Game News Unknown Realm: The Siege Perilous, a retro RPG inspired by 80s classics, now on Kickstarter

[Jack Dandy]

Single character?

Hmmm..

 

[naossano]

The whole concept triggered the codex.

 

[Infinitron]

DarkUnderlord Crooked Bee Plz give hemispheres a dev tag (Stirring Dragon Games)

 

[Kev Inkline]

Single character?

Hmmm..

I think they're married, but nothing lost trying.

 

[Ranarama]

Single character?

Hmmm..

He clearly had a dog in the trailer, and they do mention mercenaries and NPCs to pad out a party.

And frankly, I prefer that approach. Spinning up character creation six times before you get to see what combat is like isn't fun when you're not dealing with a known system like D&D.

 

[oldmanpaco]

DarkUnderlord Crooked Bee Plz give hemispheres a dev tag (Stirring Dragon Games)

Yeah so the psychopaths will know which posts to barrage with codex "love".

 

[HoboForEternity]

those physical goodies are cool

but money

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

I loved the c64, played wasteland and many goldbox games on it. Bought my first phone modem (from Toys R' Us of all places) and ran up a huge phone bill calling a D&D style bbs/mud in Marin county from San Francisco. Back then calling even just 12 miles away could be 'long distance', but I did not know it at the time until a $140 phone bill came and my mom took my modem for awhile as punishment.

I don't know what they made C64's out of but they were very hardy machines. I spilled a coke all over it one day and it stopped working. I thought all was lost, but then a couple days later it worked again! I guess it just needed to dry out. Later a colony of ants made their home in the computer when they became attracted by the dried coke syrup. Even that did not stop the mighty c64 though.

when I would switch the c64 on some of the ants would sometimes crawl out - I guess maybe it got too hot for them inside the computer. There were probably dead and fried ants inside along with the dried coke, but it kept working for a few more years until I replaced it with my first IBM clone around 1990.

 

[Melan]

Update:

Character Sheet Sneak Peek
Posted by Stirring Dragon Games (Creator)

Good evening everyone!

Hope you all had a great weekend. We're excited to be 68% funded on Day 5 with almost 360 backers! Our goal is to reach 400 backers by tomorrow night, so tell all your friends! We want to share the joy and charm of 8-bit RPGs with as many people as we can.

And speaking of 8-bit RPGs: here's a sneak peek of the first half of our in-game player stats sheet inspired by a certain old school tabletop game some of you might recognize. This is what pops up when you press the Stats command, which will include your customizable character portrait from the initial character creation.

We'll show you the second half of the player sheet in a later update with all the nice skills and stats that you have in the game.

A quick housekeeping note: Some of you may have noticed we had to change two reward tiers earlier today. Our main collector's edition tiers seemed to be causing confusion for some potential backers. This was mainly due to the fact that we wrote the rewards in a sequential narrative order and didn't realize that Kickstarter drops sold out tiers to the bottom of the page. So once the Early Bird boxes sold out, the reward descriptions weren't flowing the way we initially intended them to, and the items included in the tier weren't listed.

We decided to close those tiers and list new ones to replace them. The rewards and price are EXACTLY the same, but the descriptions are hopefully more clear and the items that come in the Collector's Edition boxes are listed as they were in the early bird tiers.

One final item of interest we wanted to share, for those of you who are into computer history: Tomorrow the film Generation 8-Bit: The Commodore Wars will be released on Steam and VHX. The film features a rare interview with the great Jack Tramiel as well as Chuck Peddle and others. You can see the trailer here: http://bit.ly/2h29nNL and find more information at www.commodorewars.com For backers who aren't familiar with these names: they are the creators of the Commodore computer.

Based off of the comments here, we've decided it's clear we have the smartest and coolest backers ever (Rush fans + Old School RPG fans + Ultima fans + C64 fans!!). All the work we've put into this project over the last 4+ years already feels like it was so worth it just to see that this game is reaching the audience we made it for – which is you!

Thanks for your continued support and for spreading the word far and wide.

-Bruce and Laura

 

[Zed]

Cool project, I hope they succeed in funding it. Love the small things like rat racing and the UI details.

 

[Jaesun]

Backed this. Really looking forward to playing this.

 

[Namutree]

I'm probably gonna get this game. Though I rarely back games after PoE.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

I'm still on the fence, it looks really good but I am not interested in 'feelies' and with nineteen bucks its a tad on the expensive side for the digital only.

 

[Outlander]

Almost there, 1.5k remaining.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Modern Sensibilities:

• In-Game journal automatically records important plot information for you.

One thing that would be very easy to implement and very useful in such a game would be an ability to take your own notes in-game, so you won't need a notebook or alt-tab to word all the time. I assume that the game will be similarly designed to old Ultimas so that you would have need to take considerable amounts of notes to beat it.

 

[hemispheres]

Modern Sensibilities:

• In-Game journal automatically records important plot information for you.

One thing that would be very easy to implement and very useful in such a game would be an ability to take your own notes in-game, so you won't need a notebook or alt-tab to word all the time. I assume that the game will be similarly designed to old Ultimas so that you would have need to take considerable amounts of notes to beat it.

Laura from Stirring Dragon Games here - Unknown Realm won't be like the old Ultimas at all in this respect. You won't need to take notes to beat this game. Information relevant to main quests will be automatically recorded in the in-game journal when you discover it. It will also be removed once it's no longer of use. There will be side quests and leads that are not essential to the main goal of the game that will reward the player for exploring those possibilities. Some players might want to take notes on those, but it won't be necessary to beat the game.

The idea is that you can play through the entire main story without taking notes and finish the game, but for those who like to explore the world more thoroughly through sub quests, they will find there are rewards that come with a little note taking. This is why we included a very nice little quest journal in our Collector's Edition box.

 

[CryptRat]

Information relevant to main quests will be automatically recorded in the in-game journal when you discover it. It will also be removed once it's no longer of use.

That seems terrible. The player doesn't even have to sort information and figure out what will be useful for the main quest.

 

[GarfunkeL]

A quest journal is not the same thing as quest compass. Arcanum had one of the better examples of an automated quest journal, and I've never heard anyone complain.

 

[hemispheres]

I hope this doesn't mean that you will effectively have quest marker-like entries telling you to go to X and do Y. It's that sort of handholding that has made modern games mindless fedex simulators. Requiring the player to pay attention and think is a core element of the old school games you claim to want to emulate.

It's definitely not handholding. There will be no quest markers or quest compass, etc. If an NPC mentions a location, you'll have to pull out your map and figure out where that location is and how to get there.

Think of the journal entries more like someone telling you to make a chocolate cake without giving you the recipe or directions. You have a goal, but it's still up to you to figure out how to achieve it and you have multiple ways to solve it. Keep in mind this is an open-world, non-linear RPG and information comes to you in a dynamic, non-ordered fashion. It's up to you to decide what to do with that information and how it fits in the overall plot of the game.

This game is all about having to think and use your imagination, in fact, you stated our philosophy pretty well when you said the bold and underlined above. But the fact remains, not everything about those old games was fun and we wanted to make this game accessible to gamers who might not have the patience (or time, in some cases) to haul out the graph paper and do it totally old school. ;-) You can always play the game without referring to the journal.

We're planning an update at some point during the next two weeks on the in-game journal and how it should be used.

We have dabbled with the idea of having the option to disable auto-journaling completely, which is easy to implement. Do you think this would that be an appealing or useful option to players who want to go totally old school?

 

[MrBuzzKill]

Less than 24 hours to go.
One thing I didn't quite get - why is the German version (which they unlock at 160k mark) such a big deal? Most Kickstarters don't seem to make a big deal out of localizations to various languages, just a sort of a check mark.