Card-Based Tainted Grail: Conquest - card-based roguelike adaptation of Kickstarted board game

[rusty_shackleford]

https://af.gog.com/game/tainted_grail?as=1649904300

Spoiler

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/awakenrealms/tainted-grail-the-fall-of-avalon/posts/2375160

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Read as "Tainted Grundle" and was like

 

[thesheeep]

Anyone having any experience with the original board game?
I'm entirely unsure what to think of this.

 

[Beowulf]

Anyone having any experience with the original board game?
I'm entirely unsure what to think of this.

The "original board game" just finished its kickstarter, so except for some early version paid reviews nobody played it, and in some parts it exists only as concepts of the designers.
It might be released in 2020, if they can keep their schedule.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

Fall of Avellone.

 

[LESS T_T]

Hey, it looks cool. Alpha demo and full gameplay trailer at December 20th.

It seems the combat carries the board game aesthetics.

Avalon is dying. King Arthur is long gone, and Knights of the Round Table are in disarray. Guardian Menhirs, the only thing that makes it possible for humans to survive in this remote land, are going dark. Your village chose its best and brightest and sent them on an epic quest to reach Kamelot, find the Grail, and save the land.

You were not among them.

They’ve never returned, and now it’s your turn to lead a band of unlikely heroes, the only ones this land can still provide. These ordinary people set off far too late, under-equipped for the task ahead, and with little hope of success.

Tainted Grail is a dark fantasy open-world RPG with fresh turn-based exploration and combat. It is based around deep, immersive story from one of the best and most innovative board games (biggest Kickstarter project of 2018!), but introduces a whole new experience crafted directly for PC.

EVERY DECISION MATTERS
Tainted Grail is a deeply immersive experience that takes the best elements of RPG adventures and brings them to the next level through intricately branching storylines. Written by Krzysztof Piskorski, one of the best Polish fantasy writers, it will draw you right in and keep you engaged, surprised, and invested in many secrets of Avalon.

In this dying world, no decision is easy or morally obvious, and you will often face impossible choices. Other times, the consequences of seemingly minor actions will haunt you in the least expected moments. In the end, your impact on Avalon is going reverberate through deep, meaningful changes to the game world - entire towns will raise or fall, land will shatter, ancient powers will be restored, or broken forever.

DEVELOP YOUR TEAM AND VILLAGE
During the game, you will continuously develop your heroes – from getting better items, through leveling and choosing new asymmetric skills and attacks, up to evolving archetypes that will redefine and direct these characters.

On top of that, you will develop your village as well. Shoring up your defenses or raising additional buildings won’t be easy, often requiring you to solve story encounters and to unlock new possibilities through exploration.

EXPLORE THE UNKNOWN
A major part of the game involves expeditions into the land covered by the Wyrdness, an ancient force twisting people, creatures, and even space itself in all manner of ways.

You will need to carefully manage your resources, use special items protecting you from the chaotic influence, and pick your track carefully, as there will be plenty of enemies and weird, unexpected events waiting for you. While dangerous, exploration will be the only way to gather precious resources and, ultimately, to figure out what is happening to Avalon and if it can be stopped.

The 3D map your heroes will travel through will be brimming with dark but also beautiful and striking designs and locations.

STRATEGIC COMBAT
During combat, you will decide between using skills specific for your hero and figuring out the best possible combinations to do it. A unique power runes mechanic gives the system additional depth, making it possible for the same skills to have a different effect.

Every hero will bring a different playstyle, defined by unique skills, that you will continue to further develop based on your favorite tactic. You will supplement this rich toolset with various items and special moves. All of that makes every encounter a different and exciting tactical challenge!

 

[Infinitron]

Damn, this is actually a good way to fund a CRPG. Take money from deep-pocketed tabletop nuts (5 million Euros, holy shit!) and use it to make a video game. The devs who start with video games and then do a tabletop spinoff are getting it wrong, lol.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

Here's their Kickstarter update about this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/awakenrealms/tainted-grail-the-fall-of-avalon/posts/2712643

Shipping / development update + HUGE Tainted Grail Digital update!

Hey everyone!

We can see a loooot of you already enjoying the game and getting deep inside the story of Avalon and you have no idea how much happiness and satisfaction we feel seeing you guys liking our work! Having said that, we also know there is a lot of you waiting to get the game to the table (language editions / 1-wave) and we are working really hard to bring it your way soon too!

This update is quite special for us, as we will be showing Tainted Grail in its digital version to the whole world today. A game that each backer will get for free, as promised Our digital team have put SO MUCH EFFORT through past year and its so much better from what we have shown you during the campaign. Now, we could really use your help to spread the word about the digital game out there! Wish-listing on steam / commenting / sharing feedback / sharing trailer with friends - any of that would be amazing! thanks to that we will be able to do a much better digital game and bring Tainted Grail's universe to the mainstream! In this update we will share a loooot of details from the digital game, so if you are interested, make sure to check it out!

Today we will be talking about:

• Tainted Grail Digital - HUGE update! Free Steam Keys for every backer!
• 1-st wave shipping update
• Mobile app updates?
• Language editions translation update
• Expansion new art!

Tainted Grail Digital
First - take a look at the new announcement trailer!

As you know, during the campaign we have announced that we will bring Tainted Grail as fully fledged PC experience. Not Board Game adaptation, but an RPG created from the ground up. We also announced that every backer of the Board Game will get the digital version for free on top of his pledge. Some of you were excited about it, some of you were not - but from that announcement our digital team put SO MUCH WORK into this game that currently it is a miles ahead of what we were showing and today we will be showing it to the whole world! We are extremely proud of what the team was able to create and we must say we are really lucky to draw so many passionate and hard working people to our team!

Before we will start - we have designed a demo and the game in a way that it does not spoil the Board Game story, so you can read everything / watch and play without fear!

If you like what to see and enjoy the universe of Tainted Grail here are few things that you can do to help us!

• Wishlist the game on steam
• Share the word of the game to fiends that enjoy RPG games! It is a good occasion to convince them to play Tainted Grail and perhaps get them in for a Board Game session
• Play the game and leave us your feedback! You guys are always amazing with very cool ideas and feedback on any issues.
• If you enjoyed the game, write us a review on Steam! :D

Here is also story intro for the game!

Spoiler

When can I get my Free steam key....?
Ok, so first of all - while the game looks so much better then it did, we are far from being done! We really want to make it an extremely well fledged RPG experience that will compete with other digital games out there.

What we have now is an Alpha Demo that you guys will be able to play at 20th of December!

This Friday you will get an email that will have included your personal Steam Key*

To activate it, simply go to steam app and click option showed on illustration below:

*Some backers already got access to pre-alpha version (TG Digital and Grail pledge backers), your version will automatically update to the newest available

What we know that we need to work on more:

• Bigger combat complexity / more skills, options and builds
• Overall balance
• Better characters asymmetry
• Better UX and tutorial on each part of the game
• More story choices affecting gameplay in significant way
• Whole village building aspect of the game
• More time sensitive gameplay / events - so that turn system will make sense
• Bugs, bugs, bugs....
• Optimization
• Graphic, audio and animation enhancements

Quick FAQ

Is game in any way interfering with Board Game development?

Nope, it is totally different team, recruited for Digital game specifically

• Is the game PC only? MAC OS support?

Currently we are working only on PC version BUT as usual, if the game will get popular enough, we will work on other platforms!

• Is the game coming in different languages?

Same as above - currently we are planning only English, but with enough interest anything is possible!

• How much different is Digital game from the Board Game...?

Very. We have changed basic mechanics totally, including combat. We want to use digital platform to full strength and thanks to that we are able to do even more branching storyline, a lot of "hidden" gameplay complexity.

In terms of story, while it will follow same topic, it will offer A LOT of new material, including the fact that demo is 100% spoiler free for the Board Game.

Tainted Grail Digital - development insights
Taking this opportunity, we asked our digital team to provide you guys a few insights from the development process. If you enjoy those, let us know in the comments, we will be happy to provide more!

Art

While we had tons of arts from the board game, we wanted to add so many new things, that we had to created whole new concept art for the digital game, to make sure it will look consistent and will preserve a grim style of the original Board Game!

Since the stars of our current pre-alpha version are Ailei and Beor, let’s see what they look like

Fun fact: the naming convention meme is real. You gotta love that this piece’s filename is “AILEI1_3 final final 23”. And that Beor got to “final final 46”:

Aside from some familiar faces, you’re going to meet a variety of folk, some of them more than willing to trade with your adventurers. Here’s a look at the merchants. A cool tidbit that one player in a thousand will notice: every merchant has their own, unique prices!


In digital game there will be also bigger variety of the enemies and we wanted to create a lot of them by showing the deadly effects of wyrdness on life in general. Just check out some of these concepts!

There are also some really weird new locations you can see, visit, influence and generally interact with. We have introduced a whole new mechanic in digital game with Wyrdcandles - special candles that lets you go through the Wyrdness without active Menhirs for limited time.

They are one of the most important item in the game that and you will need to push your luck around it, while exploring new lands. BUT! We created a whole new lore elements on how are they made, by whom, why and there is as always tons of branching storyline depending on your choices (this storyline is not yet in the demo).

And here is one of the taverns hidden deep in the Wyrdness!

Story
Here’s one of the main reasons we keep saying it’s a different game from The Fall of Avalon, and not its adaptation. This is a spoiler-free look at a quest in the tabletop Tainted Grail:

If you’ve played the game, you know how impressive the branching narrative is. The thing is, we committed to recognizing the strengths of the new, digital medium, and it’s very clear here. This new format allows us to go even more crazy with it and expand on the branching storylines in ways that would just prove unbearable while playing a board game. Take a look at just few quest connections!

Gameplay

While working on gameplay we were doing tons of different builds and testing out totally out of the box ideas. From the very start we did not want to do a simple port of a Board Game - we believe that every medium have its own strengths and while Board Game mechanics can work amazingly well on the table - on computer they might be very tiresome.

This is why you will see quite a lot of changes in the digital games, most importantly:

• You will control more then one hero! They can change, evolve or even die during your journey!
• You also take care of the whole village, can build new buildings, defend it etc.
• Exploration works differently - you can walk through Wyrdness with wyrdcandles, there are more Menhirs to be light up.
• Combat is totally different - there are more statuses, items and things that game calculates itself (that would be WAY to hard to calculate for yourself during board game session)
• Story is more branching, there are more side-quest and the game will dive deep into the lore of Avalon

But there is so much more small changes everywhere - once you will see the demo, you will know It feels like 2 different beasts, but we hope the overall fell of exploration and adventure is strong in both titles!

Here are some screenshots from the Alpha demo!

Ok guys! This would be it in terms of Digital game. As you can see - our Digital team have put A LOT of work inside and we hope that you guys will enjoy the demo and are generally happy with the direction digital game is heading!

1-st wave shipping update [ENG]
With the Canadian backers receiving their games this and next week - we are almost completed with shipping out 1st wave of ENG orders! We are also extremely happy to report, that requests for replacements also are way below 3% (our target) so we can fairly say that stricter QA control in China factory brought positive results!

Now, what if you did not recived your game...?

First of all - log in to your GAMEFOUND ACCOUNT and see if:

1) You are sure you picked English edition

2) You are sure you have picked 2-wave shipping

3) You are sure order was paid and completed

If all of those are correct and you still did not get either game or tracking - please contact our Customer Service HERE and create a ticket!

Mobile app updates?
A lot of you are asking about the updates on mobile app (especially the journal). We are already working on it, but so far there is no definite time for publishing it yet. We will keep you updated with this, but generally we want to start with the most important functionality of the app (interactive journal, music, save) and then gradually update the app with more and more content if you guys will enjoy it!

Why were we able to work on the digital game and not the app?

Since the digital game is something totally different from the Board Game, we did not had to wait for the Board Game to be finished. With the app, we wanted to make sure we will focus on the Core Box development first, get everything right there and only then start working on the app, once source material will be ready!

Language editions translation update
You are probably waiting also for some news from translation process. Current status is, that by the end of next week we are going to send the translated files for the digital proofs, so that we will get them back before Chinese New Year.

Translation process was really long and hard with the amount of content out there. We really wanted to make sure we will answer all questions that our partners had so that they will do an amazing job with translation of the game. Especially in this kind of game translation is really crucial. So right now we will be looking over the proofs, looking for errors and mistakes, correcting colors etc.

In the next update we will be able to share with you guys some of the pictures of Digital proofs as well as full production and shipping plan, once we will have every language edition confirmed!

Expansion new art!
Lets traditionally finish with some new art from Stretch Goals and expansion, that are also being currently heavily worked at!

Check them out!

Ok guys! This is it for today, see you in a bit with more news from the world of Tainted Grail! As always, thanks for your support and being here with us!

 

[Hobo Elf]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why would you go to the trouble of making all those 3D environments and characters and then keep the combat at card game visuals.

 

[LESS T_T]

So you don't have to make all that combat animation?

 

[Darth Canoli]

Damn, this is actually a good way to fund a CRPG. Take money from deep-pocketed tabletop nuts (5 million Euros, holy shit!) and use it to make a video game. The devs who start with video games and then do a tabletop spinoff are getting it wrong, lol.

5 million euros and they come up with that trash card combat system ?
I'm guessing they all have an assortment of STD and the Columbian cartels are 2 million richer by now ...

 

[jac8awol]

Nice! I'm a sucker for Arthurian legend stuff, keep trying to replay King Arthur the roleplaying wargame but it always crashes my laptop. I'll throw money at this project, seems gritty enough, those Polish authors drink depression for breakfast. Knock off gwent with Merlin in a campaign, yes please.

 

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/1199030/view/3411982578239951397

A gigantic update about cool stuff!
OR: TAINTED GRAIL IS COMING ALIVE!

Siema! I’m Kamil, game director/producer at Awaken Realms Digital, and I’m really happy that I’m finally able to share this update with y’all!

Mostly because over the past few months we made a huge leap forward in every aspect of the game.

As you may know, we’ve run a closed pre-alpha test of Tainted Grail for Kickstarter backers of the board game in December – we really wanted to see how players will react to a very rough version of the game in order to get as much feedback as possible. We asked them to complete a “short” survey after they were done with the demo and well… we got swamped with responses. We got a tremendous amount of answers and they still keep on coming.

We are amazed by this reception. So first of all: thank you! Engaging with our community is one of our core values at Awaken Realms and we always take your feedback seriously.

We went through all the answers, we’ve read all you had to say on our Discord (and spoiled some stuff over there already), we’ve read our Steam forums (and responded to everything we could), and we’ve been keeping close watch on everything that had been published about Tainted Grail on the web.

We were looking for things that keep coming back in your feedback. And so, taking everything you said into consideration (after running it through our internal filters), we’ve decided to change and improve some things in the game.

Here’s some of the stuff that’s been happening with Tainted Grail since December 2019!

We’re going to talk about:

• COMBAT
  
• TURNS
  
• THE MAP
  
• WHEN IT WILL BE PLAYABLE
  
• TRANSLATIONS

Oh, and one quick note before we get to the core: in our surveys we asked “what do you feel is the game’s most solid and enjoyable aspect?”, and we saw that most common answers – 75% – point to the following topics:

• story (32%), lore (7%)
  
• atmosphere (13%), visuals (11%)
  
• combat (12%)

But, as you may know, we’re Polish, and so even though we could’ve said that it’s a job well done and call it a day, we – like our DNA dictates – decided to focus mostly on the negatives instead. That’s how we’ve been raised, that’s what our parents usually did!

So. The interesting thing that came up when we asked “what one thing should be improved in the game” is that the most popular keyword was...

Spoiler

COMBAT
Here’s a funny thing. How is it possible that “combat” was both one of the best rated elements of the game and one that you felt should be improved the most?

I’d say that the answer seems pretty simple: our game was based on a very weird dissonance. It looked and played like an RPG while its combat felt like… well, another boring card game. We’ve seen this problem reflected in our surveys, on our Steam forums, and in plenty of other places.

There was an interesting paradox we faced, though. It seems that people are fed up with card-based games EVEN THOUGH when they did try out Tainted Grail they seemed to like the gameplay we’ve built around cards.

So, thanks to the amount of positive feedback we received and a lot of interest we’ve seen around the game we decided that we definitely need to find time and resources to do something about this.

Here’s one of the main things that we've been working on: we moved our combat to full 3D.

IT'S STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS!


There's still a lot we have to polish in here and we're working on that - we could've waited to show you a better version... but we're so happy to be able to finally say that it WORKS that we just couldn't restist sharing even a work-in-progress video with you all!

Let us know what you think! For us - It already feels really good to play (that screenshake! :D). And we’re honestly not sure whether there’s another card-based game out there which does the same thing with combat visuals. We couldn’t find any.

Now we're finally sure that we are going to keep this feature and so we can finally share it with y'all - and we're really happy about that because going full 3D was the only logical step we could take if we wanted to keep the RPG feel in the game while also keeping the main building blocks of our combat’s systems intact.

So there are various reasons why we decided to do this – obviously, we wanted to make the experience more visually appealing and more immersive – but I won’t bullshit you with this kind of PR talk. One of the greatest things we achieved by going full 3D is that we can finally let you spend more time with your heroes and let you see them grow in power. We couldn’t do that with tiny low poly models moving around the game’s map that turned into static portraits on the combat screen. Now, when you build an awesome combo, you can actually witness and feel its real power! :D

“BUT… IS IT STILL A CARD GAME? “
Well. You see, the design problem we’re facing here is that unless they’re based on your physical dexterity (like Skyrim or The Witcher 3) most turn-based video games offer skills and abilities that deep down are just like cards – they only have different ways of visualizing them.

What we are looking for while designing Tainted Grail, and what’s best achieved in our case by cards and turn-based combat, is

• letting players try out various playstyles,
  
• giving them lots of interesting gameplay choices,
  
• turning every combat encounter into an exciting puzzle to solve,
  
• laying out a rich collection of systems that affect one another,
  
• chosing new skills, managing them, and creating awesome combos.

Using turns and cards also allows us to have some fun with the game’s pacing: Tainted Grail currently feels like a fast-paced puzzle game (for “arcade” gamers like myself) WHILE also having plenty of opportunities for min-maxing and optimizing the game’s systems (for hardcore deck builders – like our designers).

But enough about that – it’s not the only change I have to tell you about!

TURNS
This will be quick. At some point in the game you were able to recruit a second character. When you did that, the game shifted to turn-based movement – and plenty of players hated that part because we didn’t implement it properly. It was confusing and tiresome to move characters separately (while we couldn’t just add a “party” because it would’ve been totally weird (as in “why is only one of my characters fighting or participating in that story encounter?” weird)) and/or game-breaking in certain points.

What we did is this: we got rid of turns as a limitation (“you can’t go there this turn, you need to wait until the next one”) and kept them only as a way to measure time. So now you can move freely on the map – it’s just that the time will pass and it will be measured in arbitrarily set turns. Why? One of the reasons is that some things in our storyline demand it! Also, there are some items and statuses that last for limited amount of time - and turns are pretty clean and easy when it comes to representing the flow time.

THE MAP
What players really loved about Tainted Grail’s demo was its atmosphere and visuals. Our artists did a great job at translating the world of the board game into its digital version in December BUT we knew we could do better.

Or rather they’ve known that they want to do better because… well, the only explanation I have is that they are insane. Like, seriously, I haven’t met a group of people who are that crazy about polishing every single thing (that nobody’s going to notice, like, ever). But, as always, they did an amazing job with the graphical overhaul of the entire game.

But first – let me explain why we felt that Tainted Grail needs a visual makeover.

When we started the project, it was based around certain assumptions – that the terrain will be of fixed size and height, and that the placement of locations should be more or less similar to the board game. This means that, for example, Grubwood – a haunted forest in which the Fore-dwellers were slain in huge numbers – would’ve had to be a location designed as a single “node” that could be placed on the map so that you could interact with it. Pretty much like a single card in the board game.

This meant that Grubwood would’ve had one entrance, and upon interacting with it you’d see a pop up with its storyline.

We didn’t want that to happen:

However, we didn’t have time to tackle this problem properly in December so our Grubwood looked like any other forest in the game:

We couldn’t do much about it back then. In order to fix that we’d have to start over – rebuild the entire map from scratch.

So what did we decide to do when we saw you all really excited about the game’s visuals after our pre-alpha demo? Well. Obviously we decided to start over and rebuild the entire map from scratch in order to make it even prettier! :D

But what does it mean for gameplay?

Skipping all technical stuff, it’s enough to say that now the map can be as big or as small as we want. And this, obviously, means that the game got… bigger. And more diverse in terms of landscapes you’ll be able to visit and experience.

This, in turn, means that we can add more quests, more events, more STUFF.

(And that I – being in charge of quest design, too – won’t sleep for a couple of months BUT OH WELL #INDIEGAMEDEV)

Second great thing we have now – various tools which help us out in differentiation of textures and vegetation in order to create plenty of different biomes. Cities should feel like cities and forests should feel like forests now. Do you remember the Witch’s cottage near Cuanacht?

In December:

Today:

Also, remember our old Grubwood – that blue forest? Here’s our new Grubwood:

Third thing: that damned scale.

I have nightmares about this topic, seriously. It kept coming back in our discussions for the past year or so, and we’ve been running in circles trying to fix this problem. It’s all because we just couldn’t stand this:

The fact that our heroes are the size of houses was a total immersion breaker for most of the people on the development team. Any solution would’ve required a redesign of the entire game map. Would’ve required a redo of plenty of our already existing models (like houses), plenty of entirely new ones, entirely new terrain. It would’ve required a lot of time and effort…

And, as you already know, that’s precisely what we did.

And it was soooo worth it.

Now let’s get to the best part.

WHEN CAN I PLAY THIS?

Soon™.

After some thoughts and consultations, we decided that we will launch this game in Early Access (this upgrade will come for free to all Kickstarter backers, your version of the game will just upgrade). You may think that story focused RPGs are not the best material for Early Access for various reasons and well… You are quite right.

BUT there are a lot of people who asked us whether it's possible to play the game somehow (THANK YOU, the fact that you wanted to play our pre-alpha feels so amazing!), even if it was just a tiny fragment of the full experience. So, even though we will have only 3-4 hours of main campaign's gameplay ready for our Early Access launch, we will make sure it will be an enhanced and improved version of what some of you have already seen. For example, we're going to implement/ehnance/fix:

1. Better quests, more sidequests
   
2. More choices and branching with more consequences
   
3. More voiceovers!
   
4. WAY better visuals (as you've seen in this update), sound, and overall UI improvements
   
5. ...less bugs & better optimization

But, to be honest, we would feel bad if this was be the ONLY thing we would offer to all the people who will help us in creating Tainted Grail by participating in our Early Access.

This is why we are creating A WHOLE, ADDITIONAL MODE for the game.
And you'll be able to enjoy it... endlessly.

An entirely new game experience. For free.
In addition to the RPG, not instead.

It started as, well, just a crazy idea, but after a while... it turned out into something really amazing! I can’t tell you more right now and this update is REALLY LONG already… But stay tuned: we’re going to have more details soon and we are really excited to share it with you all!

Oh, I almost forgot. One last thing you’ve been asking about...

TRANSLATIONS

This will be quick. We spent a lot of time creating a backend and tools which will eventually allow us to translate the game to various languages but – to be completely honest – we won’t be able to support other languages than English for the Early Access launch. The game’s text and storyline is going to be changing during this phase and we just can’t afford to spend our resources on this particular feature because translations and voice acting… well, they are really expensive.

However – you can help us out.

Steam allows us to see precisely how many players downloaded or wishlisted the game in a certain region/country. This means that we can clearly see both the existing player base AND the possible demand – and right now all our player numbers come from the Kickstarter backers.

We will be looking at all those numbers closely (like “f5” every single minute closely) before, during, and after the Early Access launch – so we just want to ask you for a click. If you’re interested in the game’s translation to the language you speak or you know someone who will only play the game if it’s translated: tell them to let us know by adding Tainted Grail to their wishlist. We can’t (it’s physically impossible) count how many of you will ask us about this on Discord or email – we can see the numbers in our control panel, though.

So: make yourself visible by wishlisting and playing the game – this lets us know not only how many of you are there, but also WHERE you are!

 

[Stormcrowfleet]

Anybody have gameplay stuff ? It's good ?

 

[Infinitron]

Early Access on June 25th, also on GOG: https://af.gog.com/game/tainted_grail?as=1649904300



https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/1199030/view/2202768523867631939

ANNOUNCING TAINTED GRAIL: CONQUEST

More info about a new game mode we're adding to Tainted Grail!

Hey everyone! It’s Kamil again - game director/producer at Awaken Realms Digital. I have some really exciting things to show you today and we're SO DAMN HAPPY that we can finally talk about them out in the open! :D

Here’s... Tainted Grail: Conquest!

TAINTED GRAIL: CONQUEST
Like I said in my last post, we are creating a whole additional mode for Tainted Grail and you'll be able to play it, well, endlessly. It’s an entirely new game experience which you’ll get in addition to the main game, not instead of it!

We’re kinda insane because making two games at the same time isn’t easy... But we’re extremely happy that we will be able to deliver this thing to you, folks!

The crucial point here is that Tainted Grail: Conquest will be the main focus of the period we’ll spend in Early Access!

Why, though? Two main reasons

ONE: GAMEPLAY IS KING

Awaken Realms, as many of you probably know, has A LOT of experience as a board game developer. This means that over the years we’ve learned that gameplay is king – and it’s really easy to forget about that when you’re making a video game (being constantly distracted by various systems and mechanics you’re adding to the experience while forgetting about the most important thing: FUN).

We’re confident that we’ll be able to deliver a proper RPG to you because RPGs stand on their storylines – and Tainted Grail is a really amazing, huge, and already developed world from which we're able to draw – but we are pretty sure that your journey through Avalon would feel lackluster if the gameplay wouldn’t be there. This is why we’ve been extremely focused on gameplay for the past months and we are really proud of the results we were able to achieve!

Actually, after a few tests and discussions, we realized that our combat system works really well on its own. After some further prototypes it turned out that this unique mix of an RPG and a roguelike is a really fun game out on its own. Full of neat combos, unexpected quests, and hard, satisfying exploration. This is how Conquest was born.

Sure, our new trailer shows a lot of shiny stuff, bits and pieces of combat, and some locations – it is much harder to see the actual gameplay and the flow of the game, though. We really put in the work so that the whole experience will feel really satisfying to you all – but there are still plenty of details to be taken care of and ironed out (hence - Early Access).

Spoiler

TWO: RPG experienced as a whole

We believe that truly epic RPG adventure should be experienced as a whole, without any breaks or "episodes" and whatnot. This is why we feel like developing an RPG game in Early Access and giving out the storyline bit by bit misses the point. This is why in Early Access you will receive access to about 3-4 hours of the Campaign (just to give you a good intro and taste of things to come) and then you will get an update with the full campaign when it’s done! Meanwhile, you will be getting quite a lot of content for Conquest that will make getting the Early Access version worthwhile!

That’s why Conquest will be the main focus of our Early Access. If you want just the story campaign – we would recommend you to wait for the official release (with one small caveat that the price might be a bit higher).

So, as you see, Tainted Grail: Conquest is our personal take on the roguelike genre – but holy damn, where do I even start telling you all about it?

There were a lot of things we wanted to do with the campaign but for various reasons we couldn’t. We had plenty of neat ideas that wouldn’t work in the context of a traditional RPG or there wasn’t any justification for actually making them happen. However, when we were thinking about Conquest, we realized that by working on two games at the same time we can make them both bigger and better.

What will be unique to Conquest?

MAP GENERATION

We want the game to be playable “forever”. Every time you boot it up you’ll be presented with a different map layout but – at least at launch – with the same objective: kill the prince of the Fore-dwellers. Later on we’re planning to add ever-shifting, surprising objectives to every run.

However, all of the paths will contain interesting encounters, surprising locations, and various treasures – and we’re working HARD to make it really fun to explore this world.

At the same time we really do know that “procedural generation” tends to mean “boring shit” in the current video game dictionary. Because of that we’re trying to find ways of surprising you and making sure that even after hours and hours of playing you’re still going to find something new to experience.

(Something different then pure gameplay and various combinations of combat skills and encounters which in itself should make the game fun to play for gazillion hours – but if that was all we’d have to offer, then why bother with the map, right?).

We want you to be finding new stuff even after many hours of playing. There are various ways to achieve this but I’ll give you my personal favorite thing about Conquest (but I’m biased because I’ve been a quest designer for a few years).

What I personally always wanted to see in roguelikes is a storyline that… makes sense? It’s not easy to find one that has it – and for good reasons: why would you care when it’s all about quick arcade runs, right? However, in our case, since we already have the technology to handle a narrative-driven RPG campaign, it would be a shame not to use it. This means that we’re able to add plenty of interesting encounters, characters, and locations to the game, and make sure that once you interact with them, they can change, react, or surprise you over the course of your runs. Won’t spoil more – and I gotta tell you more about...

BASE BUILDING

One of the things we really wanted to have in the game’s main campaign was base building. We made some prototypes of this feature last year but it just didn’t make sense – it’s a problem from the design standpoint because of the inherent conflict of “having a base” and “going on a journey”. Having a base means returning back home and we didn’t want to force players to get back to Cuanacht for resources, to buy stuff, or whatever else.

However, in a roguelike, you constantly die and start over. And you have to start somewhere. That’s where a base comes in really handy – because the village, in our game, will be a way to carry over your passive progress.

During your runs you’ll find people and resources that will allow you to create new buildings - and these buildings will stay with you over the course of all of your runs. They'll function as vendors or rest sites. Some NCPs will allow you to craft various weapons or change your abilities. Some will offer things that you wouldn't be able to access in any different way - while some options will be hidden unless you complete a certain questline... There's going to be a lot of things to discover with this feature and we hope you're going to have a lot of fun with various ways of personalizing your hometown AND discovering how to actually unlock certain buildings!

General Additions

Combat Revamp!

I already said that in our previous post, but it’s worth repeating. Along with the visual overhaul of our combat, we kept the core, but changed a lot of things about the system. So far it’s looking really good and some of our Kickstarter backers are already having a lot of fun with it.

You see, in early 80s, Sid Meier, a genius designer, said that a game is a series of interesting choices, and that’s our core motto when it comes to designing our combat system. On the most basic level we’re operating on five factors: items, attacks, passives skills, runes, and rune upgrades, all of which influence each other, so that you get a real chance at customizing your playstyle – it’s all about giving options to players and letting them create their own killer combos out of various building blocks that we’re offering.

We’re not designing a “cRPG” where your passive skills are like “+5% to fire resistance”. We’re doing our best to include as many game-changing options as possible. Every turn in combat should present you with a meaningful choice – through encounters with tough enemies with crazy attack patterns or through sheer joy of optimizing your possibilities so that you’re a walking killing machine.

But, believe me, the game will be hard. We’re already working closely with our community and every time they tell us that they’ve won a bossfight on their first try is the moment when we make the game 20% harder :D

Fashion Grail!

One of the things we really wanted to add to the game – but couldn’t justify that – was character customization and more options for character development. Since you were playing as Beor or Ailei, we kinda had to stick with their board game archetypes.

Now, by working on Conquest, we decided to add a thing that plenty of players were asking us for in the pre-alpha surveys: say hi to Fashion Grail!

And that’s not all when it comes to improvements and additions… but we need to leave some stuff for later, right?

Expect some gameplays and more information soon!

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

We’re pretty confident that we’ll be able to deliver a proper early access build by this date and – to reiterate – it will contain two games!

• One game will be the beginning of a single-player campaign which some of you already played in December, but refined, polished, and expanded – offering around 3 hours of gameplay.
  
• The second one will be the main focus of the time we want to spend in Early Access – that’s Tainted Grail: Conquest. It will be a combination of a hardcore RPG with a roguelike experience.

We will be running various tests for our Kickstarter backers soon – join us on Discord to check the game out!

 

[Infinitron]

Combat looks boring as hell, but everything else looks cool. I guess I'll keep an eye on it.

They make this cool setting, moody art, interesting campaign... and then Yu Gi Oh card combat

Total dealbreaker for me

What a shame

Looks like I missed the update from last month where they revealed that combat was no longer just cards. Rejoice.

 

[Drowed]

I already said that in our previous post, but it’s worth repeating. Along with the visual overhaul of our combat, we kept the core, but changed a lot of things about the system. So far it’s looking really good and some of our Kickstarter backers are already having a lot of fun with it.

But to be honest, visually the combat now looks more interesting, that's a fact. I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic now, assuming the rest of the game is as interesting as it seems at first glance.

 

[Pearass]

I already said that in our previous post, but it’s worth repeating. Along with the visual overhaul of our combat, we kept the core, but changed a lot of things about the system. So far it’s looking really good and some of our Kickstarter backers are already having a lot of fun with it.

But to be honest, visually the combat now looks more interesting, that's a fact. I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic now, assuming the rest of the game is as interesting as it seems at first glance.

I agree! I don't really like card games, so it turned me off quite a bit. The style was good though, so this is definitely a change that makes me feel a little more secure.

 

[AliceAlcina]

Slightly new video

 

[Agame]

Indie games and "card combat"... smh.

 

[AliceAlcina]

Indie games and "card combat"... smh.

It's annoying at best, but as long it's fun...

 

[Infinitron]

Oh heck, they released it a week earlier:



https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/1199030/view/2475239471144245845

TAINTED GRAIL: EARLY ACCESS NOW AVAILABLE!
Today is the big day! Today we finally share with you the Early Access version of Tainted Grail, and we couldn't be more excited about it. We probably couldn't be more stressed about it, too :D

This was an extremely long journey for us… We've spent almost 2 years of our lives on this game, learning as we went. The project kept evolving, the team kept growing, and we've all learned so much from working on this title that it's almost unbelievable.

And when we think back on how it all started - we're really proud and honestly amazed that our company actually got to this point.

You see, the journey of Awaken Realms was much, much longer than our two years. The company was formed about six years ago in the basement of an old house located in a small village near Wrocław, Poland. At first, it was run by two guys (they say they were "extremely passionate about games and stories," but they are just geeks, like all of us! :D) with zero capital and no experience whatsoever. But they decided to start a miniature-painting studio... and we're pretty sure they never would've thought that, in time, their company will be able to break Kickstarter with its board games and start working on ambitious digital games!

A lot happened on this 6-year-long journey from painting miniatures, and most importantly, a lot of talented people joined the company and managed to create some great games… or even open up a board game pub in our city :D

And so, we at Awaken Realms Digital, are incredibly proud to share with you an early access version of Tainted Grail. The first video game Awaken Realms ever started working on - and the first one we're publicly launching!

You can imagine why this feels exciting and stressful at the same time. We've worked days and nights, we've put our hearts into this game, and we are incredibly proud of what we've been able to achieve.

We REALLY hope you're going to enjoy Tainted Grail!

But OK, we probably got a little carried away with this intro… Let's write a little bit more about what is waiting for you inside this Early Access!

TAINTED GRAIL: CONQUEST

As we announced before - our main focus during early access is going to be Conquest, our narrative-driven rogue-lite/RPG hybrid. An endless game mode, we're going to support with regular updates all the way until our proper launch.

Spoiler

What's Conquest?
This is a whole, new roguelike mode that we announced in our last update. We've been working on it for the past months, and we've been actively iterating it with our discord community, and while there is still a lot of work ahead of us... It already feels really satisfying to play!

Also, we have our first community-made guide to playing one of the classes! Thank you, Disiesel!!! :D

Main highlights:

• Tons of story locations/interactions with different lore and choices
  
• Procedurally generated world – every time you start a new run, you will find different things on your way!
  
• Possibility to create unique combos between cards, passive skills, items, and consumables
  
• An option to build and upgrade your village in between the runs
  
• High-scores! Defeat the final boss and beat your high score!
  
• Learn extra lore about the world of Tainted Grail.

To stress it out: this mode will be the focus of our early access and will be developed over time with your help, folks! We will be adding much more content, new classes, new runes, new monsters, new bosses, and various challenges!

And we're going to share a roadmap with you really soon!

Campaign
On top of that, we have a re-mastered teaser of the game's single-player campaign for you. This is still a teaser which lasts for around 3 hours, but it comes with quite a lot of changes!

• Huge visual upgrade
  
• Polished storyline
  
• More content to find and more story interactions
  
• More voice overs!
  
• The game's world was built from scratch!
  
• ...And much more!

We hope this will give you a good taste of what is coming in the full release. (But please remember if the story campaign is what you are mostly looking for, we are recommending waiting for the full version!)

Visuals
First of all, we were able to really enhance everything in the game visually and bring everything into 3D! Animations are better, visual effects are better, the scale of heroes and the environment is right, and the terrain is much better looking, too! But well, screenshots and videos speak for themselves!

Hopefully, our visuals will immerse you in the dark Arthurian world!

Voices, sounds, music!
We have also enhanced our soundtrack and audio, and we are so happy with the final effect! Not only did we got the AMAZING Danheim (definitely check out their Bandcamp page!) on board and they allowed us to use their songs on the game's soundtrack, we were also able to get a lot of great voice over actors. Huge thanks to Emma Powell for being THE voice of Tainted Grail!

So...

We really hope that you will get a great experience out of the game – but please remember this is still Early Access. We expect some bugs, small problems, issues, and a general lack of polish in various places. We will be reading all of your feedback, and we'll try to fix everything as soon as it's possible!

This is it! On behalf of the whole Awaken Realms Digital team, who worked as crazy on this game, we would like to invite you to take a look!

Meet the hungry knight, sleep in the skull of the Great Stagfather, and curse those damned rats again and again! See you on the trail and let the All-mother protect you from wyrdness!

And last, but not least:

 

[fantadomat]

Is it out or in early access ?

 

[AliceAlcina]

It's in EA