Monthly Update - Big News and progress report
Hello everyone!
Here's our monthly update, packed with big announcements and lots of progress!
Big News
We have multiple announcements this month. First, the big one:
After a lot of thinking, we decided to
sign up with a Publisher. As such, we can now guarantee that we'll be having a PS4 version as well as getting on GOG for the DRM free version. There will be many other extra online stores carrying Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark as well, which will be announced later.
There's currently no change to the status of the Switch version: we're still hoping to get it done, but it'll probably end up being after the other versions are released.
We'll be announcing the name of our Publisher soon, but they are preparing a press release about it and asked us to hold off until their announcement before mentioning their name.
Tied to this collaboration with our publisher, it is very likely
we'll be at PAX East 2018 in April. We've wrapping up some details currently, but it's looking good. We'll have an announcement about that when it's finalized and we certainly hope everyone will drop by our booth to say hi! We'll be happy to thank you in person for all the support and helping us realize our dream game!
Also, after looking things over with our Publisher and looking at their schedule and ours, we've decided to target
Q1 2019 for the final release date. This will allow us to launch on all 3 main platforms (PS4, XBox One, PC) simultaneously as well as ensure we have enough time for all the polish and features we're planning, as well as localization in 5 different languages. Basically, we want to make sure the release is done the right way and the game is as good as we want it to be on release!
We haven't actually had anyone write to us about Steam Keys yet, but we want to keep everyone in the loop: we've already sent the Steam keys to all our Beta Backers and we've been wanting to send the keys to everyone else ASAP. We've been holding off mainly because we've been in talks with our publisher for a while and we knew it would grant us access to PS4 and GOG and we know many backers were interested by those options. We're still not actually 100% sure how to handle keys for consoles at this point to be honest, so we'll be looking into that with the help of our Publisher so that we can start delivering keys ASAP.
Finally, we just released the new big
Beta Backer build (about 15 mins ago) and we'll keep updating the big build monthly, with an update to the experimental build in between. The latest build has some more story battles, patrol battles and a LOT of balance changes, primarily centered around better AI. There's also a lot of visual and UI improvements and we're still working on more of those. The detailed notes of the build are going to be on our Steam page shortly (after I'm done with THIS update, haha ^^), which you can find right here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/699170/Fell_Seal_Arbiters_Mark/
That should cover the big announcements for this month. Now onto the...
Progress Report
The steam page is actually going to be a good spot to get the specifics of all we did (with more precise balance notes, etc), but we've been tirelessly working on adding new content, new assets and especially polishing gameplay.
First big bit of progress is that we
finally completed the new Idle Animations. A few monsters are still missing theirs, but they should be dealt with soon enough. All humans and most monsters now have their idle, with their equipped weapon showing for the humans (which helps you figure out what they might be up to even faster).
Next, we have a lot of new portraits created (but still so many more to go, haha):
We also have a lot of UI improvements to give more information to the player while in combat. The in-battle description of abilities was updated to use the same description box as in the menu, which shows a lot more details. Here's what it looks like now:
There's a slew of other UI improvements, including better controls, fixes for larger and smaller resolutions than 1080 and a lot of other small quality-of-life details.
We also have a lot of new sprites, including new monsters and new outfits (we're almost done with the outfits!)
We have a new map as well and a lot of new spell effects, but there's some spoilers involved in showing some of those. Anyone that can't wait though can always check our
Discord for most of the game's maps as well as follow us on
Twitter for more regular updates!
Hopefully everyone is as excited as we are about our progress and we'll have a lot more to show next month!