Stygian Sentinel 18
Issue #18, January 11th 2016
It's 2016![edit]
In 2015, we were successful at our first Kickstarter, assembling the core team, and erecting all the scaffolding that games are built upon. The groundwork for the key systems are in place: character building, magic, movement, and combat. We’ve also tackled the pre-production for the narrative and key characters, the three factions and denizens of the deep you’ll encounter, the lay of the Stygian Abyss, and the other fantasy world design elements that go into The Underworld.
As the New Year begins, we’re busy making the transition to full production. The focus shifts to building out all the game play elements. Right now, we’re barreling along on two tracks: art and design.
Our designers are heads down prototyping the quest and narrative systems, building out character skills, and working out how to create spaces that take advantage of those skills. We’ve even started coming to grips with the major characters in the game and the main plot points.
It’s fun to see a team switch gears from “Wouldn’t it be cool?” to “We all agree that is cool. Let’s build it and prove it!” Seeing an idea on paper isn’t nearly as awesome as seeing it the game engine. One of the most rewarding things as a producer is being the guy who gets the first look at everything. It’s like opening presents every morning when we reach this point in development. From something simple like getting a new shader for stalactites to testing out wall-running and ground-sliding for the first time, it’s never boring.
- I think I had this guy as a miniature in 1986.
The other track is art. After Nate Wells joined us as Studio Art Director late last year, we revisited the look for the game and decided to evolve to something that would be more distinctive. Something that captured the vibe of an old school dungeon crawl, but at the same time brought something new to the genre. Nate arrived at what he terms an “authored” art style, where The Stygian Abyss looks as if it were crafted by mages of yore who more-or-less terraformed the environment by their mighty mystical hands. The art team is busy working on the evolved look. A couple of sneak peeks are shown here, but we should have a playable build with the new look to share soon enough.
- Stalagmite? Stalactite? I still get these confused.
Things are going to get even busier for us as we transition to full production; but it’s a good kind of busy where we’re firing on all cylinders and where we’ll have more to share with you each month going forward.
– Chris Siegel, Sr. Producer
In Other News[edit]
Because things are getting busier with the team as we transition into production, we’re switching Newsletter updates every three weeks instead of every other. It takes non-trivial time to do these updates and we want to balance that against progress on the game. We may switch back to biweekly updates later if we find we can balance that and folks really want them more frequently, but we want to test this out for the time being.
We decided to hold back the second round of updating the Prototype build until today, in order to make sure Steam was in a good place after the recent snafu. It should be updated and ready to try out by the time you read this. Remember, if you haven’t gotten access to the Prototype, you get it via an Add-On on BackerKit. To learn more details, go HERE.
Our plan is to continue to crowdfund on BackerKit and PayPal, likely through this summer. We have a few more stretch goals that we’d love to reach and are tantalizingly close to unlocking The Wailing Haunt. Less than $10,000 away now!
The Team at OtherSide