5 Days until Kickstarter - Oh boy!
More than three years ago there was an epic rain in the city of Tbilisi in Georgia. The roads had turned to small rivers and unable to get home from a work-related meeting I took shelter in my friend's tiny basement room that his indie music band rented for practice. We decided to wait out the rain there.
It had been a long time since we had gotten together and soon we got to talking about our favorite games. As it often happens it didn't take long for us to start talking about old games and all the things we missed about them. The handcrafted open world of Gothic, the epic story and companions of Baldur's Gate, the interactivity of Ultima and Zelda, the open-ended design of Thief or Deus Ex, the feeling of being alone with the environment of Tomb Raider.
We talked with great excitement about all the cool features and design trends that seemed lost to time. And the inevitable question soon followed. "Why does no one make games like these anymore?"
Except for this time, it was followed with another question. "Why don't we make it ourselves?"
We grabbed pen and paper, laid it out like a battle map on the wooden board perched on a bunch of bricks that served as a recording studio table, and got to designing our concept. Nothing was hypothetical, we had spent tens of thousands of hours learning and practicing our craft. By that time we had worked on many projects for over 12 years, including indies, big corporations, outsource, video games, board games, even an award-winning animation short.
We were seeing that the path from drawing doodles in school and making mods for Morrowind as teenagers to professional game dev had paid off. We didn't just have a dream before us but a solid concept, with a solid pipeline to make it a reality.
When the rain had stopped and I walked out with a head full of ideas, my mind had never felt clearer. It was time for us to make an RPG game of our own.
Three years of really hard work later, we have designed all the core systems and mechanics. We are really excited about what we have accomplished. We are seeing the soul of our favorite legendary RPG's come to life in our game and so much that is new and exciting.
But we know that it can be better. It's possible for us to win more time to focus on gameplay and story and really polish up each piece of the content. And there are specific mechanics currently out of our scope that can bring the whole picture together into something truly special.
We want to make those mechanics a reality. We want to make something worthy of the great classics that inspired us to become game developers and pursue our dream of following in their footsteps. We want to make you an awesome RPG that you'll enjoy playing and replaying for many years to come.
In just five days we will be launching a
Kickstarter campaign. Where we'll have a new playable story demo for you to play, much of the lore to discover, and awesome rewards to get.
With Kickstarter's base goal, we'll be able to hire talented people to help us with amazing quality music, sound, atmospheric effects, and text editing. This will give us more time to focus fully on gameplay, story, and level design and fill every nook and cranny of our game world with exciting details for you to discover.
If we can reach stretch goals, we'll be able to add amazing mechanics to the game (We'll share stretch goals in our newsletter soon). Add voice acting and translate the game into more languages.
We need your help to make this a reality. To push beyond our limitations and deliver you a truly remarkable RPG. A game designed fully on your feedback and a game where we would not have to sacrifice anything from our vision of the game.
If you are excited about our project and want to help us craft a bigger and better game there are five things you can do to help.
- Sign up for our newsletter or join our discord so we can share with you a preview of our Kickstarter page and hear your feedback.
- Tell your friends who might be interested in our game about our campaign.
- On February 1st and 2nd help us share the game on social networks and in gaming groups. If we can get funded in under 48 hours, the KS algorithm will highlight us and we'll have a very big chance to hit many stretch goals. This is why it's important to have a large activity on the first two days.
- Follow our Kickstarter page so we can panic less and not get heart attacks before the launch :D
- And if you are able and willing, back us on Kickstarter. We have awesome exclusive rewards, and you'll be the first to play the game and shape it with your feedback. Our development will be fully transparent to our backers and you'll get to play each update of the game.
And last but not least, a huge thank you for following and supporting us on our game development journey. We are always happy to hear your comments and suggestions. Keep em coming!
