KickStarter ICY: Frostbite Edition

[LESS T_T]

I was going to post a reply at the Zaharia thread, but realized that it's better make a new thread for discussion.

For specific context: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...urn-based-indie-rpg.87760/page-9#post-3289734

Indiegogo link: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/icy-a-post-apocalyptic-rpg

Dev. Diary I – Ice cold apocalypse

In this first dev. diary we’ll talk about Frozen World main features.

In general, Frozen World will be a narrative and interpretative experience: the player will create his/her character and play through a branching story with a free gameplay, allowing for a deep and satisfying roleplaying experience. This is easy to say, but usually hard to create, so let us give you some more detail about the gameplay structure.

Frozen World won’t appear so different compared to a visual novel and there will be a lot of common features, since the game will feature a narrative built with lots of texts and 2D images. But dialogues won’t be the only gameplay mechanic, because Frozen World is a game about survival in a dangerous world, where humanity is scattered and few in numbers. The player will be able to freely travel around the frozen waste moving his party on a map, which will also allow the player to hunt for food and scavenge in search for ancient treasures. Travelling is part of a nomad daily routine, but that doesn’t make it less risky since the world is full of dangers of any sort and quite often those dangers are born from other humans actions and needs.

The third main gameplay component is the combat system, which will let the player control his/her character actions and his/her party behavior on the battlefield. This feature is still in development and it’s not easy to know precisely how it will work, but we have our guidelines to create it: fights will be dangerous and the player shouldn’t crave to constantly fight to proceed through the game, with the risk of having half the party injured in some way or, even worse, seeing the death of a fellow companion.

These 3 different components will allow us to create a deep and compelling experience, based on the main features of the setting. The Frozen World isn’t an easy place where to live, mostly because is freaking cold everywhere and every time. Mankind can’t grow any kind of food outdoor; the bites of cold constantly threaten the life of people who have no warm shelter; without civilized institutions ruthless people can just take what they want from the weakest and no law enforcement exist to stop them.

Life is hard in the Frozen World and we will continuously remember this concept to the player.

Working on the game we have different goals:

• First of all, we want Frozen World to be a deep and consistent roleplaying experience, full of meaningful choices able to affect the plot. We didn’t create an ice apocalypse just to put tons of snow in all the artworks, we created it to be the game’s core. The main plot, the secondary storylines, the optional dialogues: all narrative elements are born from the setting and will perfectly fit in it.
• Our second goal is to create a long and rewarding experience. We created a particular setting and we need time to let the player enjoy it, that’s why Frozen World can’t last just a couple of hours. That wouldn’t even be honest, why should someone buy a short game where all the good ideas are just underdeveloped?
• Our third goal is to create an entertaining game. That means correctly balancing all the different elements to create something that the player will be glad to play, hopefully more than once. Frozen World will feature lots of dialogues, but having tons of long and boring dialogues won’t create a fun game, it will only let us brag about the number of dialogues in the game. Placing thousands of fight into the game won’t make it funnier, it will only make fighting something boring and cheap. Balance between different features is of the utmost importance.

Since the development is at a good point, we will now regularly post updates of any kind, stay tuned!

ping to the developer: OwNathan

 

[Haba]

God damn it. Mah setting ideas.

 

[Zetor]

God damn it. Mah setting ideas.

That ship (well, train) already sailed 20 years ago -- http://www.mobygames.com/game/arctic-baron aka Transarctica

I've always preferred more 'natural' post-apoc settings over nukes and radiation -- my other big favorite is "unexplained deep-space anomaly turns the Sun into a blue dwarf for a few years, then returns to normal".

 

[Eyeball]

There was another old RPG (something World of Ice) that was also set on an icy world. It was pretty interesting, moving in a snow storm guided only by compass and map with zero visibility and keeping both warm and fed was a challenge. I hope for this game to be hard survivalist, something which few real RPGs dare to do.

 

[Haba]

God damn it. Mah setting ideas.

That ship (well, train) already sailed 20 years ago -- http://www.mobygames.com/game/arctic-baron aka Transarctica

I've always preferred more 'natural' post-apoc settings over nukes and radiation -- my other big favorite is "unexplained deep-space anomaly turns the Sun into a blue dwarf for a few years, then returns to normal".

Yeah, I'm perfectly aware that none of the unique ideas I have are really unique.

And I'm going more for a gradual shift to permanent winter rather than a permanent frost. Using the great famines of late 1690's as reference. I.e. times when for several years in a row you had practically no summer at all. If you consider the fact that 30% of the population of Finland perished from that, even harsher year(s) of never-ending winter would be absolutely apocalyptic.

Which is why I'm interested in seeing how they rationalize humankind's survival despite the extremely unfavourable conditions.

There was another old RPG (something World of Ice) that was also set on an icy world. It was pretty interesting, moving in a snow storm guided only by compass and map with zero visibility and keeping both warm and fed was a challenge. I hope for this game to be hard survivalist, something which few real RPGs dare to do.

That'd be Aleshar.

 

[Indranys]

This is better than their arab fantasy simulator game IMO.
Not because middle eastern setting isn't cool, It is interesting, but I fear they're making another Bioware's Jade Empire chachingcaching Chinese bullshit.
I don't really mind the cultural misunderstanding and shit, but it's just as silly as fuck.
Even with sufficient research to those foreign cultures, they must look into the mind of the natives to really know their perspective of things,
that's important to minimize cultural biases, without too much orientalism/eurocentric tropes which will make the setting pretty meh in my eyes.
I think Unrest is cool because the locals made it.
The devs are smart enough to consider this, and the new game will be easier too because ice age is pretty damn universal.

tl;dr Leave sandniggers simulator to Andhaira folks, and someone should persuade Wyrmlord to make gangrape simulators south asian style.

 

[Jools]

Dunno. I feel I don't even have I have enough info to say "looks interesting". The buzzwords-laden description of the project could come from Bioware, Black Isle or any gaming studio really. In fact, unless I see some in-game screenshot, I'm gonna call vapourware on this.

 

[Humppaleka]

There was another old RPG (something World of Ice) that was also set on an icy world. It was pretty interesting, moving in a snow storm guided only by compass and map with zero visibility and keeping both warm and fed was a challenge. I hope for this game to be hard survivalist, something which few real RPGs dare to do.

Aleshar - World of Ice

 

[OwNathan]

I was going to post a reply at the Zaharia thread, but realized that it's better make a new thread for discussion.

For specific context: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...urn-based-indie-rpg.87760/page-9#post-3289734



ping to the developer: OwNathan

Thanks for opening the thread!

Dunno. I feel I don't even have I have enough info to say "looks interesting". The buzzwords-laden description of the project could come from Bioware, Black Isle or any gaming studio really. In fact, unless I see some in-game screenshot, I'm gonna call vapourware on this.

There are no screenshots mostly because they would be horrible to see, we're still working on a decent UI because we mainly focused on the core features, like the travel system or the dialogues. As soon as we'll put a decent UI into the game, we'll post some screenshots.


Anyway, I'll be available for questions.

 

[getter77]

What are you plotting for the music? That main theme of Zaharia remains stuck in my head to this very day, so I'd imagine this new setting lends some fertile ground and I'd hope for better than the tired trope of "explore the sandbox world to utterly forgettable ambient music and random animal sounds~".

 

[OwNathan]

This is a low budget project and we still don't know if we'll be able to hire Luigi di Guida again (our previous composer)so we're working with a new talented composer. The soundtrack will be quite different, no orchestral stuff, something more experimental with influences from noise music.

But we're still in contact with Luigi and we hope to save enough money to get a couple of tracks from him, he's really good and we would like to work with him again.

 

[Hoodoo]

 

[OwNathan]

We posted a second dev. diary, with some info about the setting. http://goo.gl/G2athg

Spoiler

Frozen World setting will be the core of all narrative and gameplay and it couldn’t just be anything else.

The world is in a permanent winter and there are a lot of different consequences on human life. On the biological side, humanity had evolved to live in temperate climate ecosystems and, thanks to the progress, had been able to adapt to different climates. But what happens when most of the progress you achieved just collapses, leaving nothing but ruins behind? Our society depends on things like electricity, internet, roads and industry creating most of the goods we use in our life. But when the humans on the planet are less than a million people and most of them are forced to live with a nomadic lifestyle those things cannot just keep working.



No one knows what happened, not anymore, but there are different legends about how the world ended. Some says that a star fell on the planet, other says that a great war consumed the planet, but the real knowledge was lost because of the rapid depopulation that struck humanity. People live in a world where a dust cloud weakens the sunlight: the cloud had lowered the temperatures and slowly shaped Earth into a new planet where the temperature is rarely above the freezing point and the life of all species had dramatically changed.

Humans can no longer practice agriculture, because most crops need proper sources of heat and light, which are now unavailable. When you can’t grow your own food, you’re forced to abandon a sedentary lifestyle and start travelling around the world, searching for beasts to hunt and plants to gather. Obviously, not all the knowledge from the pre-apocalypse era was lost, and the luckiest survivors who found an energy source or a proper shelter were able to create a settlement. Those settlements are nothing compared to our massive cities, because are small communities rarely hosting more than one hundred people.

A new society was born out of this context: nomad and sedentary people often interact to exchange resources. The nomads are able to find a lot of ancient relics when travelling around the world and scavenging the ruined buildings searching for pre-apocalypse useful object is one of their primary activities; they also have the possibility to constantly hunt, gather some food then move again, in order not to deplete all the resource in one single area. A nomad group can be composed of just five peoples, but bigger groups can go up to one hundred folks who survive thanks to their big herds providing them meat and food. Those people need to travel every day to find new pastures, since the harsh climate condition doesn’t provide much food to their animals.

On the opposite side, sedentary people usually have one or more resources to barter with travellers who visit them. Some settlements are completely self-sufficient and they trade their surplus goods, others heavily rely on trade to provide supplies to their inhabitants but usually have some important resource to barter, like weapons or tools. Life is easier in a settlement, but it’s always a hard life. Sedentary people must work most of the day and live in constant fear of being attacked, since the richness in all settlements lures all kind of bandits. Living as a nomad is even harder, because they struggle every day for survival and many danger lies on their path: wild beasts, snowstorms, bandits. All nomad activities are characterized by an ever present danger: while hunting a wolf pack can attack the hunters, the scavenger searching a building may die in a collapse, every night the temperature drops and without a proper shelter people may freeze to death.

In Frozen World the player will be a nomad and we aim to create a satisfying experience to fully express the cruelty of this world. The player will face unexpected dangers, ruthless people and mysterious legacies from a distant past. He will need to lead his companions in a struggle for survival, fearing both the external world and the internal issues, because the group needs to stay close and everyday problems will regularly threat its harmony.

As you may notice, it's not the best english you ever saw, that's why we're searching for an editor to help us improve the in-game english, the one that really matters. It's a paid work and there will be tons of dialogues and other kind of text to check, so if there's any native speaker interested in doing that he can send me a private message, we don't want to deliver a poorly written game.

 

[OwNathan]

Some news about the development: we changed the name of the game and we're ready to share some screenshots of the dialogue system. I'll put the news under a spoiler.

Spoiler

After a couple of months of silence, here we are again with some updates on the development of Icy, the post-apocalyptic RPG that was previously named Frozen World. We didn’t spend the last months “building snowmen”, we worked on our game and we can finally start to show it to the world. And we will start with the dialogue system.




Today we’ll speak about Icy’s dialogue system, how it will work and what kind of features we have built in it. We believe that branching dialogues are a core feature in RPG games, since they allow the player to better embody their virtual alter ego, to give it a personality and a moral code that, through choices, will affect the course of events during the game.

The concept of choice is the fundamental pillar of an RPG: being able to choose what to do and how to do it is what distinguish a true role-playing experience from a game that only allows you to kill, gather loot and level up. That’s why branching dialogues are so important, especially in a game like Icy where all the narrative component will be dialogue-based.



Icy’s dialogue system is based on the ones adopted in the best classic RPGs and it will give the player a total control over everything his/her character will say. As you can see from the images, the player will always have more than one dialogue line to choose and that means being able to give a personality to the character even if there’s not an important choice at stake, because it’s important for us to give to the player as most freedom as possible to play the role he/her wants to play.

The main character’s skills will affect the dialogues, which means that the player can invest experience points in social skills to gain certain advantages when needed. A difficult situation can be solved through intimidation or speechcraft and killing people won’t always be the best choice: on the contrary it will often be dangerous and risky.



Unlike other RPGs, we decided to hide the various stat checks and there’s a specific reason behind this decision: knowing that a particular skill triggers a particular dialogue option can lead the player to choose it without thinking about it, just because stat checks are often a “click-to-win” feature. We want the player to carefully examine the situation and choose according to what seems more reasonable to them. We don’t want him/her to simply click on a dialogue option that appears highlighted due to the character’s stats at the moment, knowing that it will always be the best choice: for example, trying to intimidate the leader of an army maybe isn’t a smart thing, even if your character is good at intimidating people.

Another important thing that you may have noticed is that the various options available to the player are little sentences, which actually sum up the content of bigger and more articulated expressions. But don’t worry, you will always have the full control on what your character says because you will just need to move your mouse cursor over the button to see a preview of the full dialogue line, just like it happens in games such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. That means that you will never click on a dialogue option and see your character say something completely different from what you imagined. We chose to use buttons with abstracts to make the UI simpler and easier to manage, allowing the player to easily navigate through the various option, quickly identifying the one he/her prefers without losing the control over what the character actually says.



Dialogues will be the core of Icy’s experience, but this core will be supported by different gameplay mechanics that will cover the typical activities of a survivor’s routine, like scavenging, hunting and fighting. All those mechanics will feature interesting choices and will allow us to create an all-round survival experience, which will offer a real challenge to the players brave enough to choose the hardest difficulty level. We will show you those features in the future, so stay tuned for more updates about Icy!

Link to the news.

Probably the next week we'll post another update showing the map and the gameplay outside dialogues.

 

[Tigranes]

If I can hover to see full dialogue, why not just expand the central box and then list options in a traditional tree system? There seems to be no benefit - it does not look particularly more elegant, and you'll just have headaches reducing every option to 5 words to not squish the boxes. It's slightly different with something like the Bioware wheels, because there it's designed to let you scroll and choose options quickly using a gamepad, and it does make everything a lot shorter.

Really like the central 'scene' images, the screenshots generally do have a good atmosphere.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Looks nice but sorry to say... "Icy" is a less than fortunate name for the game.

 

[OwNathan]

If I can hover to see full dialogue, why not just expand the central box and then list options in a traditional tree system? There seems to be no benefit - it does not look particularly more elegant, and you'll just have headaches reducing every option to 5 words to not squish the boxes. It's slightly different with something like the Bioware wheels, because there it's designed to let you scroll and choose options quickly using a gamepad, and it does make everything a lot shorter.

Really like the central 'scene' images, the screenshots generally do have a good atmosphere.

Ideally we will have some time to create another dialogue UI and allow the player to choose between the classic system and the button system.

Looks nice but sorry to say... "Icy" is a less than fortunate name for the game.

Why? Maybe I'm missing something, not being a native.

 

[Kem0sabe]

If I can hover to see full dialogue, why not just expand the central box and then list options in a traditional tree system? There seems to be no benefit - it does not look particularly more elegant, and you'll just have headaches reducing every option to 5 words to not squish the boxes. It's slightly different with something like the Bioware wheels, because there it's designed to let you scroll and choose options quickly using a gamepad, and it does make everything a lot shorter.

Really like the central 'scene' images, the screenshots generally do have a good atmosphere.

Ideally we will have some time to create another dialogue UI and allow the player to choose between the classic system and the button system.

Looks nice but sorry to say... "Icy" is a less than fortunate name for the game.

Why? Maybe I'm missing something, not being a native.

It just doesnt roll well off the tongue, like calling a game "cold" or "warm" or "rainy".

I much preferred "frozen world", much more descriptive of the post apocalyptic winter scenario.

 

[Jaesun]

I don't like the name Icy either. Frozen World was a perfect name. Even Ice World would be better.

 

[Alchemist]

I have to agree the new name is uninspiring (Frozen World was much more evocative). Love the game concept though and so far it looks like it will be interesting.

 

[Brutan]

I don't care much about the names of games but Icy is a poor choice imo. What's worse is that you've droped Frozen World to use it.

 

[Tigranes]

Icy sounds like a new Pixar movie to me. Frozen World isn't the most amazing name ever but it communicates that it's a video game, that it's themed on survival and the apocalypse.

 

[hiver]

Icy actually sounds as if the game itself is icy or cold.

Go for "Ice Age" instead, get sued by Disney and then hire Cleve Blackemore as your legal representative.
That will get you so much PR you will be able to leave plenty to your grandkids. Trust me.

Frozen?
haha?


Ice World? Frozen world does sound good, in any case.

you will always have the full control on what your character says because you will just need to move your mouse cursor over the button to see a preview of the full dialogue line, just like it happens in games such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

That is sufficient, no need for a secondary Ui if that will take time from other stuff.

Your english is ok, just a few smaller mistakes i can see and they are mostly just words in wrong positions inside the sentence. But you need the language to be more then ok. Hope you find someone. (im not a native english speaker either)

 

[LeStryfe79]

Riddle of Ice.

 

[OwNathan]

So I guess we're going to change the name again and make a new logo.

But at least no one said that the game looks like shit, I'll take that as a good sign.