One of the minds behind of Killer Queen — the "half Joust, half StarCraft" arcade-only game — now is trying his hand at a game people can play in their homes: The Hero Trap, a procedurally generated dungeon-crawler with an unusual roster of characters.
Ninjas join elves, mages, pyro-soldiers and even bears among the heroes the player may control. "You're not just a hero - you're very hero," Nikita Mikros of Smashworx, the game's developing studio, writes in his Kickstarter pitch. Smashworx seeks to develop The Hero Trap for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X PCs
The game's premise is that the player is able to summon all of the heroes who failed before him in the dungeon. A single player may control up to three heroes, each with unique abilities, at a time; two, however, will be in a ghostly form. The strategy comes from knowing when and whom to switch.
The Hero Trap seeks $25,000, and currently has $16,557 toward that goal with 15 days to go. It also is listed on Steam GreenLight.
Killer Queen, by Mikros and Josh DeBonis, was playable only in an arcade cabinet at tournaments in and around New York. The two also developed unusual, live-action game adaptations, including one for Pitfall! that was exhibited five years ago. Killer Queen itself evolved from a real life "field game."
