¡The Rook is Back!

Remember your first steps in Glitch? A friendly fruit tree showering you with cherries, a smiling piggy asking for a petting, a lovely whistle in the background and your rock buddy coaching you along the way. With so many wacky and wonderful things to explore one might even wonder if there’s anything remotely “dark” in the game.

Glitch may be a world manifested through the deeply concentrated reverie of a crew of bizarre-looking giants, but the universal laws of duality still apply. As electrons are counterbalanced by positrons, yang requires yin, the mostly-happy goings-on of Glitch have an opposing entity in the form of The Rook.

As the force of anti-imagination, the devourer of creativity, The Rook constantly buzzes around the Giants, distracting them from their dreams (and causing glitches in the world). When the persistent disruption intrudes too forcefully into the Giants’ imaginings and The Rook gets too much on the Giants’ minds, The Rook becomes manifest in the game world itself.

Our Alpha testers have been familiar with The Rook since it first dive-bombed Old Groddle almost a year ago. During the attack, The Rook pecked and scratched away at the player interface and left the nearby animals and trees in a woozy “rooked” state. The only way to fight the creature was to was to counterattack with strategic hugging and reviving the “rooked” creatures in the immediate surroundings.

Those first attacks required a bit more rendering power than our game client could handle at the time, so much as we loved the concept, we decided to put it on hold until we made some technical advances and optimizations. With the game now running smoother than ever, the time is right to breathe new life into the flying beast.

New Rook-Fighting Skills

The new and improved Rook looks and sounds similar to its early predecessor, but the attacks can now affect bigger game regions and do a fair bit of damage in the process. Fortunately, we’ve also introduced several new features to make sense of the attacks and two new skills that can be used to avoid the rook attack completely.

With Martial Imagination, Glitches can channel their collective musings into a Focusing Orb and thereby convert them into a powerful beam which stuns The Rook. The power of imagination increases geometrically with each contributor, but too many participants can overwhelm the crystal to the point of shattering and negate the process entirely. Imagination is a fragile thing, after all.

Once the rook has been successfully stunned, players with the Piety skill can “prime” a nearby shrine to fight back directly: while the shrine is primed, anyone can donate items to it and those items will be instantly transformed into pure energy which shoots up out of the shrine, doing damage to The Rook. Again, it’s way easier to fight back as a team since more valuable donations will do more damage to The Rook.

Rook Museum

We’ve also introduced a new quest that takes experienced players to the Rook Museum, to learn more about the new skills and how to best apply them. The museum contains a series of artifacts that give a fair bit of insight into the history of the rook and its effect on the lives of ancient Glitchian ancestors.

We don’t want to spoil the surprise by revealing too many details about the exhibition, but we highly recommend that you pick up the two new skills and take the tour, even just to admire the intricate paintings and other rarities on display.

Of course, one of the best things about Glitch is that you can choose your own experience: the life of a chef or wanderer, doing hard time in the mines, transmogrifying and crafting, speculating in the auctions, setting up art installations, herdkeeping or simply hanging out with your friends. If ganging up against The Rook is not your thing, so be it. There are lots of other adventures to embark on and many other ways to play. But more on that in the next blog posts!

Other recent blog posts

• Glitch HQ — Revamped interface, mail, imagination, and more
• Progress Report: April Releases
• Bigger, Better, Brighter
• Progress Report
• Glitch HQ updated — and now on Android!
• Progress Report: March Testing Release
• The Big Unlaunching
• Our One Month Anniversary
• Zombies and Shakespeare: Happy Zilloween!
• Why it's taking you so long to get an invite