KickStarter Lost Eidolons - Fire Emblem-inspired turn-based tactical RPG by Koreans

[Infinitron]

Tomorrow:

Lost Eidolons is coming to Kickstarter on Wednesday, April 21st! The game is already fully funded and we're leveraging Kickstarter to boost visibility on our game and studio!
Please support our campaign: https://bit.ly/LostEidolonsKS

 

[ODS Pat]

Tomorrow:

We are nervous... it's barely been 2 months of community building, so even reaching the modest $45,000 goal we set seems quite daunting. Despite the game already being fully funded, it may speak volumes about how interested people may actually be in this type of tactical game if we fall short. Here's to hoping! 15.5 hours until campaign launch at 6 AM PT.

Ataraxia
1. It seems subjective, but I like JRPGs since they often have a less grounded approach to their storytelling and world-building.
2. I don't personally have a strong tendency towards romances in RPGs. I think the development of relations between characters is important, but that has much more to do with the dynamic between them and how believable they are as a cast rather than individuals as you travel alongside them. Lost Eidolons has a means of developing relations between the protagonist and his allies but nothing to the tune of romancing options.
3. An RPG is a world in which you can immerse yourself in its narrative and the elements that remove it from our world. It doesn't have to be fantastical or over-the-top, but it's thanks to being an RPG that story tellers can enable those kinds of fictitious elements in their medium. An extension of this is the development and growth of characters that you the viewer or player can invest themselves in, which typically forms a better bond and overall better experience. This can mean anything from watching the characters mature to something more on the nose like leveling up and learning new skills to take on new challenges, or both.

 

[Tigranes]

Spare a thought for the poor guy, who has to politely and seriously answer even the most retarded questions

The mechanics have a very very clear Fire Emblem vibe, and I'm good with that. Elemental reactions in tiles is a good way to add something nice to the formula.

 

[Infinitron]

Kickstarter is live: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oceandrivestudio/lost-eidolons

Story

「Greetings tactician. We're Ocean Drive Studio, a new video game start-up based in Seoul & Los Angeles working on creating memorable single-player experiences on PC and consoles. This is our first project, and we're deeply vested into making this a project worth being called our flagship. The project is already fully-funded, and we've come Kickstarter not just to raise visibility on the our studio and the game, but to also build a larger community of players who can provide us vital feedback and develop the game alongside us through that feedback. We've set our first goal of $45,000 modestly, and the moment we reach it we'll send in the word to unlock the Permadeath optional toggle feature by Early Access in October. It will be our first major milestone to overcome collectively!」

- The ODS Crew

Lost Eidolons is a classic turn-based tactical RPG that places you in the shoes of the mercenary leader Eden in his bid to seize back the empire for his people. Strategize through an episodic campaign by planning out each action before and during every battle.


Key Features:

• Meticulous turn-based tactical combat. Maneuver your units across the grid and claim control of the battlefield across 27 episodic campaigns (16 available initially in Early Access).
• An in-depth management system between major campaign battles. Setting up your allies for greatness in battle. Gear up, train to strengthen your mettle, and recruit powerful new units to your army.
• Engineer your own victories. Take advantage of more than a dozen different classes to design your foe’s overwhelming defeat.
• Gorgeous modern high-fidelity graphics set in a low-fantasy world.
• A carefully crafted classic story revolving around the bonds formed between comrades struggling for freedom in a continent marred by war and political turmoil.
• A beautiful live-orchestrated soundtrack by the talented composer Clark Aboud, the brilliant mind behind the score of beloved games such as Slay the Spire and Factory Town.
• English voice acting with text language support for Korean, Russian, German, European Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

These text languages will be supported by Early Access. We may add more depending on interest from additional regions!

 

[Aarwolf]

Backed it. We'll see what future brings.

 

[ODS Pat]

Backed it. We'll see what future brings.

Thank you! Let me know if you (or anyone reading) have any additional questions about the game or the campaign itself.

 

[santino27]

Backed. Best of luck!

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oceandrivestudio/lost-eidolons/posts/3167266

The first 12 hours recap!

Greetings, tacticians!

The first 12 hours have passed since our campaign began this morning and we've made steady progress. Thanks to the kind generosity and support from our growing community, we've managed to generate 17% of the target funding goal in the first half day!

In the very first hour alone, we managed to sell out of the top two highest backer tiers, and we also got a shiny badge from Kickstarter labeling Lost Eidolons as a Project We Love which helped out greatly with visibility on the platform.

So what comes next you may be wondering?

We're setting up a slew of updates that we'll be sharing with you all over the next four weeks. Our writers are hard at work creating brilliant stories, our artists are devising new concept art, and our programmers are making cool new assets towards the first playable build. As each of these are created, we plan to share them here, on our Discord, and on socials to keep everyone in the loop.

The final name for this doozy of a worm is 'Vermilith'.

And if you see something that looks interesting to you?

Tell us about it! Comment about it on the update page, or on our Discord. This is all part of our plan to create an open development strategy with our community. The folks backing the project and following it have a say in how the game will proceed from this point. We want to hear from you all as part of this feedback loop and then we'll show you all how your feedback reflects in the game as we make adjustments.

If we can keep it up, we'll reach our goal in no time. But we're not blindly optimistic, we're aware of the challenges of crowdfunding especially in the middle of the campaign, so we'll double up our efforts to getting Lost Eidolons known throughout the gaming space! For those who have supported us, you've already done so much, but if you can share the campaign with your friends that may be interested too, it'd be a huge boon for us!

Let's keep up the awesome community effort!

- The ODS Team

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oceandrivestudio/lost-eidolons/posts/3168218

Dev Update: Movement Tiles & Status Icons

Greetings, tacticians!

As we have promised, we'll be sharing the development progress we make with the community, and we're starting with the mockups we've worked on for the movement tiles & unit status icons.

The idea behind these UI designs is to quickly communicate key strategic information to players in an easy-to-digest interface so that they can seamlessly make informed decisions. These are the final mock-ups for the grid tile design and unit status icons that we've been working on, and unless we have other feedback we will begin implementing this design immediately (note: the below are concept and are not yet present in the game build)!

There's a lot of key information to absorb when making a decision on how you'll travel the map.

We've also designed markers for contextual movement. Ascend the stairs to gain the high ground!

What do you think of them? Any thoughts you want to share? We'd like to hear from you before we finalize the direction and start implementing them into the build!

-----

We'd also like to take this time to invite you all to our studio's Discord server! One of the main reasons why we're running this Kickstarter campaign is to build up a community of players who want to voice their opinions about what we're doing—what they like and what they dislike. Is there something about the status icons that we showed that didn't sit well with you? It's your chance to say something about it in the #feedback channel! Based on our experience in game development, our goal is to have a vocal playerbase that gets to develop the game alongside us. If we think our ideas are good, we'll discuss why we think so and give you context to our decision-making. It's all part of the open feedback loop we're seeking to create.


And is there something that you want to know that hasn't been answered yet about the game? Ask about it in our #town_hall channel, and we'll take your questions and answer them every Friday in a Q&A format. If it's something we've already answered in the past, we'll give the answer right away! But it gives us an opportunity to curate a bunch of information at once, as well as gather visual assets to improve understanding.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oceandrivestudio/lost-eidolons/posts/3169314

Dev Update: Battle Map Environment Design

Happy Friday, tacticians!

Before you all take off to enjoy your weekends, we wanted to share a few updates on the stage graphical design for battle maps in Lost Eidolons. We read a few comments during our project reveal on how the stage and area design needed to look more interesting during fights, so we made it a point to start applying some levels of polish on the visuals in a few of these areas. These are still not final and we intend to continue improve them over time. Check them out below:

What do you think of these designs? Would it be up to your aesthetic expectations if all the areas had this level of detail? Do you feel like it's not enough, or that there are still areas of improvement? Let us know in the comments or on Discord! Also as an FYI, our first Town Hall Q&A recap will be on April 30th, so that we can gather enough questions to share the answers to.

 

[santino27]

I assume they will make their goal, given the current fundraising total and how low their goal was, but this is the first kickstarter I've backed in a while and it's surprising to see how slow the fundraising pace has been.

 

[ODS Pat]

I assume they will make their goal, given the current fundraising total and how low their goal was, but this is the first kickstarter I've backed in a while and it's surprising to see how slow the fundraising pace has been.

It shouldn't come across as crazy surprising!

Our game was announced just last month, and prior to that point our studio hasn't built any reputation for ourselves so we didn't have an outstanding base of fans of our work to translate into a new IP. One might say we decided to try our hand at crowdfunding too soon. But, we factored that into account when we set the low fundraising goal. Also many other games commit to crowdfunding way later down the development pipeline; we went in early so we have a little less to show off to appeal to backers.

We're just a budding indie studio. Hopefully we'll get to the point some day where a title from us can be exciting news by the utterance of studio name alone, but we have a long way to go before we even broach that kind of status.

 

[Infinitron]

My experience has been that any reasonably good-looking game, even one from an unknown studio, can raise $100,000 on Kickstarter if the developers have done their promotion right. Lost Eidolons definitely looks good, a bit generic perhaps, but it's probably not reaching its potential.

 

[ODS Pat]

My experience has been that any reasonably good-looking game, even one from an unknown studio, can raise $100,000 on Kickstarter if the developers have done their promotion right. Lost Eidolons definitely looks good, a bit generic perhaps, but it's probably not reaching its potential.

We've got a lot to learn in that department then, damn.

 

[Nortar]

My experience has been that any reasonably good-looking game, even one from an unknown studio, can raise $100,000 on Kickstarter if the developers have done their promotion right. Lost Eidolons definitely looks good, a bit generic perhaps, but it's probably not reaching its potential.

We've got a lot to learn in that department then, damn.

Considering how Subverse got 16 times more than their 100K goal, they must have done something right, haha.

Perhaps you could use a stretch goal to invite a guest writer to work on the project?
Like Chris Avellone, for example. He is not too busy lately.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oceandrivestudio/lost-eidolons/posts/3169365

Story: A Hero in the Making

To help you gain a penchant for the world and characters in Lost Eidolons, our writing team plans on putting together short stories to introduce some of the key members of the rebellion and also about the circumstances of the brooding war. We'll be sharing a Story Feature every Tuesday and Saturday from now until the end of the campaign, each with a different topic. These won't provide any spoilers, but instead give small insights on different people, places, or events to contextualize their place in the story. Today's topic is about our protagonist Eden, with next Tuesday's article talking more about some of his closer companions.

-----

In Benerio Province, where theatrical forms like opera and puppetry are proud traditions, everyone knows that the best epics starts in small towns, and the best heroes come from nothing.

For example, a charming sellsword named Eden.

If those who know him were to summarize Eden in a few words, they would be "everybody’s best friend.” Hailing from the coastal fishing town of Lonetta, Eden is a kindly wisecracker, a stark contrast from the usual gruff stereotype for those in his line of work. Ever the charitable soul, Eden has built a reputation for helping those in need, without heed for pay... or lack thereof. As a result, he is widely beloved in his hometown, even if his insatiable do-gooding sometimes wears on his friends’ nerves.

The village of Lonetta, a quiet town which sits in the path of events far greater.

Yet for someone so popular, little is known about the circumstances of his birth, including by Eden himself. Supposedly he first arrived in Lonetta years ago, just another penniless urchin orphaned by the war. As fate would have it, he was taken in by the parents of a boy named Leon, who raised him as if he was their own blood, laying the foundations for a lifelong friendship.

On a day-to-day basis, Eden and his scrappy streetwise crew make ends meet by protecting travelers around Lonetta from hazards like bandits and monsters. Though he may not go looking for danger, Eden never shirks from a fight. In combat, his cunning leadership and endless good cheer make those at his side feel as if they could do anything.

Though the spark of greater ambitions burns within him, Eden’s priority most of the time is simply to protect his friends, pay forward the kindness others have shown to him, and hopefully earn some drinking money in the process. But in an empire rife with corruption, it's only a matter of time before anyone with a conscience is forced to choose a side...

... and a small-town merc is forced to become a hero.

 

[jac8awol]

Will definitely buy this one way or another, somewhere along the line. I just have one request, and it's only tangentially game-related. Please, for the sake of success, don't let anything from California infect you guys. Disinfect and virus-scan all files and opinions if there's even a chance of transmission.

 

[Pocgels]

Good luck with this. Looking forward to playing as Gaston

 

[Shackleton]

Backed. Looks like my kind of game. The last tactical RPG from Korean devs I played was Troubleshooter and that was awesome so you benefit from some reflected glory.

I did cringe pretty hard at this part of the pitch though:

Enter our hero: Eden, a mercenary leader from the small town of Lonetta, in the seaside Province of Benerio. A cocky wisecracker with a pesky conscience

Please don't make him an insufferable smartarse who doesn't take anything seriously and makes terrible quips in life or death situations. That personality has been done to death in JRPGs and usually results in a character people want to die in excruciating pain.

 

[Nortar]

Enter our hero: Eden, a mercenary leader from the small town of Lonetta, in the seaside Province of Benerio. A cocky wisecracker with a pesky conscience

Please don't make him an insufferable smartarse who doesn't take anything seriously and makes terrible quips in life or death situations.

I had a completely different impression. Maybe it's because of the name, though.

to summarize Eder in a few words:
- everybody’s best friend
- hailing from the coastal fishing town farming village
- kindly wisecracker
- a stark contrast from the usual gruff stereotype

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oceandrivestudio/lost-eidolons/posts/3169394

Release Timeline, Physical Copy, and Fulfillment Schedule

Happy Sunday, tacticians!

What a pleasant milestone for our team at ODS to wake up to! We're now 40% funded and creeping up on the halfway point with 25 days to go. Thank you guys for continuing to support Lost Eidolons and spreading the word about it! 386 of you at the time of writing this post have put your faith in an unknown studio to make something worth your time and money. We'll do our absolute best to bring you guys the best game that we can make.

Today we're talking a few campaign-related matters. As you can see by the title, we're going over the 1) release timeline for Lost Eidolons, 2) potential limited run physical copy of the game, and 3) the fulfillment schedule for your backer rewards. To start, let's go over the known and future timeline for the project.

• Lost Eidolons was announced to the public on Friday, March 26th.
• The Kickstarter campaign began on Wednesday, April 21st.
• The Kickstarter campaign ends on currently runs until Friday, May 21st.
• There will be a Windows PC beta testing period sometime between the end of campaign and Early Access, TBA. All backer tiers $25 and up have guaranteed beta access.
• Early Access is planned to start in October 2021.
• Early Access will run until Full Launch. During Early Access, we'll be regularly looking to collect feedback on Lost Eidolons in order to make updates that align with players' thoughts.
• Full Launch is planned for Early 2022, however, we're giving ourselves additional headroom of up to Q4 2022 at the latest.

This entirely depends on how successful the project is, and if Lost Eidolons gains a respectable amount of traction we'll want to spend more time polishing and potentially adding more features, which would require more development time, and could result in us delaying the planned release. We will target to complete by Early 2022 as we mentioned nonetheless.

Secondly, we wanted to probe the community on what their thoughts were on a limited physical run of the game. We talked with some of our friends and noticed there are many video game enthusiasts out there that prefer to own the physical copy. It would be introduced as an add-on to any existing tier should we pursue this. Included within the physical copy could be other neat ideas (we're still discussing this, so it's a work-in-progress). Let us know if you all would be interested in this kind of initiative.

Lastly, we wanted to go over the fulfillment schedule of backer rewards. Not all rewards can be fulfilled by the start of Early Access and will have to be implemented during the course of it. We want to keep our supporters in the loop, so we'll share progress updates of their rewards along the way. Please let us know if you have any questions about the fulfillment schedule and we'd be happy to answer!

As an aside, we're currently internally discussing potential new backer tiers that supporters can upgrade to as per request from community members who missed out on the packages that had sold out nearly instantly. Should we decide to do this, we'll let everyone know well ahead of time and drop the new backer tiers in installments so that supporters of every time zone can have equal opportunity to pick them up should they want them.

Fulfillment Schedule for Each Rewards

 

[Shackleton]

Enter our hero: Eden, a mercenary leader from the small town of Lonetta, in the seaside Province of Benerio. A cocky wisecracker with a pesky conscience

Please don't make him an insufferable smartarse who doesn't take anything seriously and makes terrible quips in life or death situations.

I had a completely different impression. Maybe it's because of the name, though.

to summarize Eder in a few words:
- everybody’s best friend
- hailing from the coastal fishing town farming village
- kindly wisecracker
- a stark contrast from the usual gruff stereotype

Yes, I suppose Eder was someone who was a bearable smartarse. He had a bit of depth to the character and wasn't just a one-dimensional cardboard cutout. Hopefully Eden is going to be cut from a similar cloth and not bastard Tidus from FFX.

 

[Abu Antar]

I backed this. Let's see how it goes.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oceandrivestudio/lost-eidolons/posts/3171508

Weekly Town Hall Notice & Backer Tier Update

Greetings, everybody!

It's the start of another glorious week, and we have a few campaign updates to share with everyone today.

---

Town Hall Notice
First and foremost the 1st edition of Town Hall is coming later this week. Because the game is in active development and we've shared numerous systems, concepts, and features via our campaign page and blog, we wanted to give our community every opportunity they could get to ask the development team questions that they may have. This is where Town Hall comes into play, which is a planned weekly round-up of questions from the community, delivered directly to the Creative Director Jin Sang every Wednesday, and answered in a simple Q&A format the following Friday.

How do you ask questions to the weekly Town Hall? Simply by asking a unique question that has yet to have been asked in a place visible by our staff. This includes Kickstarter comments, Steam comments/discussions, blog comments, Twitter, Facebook, but most effective of all, is our #town_hall channel in the ODS Discord server. Questions asked here are guaranteed to be seen quickly. But if you don't want to join our Discord, that's no problem, we'll definitely try to include your question nonetheless!

It doesn't have to be limited to questions about Lost Eidolons either. Want to know more about Ocean Drive Studio since we're brand new? Or questions about the Creative Director and what influences his work flow? What color are the socks we're wearing today? Ask away!


'Monarch of the Empire' Tier Update
We wanted to provide an update on an additional backer tier and the existing Monarch of the Empire tier. Regarding the latter, there were a few backers who requested if it was possible for us to increase the quantity, and after meeting with our dev team we determined that we'll be able to fulfill this request since the player-named NPCs are spread throughout different episodes.

We will increase the quantity of the 'Monarch of the Empire' tier to 30. This will be done by adding a new tier with the same price and rewards.

This will occur on Friday, April 30th later this week. At 9:00 AM PT we will add the 'Monarch of the Empire (2nd Round)' tier with a quantity of 10.


NEW: $200 Backer Tier, 'Outlaw of the Empire'
We'll also be adding a new backer tier per request as well. Community members wanted more ways to immortalize something about themselves within the game. Being an Outlaw of the Empire confers the following perks:

● We'll put your face or icon on a wanted poster on a bulletin board in the camp. You can provide the picture or draw it yourself, and we'll stylize it on the bill parchment. Your bounty of 200 gold pieces (higher for those who pledged bonus support), as well as a name and reason for being wanted that you provide.
● Digital Deluxe package of the game on PC or Xbox console, including digital concept art book, OST, and high-res world map.
● PC beta access during the development phase for both PC & console backers.
● Your name in the credits as a backer.
● 'Outlaw' role on our Discord on request.

Note: Your poster will be displayed in the one of 20 camps in the game, this is the way to give each poster more visibility since we will be displaying very few number of posters at each camp!

This backer tier will go live in one batch of 30 at 9:00 AM PT on Friday, April 30th.

---

We are still in discussions regarding adding additional cool rewards. There's still looking at the possibility of a limited run physical copy of the game as mentioned in the previous campaign update. Should we include additional backer rewards again, we will follow the same procedure where we inform first and then set a planned date and time considerate of as many timezones as we can.

 

[Nortar]

NEW: $200 Backer Tier, 'Outlaw of the Empire'
We'll also be adding a new backer tier per request as well. Community members wanted more ways to immortalize something about themselves within the game. Being an Outlaw of the Empire confers the following perks:

● We'll put your face or icon on a wanted poster on a bulletin board in the camp. You can provide the picture or draw it yourself, and we'll stylize it on the bill parchment. Your bounty of 200 gold pieces (higher for those who pledged bonus support), as well as a name and reason for being wanted that you provide.
● Digital Deluxe package of the game on PC or Xbox console, including digital concept art book, OST, and high-res world map.
● PC beta access during the development phase for both PC & console backers.
● Your name in the credits as a backer.
● 'Outlaw' role on our Discord on request.

Note: Your poster will be displayed in the one of 20 camps in the game, this is the way to give each poster more visibility since we will be displaying very few number of posters at each camp!

This backer tier will go live in one batch of 30 at 9:00 AM PT on Friday, April 30th.

---

We are still in discussions regarding adding additional cool rewards. There's still looking at the possibility of a limited run physical copy of the game as mentioned in the previous campaign update. Should we include additional backer rewards again, we will follow the same procedure where we inform first and then set a planned date and time considerate of as many timezones as we can.

Maybe the Codex could have a little fundriser for the Outlaw tier?
I can imagine quite a few dev mugs to be put on "Wanted" posters for crimes ranging from serial drunken fornications to brutal franchinse murder.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oceandrivestudio/lost-eidolons/posts/3172808

Story: The Mercenaries of Eliche

Greetings, tacticians.

Last week we met our ambitious protagonist, Eden. To continue the story features, this week we'll be introducing you all to some of the key characters that are closest to him at the beginning of the game.

---

Even a small-town hero can’t do everything on his own; he needs a crew that can back him up (and occasionally, keep him from doing something stupid). Today we'll be taking a closer look at two members of Eden's team: Robin and Robere.

At first glance, few would guess the genial-looking Robere to be a mercenary, much less part of a group like Eden's. A woodsman by trade, he hails from a small community outside the fortified town of Eliche, where he and Robin once resided in a carpenter's workshop as co-apprentices.

The fortified hillside town of Eliche, sitting east of Lonetta.

Resting on the edge of a monster-infested forest, the shop was a target of frequent attacks by colossal insects called formikants. Despite their best efforts to repel the beasts, the damage was often deducted from Robere and Robin's pay, a source of endless frustration. During one such encounter, a bold young mercenary captain and his friends (nearby on business at the time) stepped in to intervene. Impressed by Robere and Robin’s monster-fighting skill, he invited them to join his company, and the pair soon resettled in Lonetta.

As the oldest member of the crew, Robere maintains the group's hideout and looks after the others, particularly Robin. He also does most of the cooking.

Robere’s polar opposite, Robin is a spunky young hothead somehow even more cocky than Eden himself. He enjoys the adventurous life of a mercenary, and considers the crew his family.

Known for boasting about his exploits to attract romantic attentions, Robin has a bit of a reputation around Lonetta for being a lothario, and can often be found sneaking into or out of various second-story windows. But despite his loudmouthed personality, Robin is a dependable ally on the battlefield, defaulting to Eden's leadership and Robere's guidance.

Together, these blue-collar monster-hunters make a formidable duo, standing by their allies through thick and thin.

---

That concludes today's story entry. Later this upcoming Saturday, we'll meet the two members of Eden's team that are closest to him: Francisco and Leon.