Necro Story Interview – Rablo Games Spent 6 Years On Development

Pablo Coma: I’m Pablo Coma, the founder of Rablo Games. I was the solo developer of Healer’s Quest, which was released in 2018. I then started the development of Necro Story while also working as the Game Director on Outcast – A New Beginning (Appeal Studios – THQ Nordic) until the game’s release earlier this year.

Necro Story is a light-hearted creature collection RPG about a (kind of) evil necromancer who is tasked with saving the world. Guided by the playful ghost of a white mage, you’ll have to sneak into the Underworld to save humanity.

Gameplay-wise, you will summon undead creatures, cast necromancy spells and capture the souls of your enemies to turn them into allies. There are more than 20 different spells that you will learn, each related to a particular school of Dark Magic: Affliction, Darkness, Life Stealing, Summoning and Dark Pacts.

As with Healer’s Quest, we put a lot of emphasis on the depth of customisation. Each spell has its own skill tree, which you can develop in many different ways. You can also choose which allies you will bring with you onto the battlefield, modify their equipment and manage how they use the various skills available to them.

Pablo Coma: Indeed, capturing enemies and managing your new allies is an important part of the game. You can have up to 6 different characters in your team, and 3 additional slots are available for summoning only (skeletons and zombies). So that gives us a grand total of up to 9 characters in your team during combat.

A key difference with many other monster-collecting games is that here, your whole team is on the battlefield together, not one after the other.

Pablo Coma: In the world of Necro Story, nature has gone mad. The planet has taken some defensive measures to protect itself, so in the first part of the game, most of the enemies you encounter are natural elements that have been given life or aggressive behaviour.

These range from mushrooms, leaves, rocks and peers to more Pokémon-like creatures such as Zaardz, Deerz or Oowlz. Most enemy names have a single syllable, a double vowel and a final z to make them sound funnier.

Pablo Coma: The Dark Pacts are not exactly summonings – as the player already summons undead creatures – but transformations, a bit like in the Breath of Fire series. The Necromancer will take the form of the demon with whom he signed the Dark Pact.

There are 4 different demons to find in the game, each giving access to a different demonic form and set of attacks. Note that all of these spells are secret, so the player will have to find these locations and go through some trials in order to sign the pact with the demon.

Also, like all spells in the game, all the Dark Pact spells have their own skill tree, allowing the player to unlock new attacks for the demon, improve its passive ability, etc.

Pablo Coma: During combat, we have a different cooldown system for the player and for the other characters. The non-playable characters are all controlled by the AI. They perform an action, and then, based on their speed stats, they will be unable to act for a short period of time.

However, the playable character has access to various spells, and each spell has a certain cooldown before it can be cast again. So you can cast all your spells one after the other. There are no limitations other than each spell’s own cooldown and your mana pool.

The only exception is the melee attack. When performed by the necromancer, it will put all your spells on hard cooldown for a set amount of time, just as if they were a non-playable character.

This cooldown system is very similar to the one I used in Healer’s Quest, my previous game. Since it worked well, I decided to keep the mechanic for Necro Story.

Pablo Coma: At the beginning of the story, Jaimus, the necromancer, is in a state of lethargy, his soul separated from his body. In one of the first scenes of the game, Vivi, the ghost, puts Jaimus’ soul back in his body, bringing him back to consciousness.

We then learn that it was Vivi herself who put the necromancer in this state five years ago. But she had no other choice, as Jaimus is the very last human alive. Together, they will have to discover what has happened to humanity and try to put things right.

Pablo Coma: Both games use the same kind of humour, but there are some key differences between them. For example, the constant breaking of the fourth wall was a big part of Healer’s Quest’s narrative, but it’s completely absent from Necro Story.

I felt like I had covered everything I wanted to talk about on that topic for the time being, and I was looking for something different. For this project, I wanted to have a strong contrast between the dark setting and the very light-hearted dialogue, including burlesque humour in the interaction between the playful and super-optimistic ghost and the grim and moody necromancer.

Pablo Coma: The feedback on the demo has been quite good! Players seem to be enjoying the game, which is amazing and means a lot to us. We also received interesting feedback on some of the mechanics, like the one where you had to drag and drop the souls and mana fragments to the necromancer to absorb them.

Some players told us they found it somewhat tedious to do so in the long run, so we’ve simplified that interaction for the final game, and we think it’s more fun that way.

Pablo Coma: Necro Story has a lot of secrets, so this can vary quite a bit depending on your playstyle. But I’d say a standard playthrough would take around 12 hours. Having said that, we also have some replay value, different endings, 5 different difficulty levels, a hardcore mode and even an ultra-hardcore mode!

All in all, players who like the game and want to invest the time to try out the hardest difficulty levels should be in for a really long time.

Pablo Coma: We’ve been working on this game for over 6 years. Development started as soon as Healer’s Quest was released back in April 2018. However, most of that time was spent working after hours.

Since then, the team has grown a bit, and we’re now three people working full-time for Rablo Games. So, if Necro Story meets some kind of success, we hope to be able to deliver the next game before 2030! 🙂

Pablo Coma: On Healer’s Quest, I worked 100% alone, and I’m not a technical person. I used the game engine Construct 2, which allows for simplified programming in order to still be able to deliver a game on PC. The Nintendo Switch version was made with the help of a porting studio.

For Necro Story, I’m working with my friend Baptiste, who is an experienced programmer. We worked together on various games at Appeal Studio, and he has experience working on console games.

So, we decided to make Necro Story accessible to as many people as possible. From a development point of view, we had to take into account very early on that the game could be played with a keyboard and mouse or with a controller.

Pablo Coma: I would like to thank everyone for reading and thank Tech4Gamers for this opportunity to talk about Necro Story. We’re working hard to make this game something that players will really enjoy when it launches in September 2024, so I hope you’ll have a ton of fun with Necro Story if you have a chance to try it!