Signs of life
I was not planning to make an announcement but i felt i had to just to clear mind of those who wishlisted the game by some reason and might not be following us on twitter which is where we are active.
Just to let you know, we are very much alive and project is going well. "Well" is a subjective term of course but after so much struggle we had early on the development, right now any small improvement could mean well.
Team of strangers
I guess it is classic for indie teams to encounter hardship in game dev process but i can comfortably say we are not a classic team. There is no one in the so called "team" that knows one another in real life. We are bunch of strangers doing the work remotely. Sounds funny? Not too funny for me as i, designer and producer of the project faced with lots of trouble to get things going.
This is a passion project started very roughly late 2020. I worked with programmers from other side of the world who doesnt know what is programming at all. Since i was as clueless and inexperienced, it took me quite a while to understand something is not right and we are going on the wrong direction.
Revival
Long story short, i had to take a bold decision to make a huge change management. With some bit of luck we managed to revive what could have been a dead project now. Programming is not the only thing in game development. Art and visuals are pretty core stuff to begin with. I had a long period of working many people here and there, just giving me 1-2 characterr and leaving the project as well. Not to mention animations. Worked with too many individuals and after some point it was really hard to gather everything and put it into the same pool. What i mean is having idle animation files on different version of Spine is a nightmare. But thats the story if you are doing an indie project and you dont have tons of money to spend to monthly salaries of pro animators but just work with random freelancers. If they are good, after a while their price will see a steep increase. At that point you have to either increase your budget or make another bold decision to sacrifice some bit of quality.
Not proud but yeah, i had to choose to apply my budget on more important things (like actually getting the game done) rather than having polished animations or else.
At the end of the day we are having a 2d turn based rpg focused on party and skill customization. It ain't gotta have a polish level of Ruined King. Not realistically.
Voice gives life
On top of all that we have voice over. I mean not voice over from start to end but 20+ playable characters, 30+ NPCs all have some sort of voice lines you can hear throughout the game. Games i can compare our game to doesnt have it at all, for a solid reason: good VO is expensive. And finding so many people is really hard. See, Darkest Dungeon found only one guy, just for narration, and he had a great impact on the game. They didnt add VO to their characters for a reason. I dont know why i cant follow rules of reasonable people and do things within the budget. But the reality is; i had to do VO for multiple characters myself to actually get the job done. Good news is; you can turn it off anytime you want. I won't feel bad if you do it. But i prefer you play the game (once it is released) with VO on. Which is what gives the characters some sort of life imo. (Please check our Teaser. Thirsa -the demon- is one of the few pro VO artists i have worked with. She makes the Teaser sound better.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1IByDxOFLw&t=2s
Demo release?
So much blabla and there is no clear explanation about the current status of the game nor release date right?
No. I learned my lesson to not throw unrealistic dates anymore after everything the project had suffered. However, unless some huge tornado happens and swallows us all, i guess we will release a demo in August. Can't say 100% because you know, this is game dev. But i am pretty sure we will have a small, decent, playable demo by then. I really wanted to release it this month only, in the Steamfest, but recently we really faced with some weird bugs we never had before. And i think the biggest problem (and also good thing) about Shargad: First Blood is the game design is too complex. Most systems are entwined with each other. So you can't code each system one by one. You have to do a bit of everything to see the bigger picture and then go with your guts. Hard to create solid frames of work which makes the planning even harder.
Right now, i am hopeful as i never have been before. Because combat system, which is the most intricate system of the game had seen a good progress within the last month. We have around 24 playable characters and each of them has 4 main skills, 2-3 supportive skills. 4 main skills have each up to 6 perks which marginally change the effects of each skill. We spent really a lot of time coding this and i still have to give good time to playtest myself to see how its working.
In the demo you will be able to play only 4 of this 24 characters (and just 2-3 quests) while we intend to release whole ACT 1 - which includes 8 playable characters by Early Access. After that we will keep building up the rest of the game until the Full Release which will be i guess Q1 2023. By a miracle it could be earlier, but i dont believe in miracles after i started this job, so lets hope not later.
This is the current road map for those of you who are interested in our project. If you are already patient enough to read this announcement, i am sure you are patient enough to wait couple of months more, right?
Sounds good.
Regards,
Semih