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...
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:
- Better quests, more sidequests
- More choices and branching with more consequences
- More voiceovers!
- WAY better visuals (as you've seen in this update), sound, and overall UI improvements
- ...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!
