Hey there heroes,
First let’s get to a very important topic - Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising.
We have finished our Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising post-mortem and wanted to be transparent about how we plan to address the many issues that occurred during the Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising code distribution process.
It’s clear we need to lock down backer platform selection sooner. The goal is to send out final backer platform selections within the next few months. This will allow us to send an extra month or two to fill in any gaps for backers who haven’t responded/have used different Emails/haven’t filled out their surveys.
There was some confusion where Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising was believed to be free or that it was actually the main game Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. But now that Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising has been released, we won’t have that confusion moving forward.
The customer service team has been increased to handle the larger than expected number of customer service tickets.
We plan to order more codes as a buffer. This should guarantee we do not run out of codes which would cause a delay in fulfillment timing.
These resource changes should help us navigate the massive undertaking of fulfilling Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. We plan to move faster to have enough buffer to avoid these issues in the future and hopefully earn back your trust.
If you have any ongoing issues with Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising feel free to contact us at [email protected]
Premium Backer Rewards
We are very close to finalizing the specific criteria of each premium backer reward and process for confirming identities for each backer. All premium backers will be contacted over the next 2-3 months. We will mention that contact Emails have been sent out via updates so that you’ll know they have and can ping us if you haven’t received an Email.
Thank you very much for your understanding and patience.
**Two Year Kickstarter Anniversary**
Murayama: It’s already been two years since the madness of the Kickstarter campaign. We’re still moving forward now, thanks to the power and courage that everyone’s support gives us.
Kawano: We’re in our second summer of this project now thanks to everyone. We just released Eiyuden Rising, so I tried drawing the characters of Rising this time around.
Komuda: Over these two years, we’ve been using your support as our fuel as we work together and move full steam ahead. I hope we’ll be able to show you what we’re working on little by little as time goes on.
Murakami: We're in our second summer of working on Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, but it's still at the front of our minds and we're working hard to deliver a game that everyone will love.
We might even be able to show you some of it soon!
Murayama's Monthly Development Report
This season, every new day in Japan is a hot one, but we’re still working and managing all the twists and turns that come our way.
One of my hobbies is playing board games – games that use wooden pieces and paper boards, versus the ones you can play on a computer. My personal favorite game is Carcassonne, a game where you build towns and roads.
My policy toward game systems is that they should be as simple as possible while also allowing for as many variables as possible. This may be due to the experiences I’ve had playing board games.
When you add complicated elements and systems to computer games, the computer can easily do the calculations and operations needed to support them. With board games, however, humans are the ones who need to do the calculations and manage the rules, so the more complicated the calculations needed to prep a strategy, the greater the stress it puts on the players. Therefore, board games require the creator to cut away needless elements and refine the system as much as possible.
In the end, you’re left with an extremely refined board game with what I would call a beautiful game system. This is very obvious in the games designed by Alex Randolph, a very famous board game designer, which include games such as Ghosts!, DOMEMO, and especially Venice Connection.
I wanted to make sure the mini-games in Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes inherit that flavor, so I’ve been discussing this sort of thing with the team daily. As we continue talking to each other and doing trial and error with various things, the final version of Eiyuden is slowly coming together. We can’t show you all of it just yet, but we’ll be sure to show you what we can first as thanks for all your support.
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A Word from the Team
J-Diary Vol. 6
Unrelated to anything, but recently I finished watching Season 4 of Stranger Things on Netflix.
Hi, I'm Murakami J. It's been a while. That scene with Eddie was so crazy, I've been listening to Metallica every day as I work.
Sorry for starting off with a very niche topic. Has anyone else watched that show? It's a story about kids that takes place in a rural American town, and was very appealing to me as someone who loves Goonies and Stand By Me. It's also set in the 80s, which was perfect for me, so it pulls at my heartstrings every time I watch it. The level of detail they put into the fashion, music, and culture from the time period is really amazing.
Recently, a lot of monumental works across various genres of the 80s have been getting revivals, such as the movies Top Gun: Maverick and Ghostbusters, the Cobra Kai TV, etc. Work has been so busy that there's a lot I haven't been able to see yet.
But it's really fun to watch these things, as you can tell that the creators have deep passion for the works that influenced them. And love creates new masterpieces.
I believe that masterpieces can be enjoyed forever. We learn from them and yearn to revive the happy parts of our memories in fun new forms.
It's been a while since I reported on what's going on in the studio, so here goes. Currently we've reached the peak of our mass graphic production phase, so every day we're super busy and always wishing we had more people on our team.
The field is almost completely full of areas. We aren't reusing a lot of assets for Eiyuden, so every time we finish creating something, we find ourselves with yet another challenge to overcome.
As for the pixel art, our main members just keep getting older and older. (LOL) It was really hard for us to find people who were young, good at drawing pixel art, and who actually WANTED to draw pixel art, so this is just what we ended up with when we searched for the best of the best.
Veterans are truly reliable, though. We just need to make sure our pixel art staffers take proper care of their health. (LOL) As of now, people who can draw pixel art are valuable treasures of the game industry. Let's take good care of them!! Thanks to all their passion, the game is slowly coming together.
I think we'll be able to show you some progress or an event scene or two in a little bit, so I hope you're excited.
Oh, there's one thing I wanted to mention. We've also reached the point where we need to start working on the in-game backer assets for those backers who helped us achieve victory in our Kickstarter campaign. We deeply value all the support you gave us, so we're going to work hard on this. Soon, we'll need to get some info from you all in order to start working on this (we're preparing for it now), so please help us out when the time arrives.
That's it, really. As usual, I have a ton of things to do, and I'm just trying my best to scratch them off one as one while putting up with the heat. That reminds me... It seems like this year's summer is going to be filled with extreme heat and irregular temperatures all around the world. (And we still have covid to worry about... But I'm more worried about that for the time being)
Please make sure to stay safe and healthy, everyone!
Sorry the message isn't longer this time around, but I've got a lot of work to get back to. See you next time!