KickStarter Forged of Blood - turn-based tactical fantasy RPG

[Infinitron]

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/criticalforge/forged-of-blood
Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=877620687

https://forgedofblood.com

Spoiler

From the Codex inbox:

Hey guys, not sure where to email for press releases or if you guys look at that stuff, but we're working on - what we think is a pretty cool game - called Forged of Blood. I'll copy and paste our latest press release below if that's okay, and would love to get to you guys!

Cheers,
Igor

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

News from Critical Forge

October 19, 2016

New Fantasy Turn-based Tactical RPG IP, Forged of Blood, now in Pre-Alpha.

JAKARTA, INDONESIA, October 20, 2016 - After a rigorous 4 months of prototyping, and 5 months in production, newly formed independent studio Critical Forge has entered its 9th month of work on their brand new fantasy IP: Forged of Blood. Looking to capture the nostalgia of old-school Tactical RPGs, Forged of Blood is the ambitious debut title for the studio.

“... while we want to give our players a plethora of decisions to make, we also want those decisions to carry weight and consequence. That is to say that whenever we ask the player to make a choice, be it on the tactical layer, while leveling up, or on the narrative path; that choice has to have a visible consequence after the fact.”
- Joe Peterson Handjaja, Executive Producer

Set in a morally grey fantasy world, Forged of Blood looks to present players with a deeply tactical experience that focuses on meaningful choice and consequence across all gameplay layers. Baked into the narrative experience of the game will be the questions of morality and duty, and the world will serve to explore the themes of racial divide, familial lines, and politics.

“I’ll admit to having injected my own personal goals as a writer into the story and the world - exploring racial divide and the shifting greys of morality is something that had always interested me. So, it just made sense to build all that into a fantasy world where we can experience, judge, and drive a whole narrative around it.”
- Igor Tanzil, Creative Director

Starting with a small team of designers and programmers in February 2016, the team has since successfully prototyped and established the mechanical design of the core tactical gameplay. As of July 2016, the studio has been expanded to full capacity and pre-alpha production is well underway with the majority of in-game assets completed. As of October 2016, the team has completed a preliminary UI pass, created and tested a number of environments and are looking to polish a vertical slice of the game going into 2017.

Forged of Blood is scheduled to go into Alpha by February 2017, where the studio will seek additional funding to carry the game to completion by mid-2018.

Key Features:
Tactical Fantasy: Take to the field with sword and shield or cast powerful spells in deep turn-based tactical combat against monsters and men.
Classless Warfare: With 9 unique weapons and a vast magic system, Forged of Blood lets you build your characters any way you want - without being constrained by the typical tank/DPS/healer roles.
Science in Magic: Explore the freedom and mysteries of one of the most complex and unique magic systems ever attempted in video games.
Kingdom at War: Command up to three parties of heroic characters on the strategic layer in your fight to reclaim the empire you lost.
Meaningful Choice: Your choices matter. From character building to your choices in the game narrative, your decisions will reverberate across the Strategic and Tactical layers of the game.
Your ends; your means: In a world of grays and unique perspectives, it is up to you to decide what is “right” and “wrong” for the future of Attiras. Forged of Blood will introduce a new Tri-Axis Personality Plot (TAPP) system in lieu of the traditional Good vs. Evil scale common in most RPG settings.

Projected Schedule:
Pre-production: February 2016 – July 2016
Production: July 2016 – October 2017
Post-production: October 2017 – Mid 2018

Game related links:
Forged of Blood Website: http://forgedofblood.com/
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fobthegame
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ForgedOfBlood

About Critical Forge:
Critical Forge is a young studio with a old soul, looking to make games we grew up playing. We are a small independent team based out of Jakarta, Indonesia currently in production of a fantasy tactical RPG: Forged of Blood.

http://forgedofblood.com/about/gameplay/

 

[ArchAngel]

We got very little info but I got a good feeling about this game. Hoping for some fantasy Xcom or fantasy JA2 type of game

 

[Gondolin]

The development process is also very... tactical.

 

[octavius]

Looks promising.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Science in Magic: Explore the freedom and mysteries of one of the most complex and unique magic systems ever attempted in video games.

Thats quite an announcement to make, eh?

Curious for some gameplay footage of this one.

 

[hoverdog]

the looks are great but also reek of vapourware. cautiously optimistic.

 

[Indranys]

Well, The only good thing that comes from Jakarta is violence.
Good old unbridled violence.
Degenerate Jakartans are weeaboos by birth, thus they cannot into CRPGs, let alone make one of it.

Baked into the narrative experience of the game will be the questions of morality and duty, and the world will serve to explore the themes of racial divide, familial lines, and politics.

These are Indonesian shit right here hell yeah!
This can be decent after all...
Stop evicting the Betawis for fuck sake and start making decent games you uncultured douchebags!

 

[Jaesun]

This looks really interesting. Cautiously fapping....

 

[Outlander]

Shouldn't it be Forged From Blood instead of 'of'?

Sounds weird.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Well it doesn't look like ass at least.

 

[octavius]

Shouldn't it be Forged From Blood instead of 'of'?

Sounds weird.

What would Stannis Baratheon say?

 

[vonAchdorf]

Forged of Blood is scheduled to go into Alpha by February 2017, where the studio will seek additional funding to carry the game to completion by mid-2018.

Kickstarter?

 

[Jimmious]

Kingdom at War: Command up to three parties of heroic characters on the strategic layer in your fight to reclaim the empire you lost.

I'm interested.

 

[Achilles]

I like what I'm seeing, best of luck to the developers.

 

[Volourn]

Dwarves? It ain't (good) fantasy unless dwarves are involved.

 

[Black Angel]

Well, The only good thing that comes from Jakarta is violence.
Good old unbridled violence.
Degenerate Jakartans are weeaboos by birth, thus they cannot into CRPGs, let alone make one of it.

Baked into the narrative experience of the game will be the questions of morality and duty, and the world will serve to explore the themes of racial divide, familial lines, and politics.

These are Indonesian shit right here hell yeah!
This can be decent after all...
Stop evicting the Betawis for fuck sake and start making decent games you uncultured douchebags!

Never though gonna find yet another Indonesian aside from HoboForEternity here in the Codex.

But hey, at least (as far as I'm concerned) Indonesian's game-making track record can be pulled back as far as DreadOut, which even though I haven't played it was received fairly positively, so that's some pretty good start before Indonesians start making games in other genre.

On topic, the game looks quite decent. Never tried Tactical RPGs, before, so I wouldn't know what to make of the features mentioned in the OP.

 

[HoboForEternity]

looks really cool. never thought a cRPG would come out of indonesia. most gamers here are weaboos, or MMO/MOBA snobs or dude bro popamole casuals.

i'd be finally proud of my fellow countrymen if this comes out good.

 

[Drowed]

Looks surprisingly good. Almost too good. I'll keep an eye on it for sure.

EDIT:

Oh, and this:

Design Pillars – Part III: Narrative Choice, & Consequence
Stories often take the backseat in games, and more often than not, people don’t play games for their gripping stories – Planescape: Torment and the Telltale games notwithstanding. While some of the best games I’ve played have stories that complement the main gameplay experience, it is also true that many great games could stand almost entirely on the gameplay alone. In the case of Forged of Blood, we’ve decided to shoot for a strong narrative with meaningful choices and consequence as a main design pillar to complement our core gameplay loop.

Traditionally, when we think of a narrative, we naturally think of the stories we’ve read as novels or the movies we’ve seen on the big screen. Generally, this sort of storytelling does not work well for video games as pacing and exposition will be up to the player’s discretion. The ability to pause, save, and load also inherently diminish the impact of death and loss in a game. Furthermore, in a game the actions of the digital hero are restricted to the gameplay mechanics, while the paperback hero is limited only by the whims of the writer.

On the flipside, the defining advantage that a game has over the traditional narrative is player agency – and we as players are especially good at coming up with our own stories. For an extreme example, think of the last game of chess, monopoly, or even basketball that you had (or Minecraft, Counter Strike, you name it…). By design, these games do not contain a story in and of themselves but the actions of two players can turn any flat surface into a vicious battlefield of wits, a pit of betrayal, and set the stage for the heroes and villains to rise and fall.

Traditional or not, authored or born out of player action, narratives give an interactive medium like ours an incredible edge. Games are experienced and not read, and therein lies the visceral difference between between games and any other narrative format. For games, the narrative doesn’t have to be linear and in the best of cases it must account for player input in their design. For our studio and for Forged of Blood, the strong narrative design pillar dictates a narrative that will straddle the two extremes between the traditionally guided narrative and a wholly open-ended experience.

We will approach the story element of Forged of Blood as a bit of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style narrative that is driven by player decisions across the strategic, questing, and tactical layers. This way, we will be able to provide a more defined structure and backdrop to the player’s agency in the world we’ve created, but still make the experience unique to the player’s actions. That said, we will still have to keep an eye out for story creep and manage the number of different story paths in order to fit our production budget and timeline. There are various ways to mitigate the explosion of choices and companies like Bioware and Telltale are famous for having a “quest hub” structure where the player choice diverges and converges. This blog post covers many other ways story structures and be made if you’re interested in reading about it in greater detail.

The underlying issue with a more structured story is that players will ultimately follow the options set by us as developers – and even the largest AAA games have to narrow down their story endings to only a few options. Here too lies the issue of in which certain story branches might be more interesting than the other, but until the time where we can develop an AI that is smart enough to make decisions on the fly like a real Dungeon Master, this is the best option we have.

Ultimately, we do feel that the strong narrative is an incredibly important aspect of the player’s experience, and our design goal is to find the happy medium between traditional storytelling and incorporating player agency – especially in tying in to our first design pillar of “Meaningful Choice.” That’ll be it from me for a while – next week I’ll let Igor cover how we’re approaching the narrative design in greater depth.

Thanks for reading,

Joe

 

[HoboForEternity]

this people . . . . seems to know what they're doing.


hype rising. maybe i can seek their office and come and have a chat?

 

[Indranys]

Never though gonna find yet another Indonesian aside from HoboForEternity here in the Codex.

But hey, at least (as far as I'm concerned) Indonesian's game-making track record can be pulled back as far as DreadOut, which even though I haven't played it was received fairly positively, so that's some pretty good start before Indonesians start making games in other genre.

On topic, the game looks quite decent. Never tried Tactical RPGs, before, so I wouldn't know what to make of the features mentioned in the OP.

Well I'm not that nationalist and the future of our glorious lands and seas is grim indeed.
Goddamn blinded nationalist scums are destroying any hope of incline, by god I swear this Hegelian mockup state is cursed to the core, fucking politicians spread their regime of corruption, the putrid honorless degenerate millennials are beginning to preach about the librul cultural Marxism bullshit.
All of them should be locked on the Island of Buru for the safety of the rest of us.
Fucking Golden Garuda my ass, Bakunin was right, he warned us about all of these...

Enough of this shit, I don't want to be retardoed.
Sorry if I sound so angry brothers.
At least the devs have a decent plan for this, we'll see how this thing develops...

 

[HoboForEternity]

Never though gonna find yet another Indonesian aside from HoboForEternity here in the Codex.

But hey, at least (as far as I'm concerned) Indonesian's game-making track record can be pulled back as far as DreadOut, which even though I haven't played it was received fairly positively, so that's some pretty good start before Indonesians start making games in other genre.

On topic, the game looks quite decent. Never tried Tactical RPGs, before, so I wouldn't know what to make of the features mentioned in the OP.

Well I'm not that nationalist and the future of our glorious lands and seas is grim indeed.
Goddamn blinded nationalist scums are destroying any hope of incline, by god I swear this Hegelian mockup state is cursed to the core, fucking politicians spread their regime of corruption, the putrid honorless degenerate millennials are beginning to preach about the librul cultural Marxism bullshit.
All of them should be locked on the Island of Buru for the safety of the rest of us.
Fucking Golden Garuda my ass, Bakunin was right, he warned us about all of these...

Enough of this shit, I don't want to be retardoed.
Sorry if I sound so angry brothers.
At least the devs have a decent plan for this, we'll see how this thing develops...

 

[Arulan]

It's great to be in a time when just about every few weeks I hear about a new CRPG that at the very least shows some potential.

• Science in Magic: Explore the freedom and mysteries of one of the most complex and unique magic systems ever attempted in video games.

I'm curious what they mean by this exactly. A craft-your-own-spells type of magic system, or something a la Sympathy in Kingkiller Chronicles?

 

[laclongquan]

"Forged of Blood" make me think of something bloody, like a blood sausage, or... else~

Anyway, too early to fap or not fap~ Will wait and see.

 

[Lacrymas]

Ok, surprise me, Forged *of* Blood people, I'm waiting. Also, the word "fantasy" makes me dry heave nowadays.

 

[anus_pounder]

Will wait for more details. I find indie projects to be too much of a gamble, unlike ubisoft games, to d1p on a whim.