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We chatted with Luis Nogueira, CEO at Digitality Games about their upcoming heavy metal necromancy RPG.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, this is the Barcelona Game Fest, this is the final day and I'm here joined by Luis.
Learning a little bit more about an incremental game, it's not that it goes mental, it is about the increment, right?
Yeah, it is."
"Which is Necromental and it's nice to learn about Portuguese games, I always love, you guys love Portugal.
So, what can you tell me is the concept using this incremental sort of RPG approach to it?
So, incrementals are traditionally more akin to, you know, idlers or clickers.
What we're trying to do is really get the power fantasy out of incrementals that, you know, you're this huge powerful being, but giving it a bit more RPG to it."
"So, a bit of dungeon crawling as well, a bit of mystery, a bit of puzzling, we're just giving the world a bit more context so you can actually get a story behind what you're doing.
But everything about the game, the core of the game is incremental.
In this case, it's called Necromental because it is about necromancy."
"As a necromancer, everything that you touch, you kind of have a reverse Midas touch.
You kind of, everything that dies around you is now your ally.
So, your army is constantly growing in size, but it's also growing in power and growing in opportunities.
So, if you're exploring the world and you, for example, meet someone at a town and they tell you, oh, we have this huge monster nearby, could you please slay it?
And if you do, I'll give you this really great reward of a staff of summoning something."
"And then you're like, okay, sure, I'll do that.
And you go there, you destroy the monster, the monster is now yours.
But maybe you just don't really want to do that.
And you just want to kill all the villagers and make the village work for yourself because you are a necromancer, you can do these things."
"So, it's fun to shape the world around you, keeping that power fantasy alive, but also having a little bit of extra to explore.
It's sort of a vertical slice, it's a prototype.
It's a prototype, but it looks very polished already."
"So, what is the feedback you're gathering here?
Because if it's a prototype, you're just testing out what you can do with the game, right?
Yes and no.
So, we're testing it out with players and we're also targeting certain partnerships because that's just the cycle that we usually do."
"And within the partners, we're getting great feedback.
It's visually easy to understand.
It works as a product, but our confirmation from the players is the one that's really interesting for us because we've been seeing people really interact with the game and people, as they pass by, they go like, oh, look, that looks interesting."
"And that's the kind of look they really want to get as early as possible.
That's why this prototype was made specifically to be about 15 minutes or 20 minutes of just a condensed version of what the final game will be.
So, they are telling you they are dying to play the full game?
Hopefully so, yeah. And good fun."
"Okay, so, where do you guys come from?
What can you tell me of your background and what led you here?
Right, so, like I said, we're from Portugal.
We're a small team out of the interior of Portugal."
"We've been working together for about seven years now.
So, we've been doing game dev for a while now.
We have several other released projects as well already in the market.
We've worked with several partners."
"What led us to game dev is, you know, the usual.
The passion for games, you know, wanting to make our own games and wanting to make other people's days just better out of an experience that you get out of gaming."
"So, we're very much passionate about indie and making indie games and, you know, making it in the market that's otherwise super competitive and otherwise not as, you know, not as forgiving for some of us.
But, you know, it's really fun to be able to express yourself creatively in a medium that encompasses so much from music, from writing, from art."
"Anything that you can be creative at, games will allow you to do that.
So, that's what Allure does.
And as you mentioned art, how are you approaching art here?
It's very reddish, of course. It's very heavy metal."
"There you go. So, it's a very specific palette and it's for two reasons.
One of them, we really want to be, you know, approach a retro aesthetic and keep the palette really, really concise.
But it also allows us to really scale the game well because every monster that you encounter is actually just a silhouette."
"But they do have a difference of, you know, they either have red eyes in their enemy or blue eyes in their own ally.
But then we also need the contrasting to go with that.
So, the backgrounds being, you know, this bright red or bright blue allows us to really, you know, allow the game to be scalable but also visually appealing and have that kind of contrast that's interesting to the eye."
"And you mentioned sort of the meetings you're having here as well.
It's not just about the players.
So, how is it looking with publishers, B2B?
And what is the roadmap like?
It's looking good. We're approaching, you know, like I said, it's a prototype but we have a deadline by Halloween of 2026 to get the game done."
"It's a Halloween-y kind of game, so we'd like to get there.
In terms of what you're getting from feedback, we're getting great attention and, you know, we're familiar faces here as well.
We like the thing. So, yeah, it's been great and it's been a blast."
"Fantastic. Looking forward to playing this in the spooky season a year from now.
Thank you so much for your time. Obrigado, Luis.
Likewise. Thank you. Obrigado."
