiar dynamic to players of Diablo II, but I think we’ve handled it better this time around. They are certainly easier to make! Anyone firing up our mod tools will see that creating 20 sets is not such a tough job. I struggle most with the names. In any session, I usually come up with a few powerful sounding examples, like Ophidian Fang Grips or Magma Destroyers, then as I lose my ability to focus I go to joke-y ones, like Blue Steel, and finally degenerate further into nonsense with ‘gems’ like Leone’s Shootin’ Gloves. You’ll probably scoff at these actual examples of my brilliant design style, but I’ve been doing this for years, so listen up!

Torchlight
Posted on July 28, 2009

With the end of the month on the way, we approach our most critical deadline: Finishing this thing! We are in major batten-down-the-hatches, damn the torpedos, full speed ahead! mode.

Our lofty goal is to finish the nuts and bolts of content for Torchlight by the end of the week! That way, we’ll have plenty time to polish and test before PAX. It’s going to be a doozy, but we can do it, with the help of our friends pizza and Mountain Dew.

Torchlight
Posted on July 24, 2009

German magazine PC Games is running an article on Torchlight as part of their E3 wrap up, available to subscribers and in Germany on the 25th.

But for our global readers and fans, an all-new interview hit their website today, complete with two new screenshots of the first Boss players will encounter in-game! We also reveal the official name of the long-awaited third class: The Vanquisher. Read it all on the PC Games Website!