Hello everyone!
Kemal here, the supreme game director and super design supervisor of our 3 people team. Being a small team creates personality disorders but its ok on our side:)
In this update I'll give you lots of information on what we're doing now, why we are delayed, what will we do this year & how soon will you be able to play Unawake. This will be a LONG post so here are the titles if you like to skip:
1) The Time of Turmoil: Information on why we are delayed.
2) The Great War: The tale of how we have survived.
3) Beyond: What will we do this year and when can you play the game?
3) A New Age: New information and features about Unawake as well as a very crude roadmap.
So here we go!
Let's start with the basics. Why are we delayed? I believe this is will also be very informative for young or new game developers.
1) THE TIME OF TURMOIL
First of all let me introduce us. We are a 3 people core team. Our team consists of Erdem; he's the code master. He's making our code base and our internal tools. He's also into game design as well. Thanks to his skills, we have incredible tools to push Unreal Engine to its limits while maintaining a great performance across PC and consoles. Bahar; she's covering everything we both can't: company related boring things, paperwork, meetings and a bit of game design. Myself; who is making all the design related things (level design, graphic design, icons, UI, cinematics, sound design, writing etc.), But we always brainstorm together and move forward together. From time to time my cousins Nehir and Luna Rin helps us in music & voices. I can't wait to share Luna Rin's wonderful soundtrack with you.
The indie game development process is harsh. Sometimes it is even harder than you think. Apart from dealing with game design, bugs, balance, tests and other game development related things, we have to think about taxes, budget, salaries and so on. Nearly, until the end of 2024 we were fine and going with a solid speed.
Then several issues happened in the business side. Some of you may recall that we were working with a publisher. Now we are not. Thanks a lot for their contribution. After the mutual cancelation of our agreement, we saw that we need more budget to have a successful marketing and a professional team to cover it as we're too busy with the development itself. During this time, Our expenses also climbed rapidly due to local & global world economy.
Until 2024, we had several occasions to get investment to the company but the investors were complete predators and actually devaluating the company by taking too much of the company shares given their very small amount of investment. During the pandemics we saved ourselves from our previous investors by buying all of our company shares and become completely independent. We didn't want to fall in to the same trap again.
So we had to find something to make sure our company and -of course- we ourselves stay alive to continue working on our dreams. But what could we do?
2) THE GREAT WAR
We accepted freelance jobs for our company, we did lots of unrelated things but also made some cool side projects too. Working on the skybox panoramas of Godfall and Metal: Hellsinger was really fun.
We have also created an Unreal Marketplace account (now called FAB: https://www.fab.com/sellers/Velarion ) and started selling developer products such as landscapes and skyboxes to other fellow developers. It was started as a small thing in 2019 just to support us in the journey. But after the pandemics it became a vital thing as we stopped accepting freelance inquiries after working on international titles. It was too hard to find time to focus on our own works.
With Unreal Marketplace/FAB account, we were able to sustain ourselves to move forward with our developments without needing any investment and freelance projects. We were doing great. We were even featured by Epic Games couple of times as a spotlight artist. It is also very nice to see what we have built on our fellow developers' projects.
It was a nice system until it is destroyed by the shifting economical realities again. I won't give more details on that here as it will be too long for this update.
So we started an investment run to support our company and our flagship project; Unawake. At the time, we had 44k wishlists, very good feedback from Steam Nextfest, a nearly 4 hours of good playable content without bugs etc. even including cinematics, quests, storyline... We couldn't find a good deal or the right people for a long amount of time.
And let me tell you this; waiting for the investor's decision is the ultimate torture for any game developer. First you do your presentation, have a couple of online meetings, make some updates to your presentation and maybe give some additional details, work on the excels, budgets etc. and you give keys. This already takes 2-3 weeks. Then you wait for their return; bam! There goes your another month. Apply this to 20 investors and you get a 1.5 year break.
And to our disadvantage, the global game industry is not good as well. Don't get me wrong; the overall industry is perfect. More huge than Hollywood, incredible growth etc. but for the indie investment, what investors want has completely changed in the last couple of years. Lots of fails, acquisitions, changing of trends, laying of tens of thousands of people from lots of companies don't create a good ecosystem for investment. What they give is too small for a game like Unawake but what they want from the company is too much. We saw that most investors and VCs like the idea of investing on a game after it has some nice metrics from an Early Access release. But we needed the investment before any release at all.
And luckily, we found perfect partners to aid us in our way and complete Unawake in the best form possible. The deal is still not finalized but its in the final stages. I gave my word in the discussion boards that I'll give information about our schedule so I didn't want to make you wait any longer.
With this new investment, we'll have enough budget to continue our development on Unawake at last.
It was a very hard journey for us. We were always unlucky with our partners. This is our 10th year and our history is full of business and game industry drama. We saw lots of fellow companies fell during these years and still seeing lots of sad stories internationally. We didn't want to be part of those stories. Sometimes we did external work, sometimes we endured to completely unrelated jobs to make sure our company stayed alive. We had to create marketplace assets so that we can pay our bills and rents. Sometimes we asked ourselves; hold on a minute, we supposed to buy the assets for our game not make and sell them?!:) but we had to stay alive.
Indie game development and overseeing an indie game company is like the hardcore mode of life. But you know what? We're happy. This is not just our job. This is our life, our dream. We just wanted this dream is to become the part of our work life too. Money is important. Both in spending and in earning. In this capitalist world, money is needed to supply everything about you. Sad but what can you do about it? Nothing. At least we have a great indie game ecosystem so that anyone can try their luck to find themselves in this ocean of ideas and ambitions. So we had to act accordingly not to fail ourselves and our dreams.
Now let's move on to part 3!
3) THE BEYOND
As I said, now we're in the final stages of our investment deal but I didn't want to wait for it to write this update. Because I gave my word in the discussion boards to update you on what we're doing at late February. We expect the deal is to be finalized and signed sometime on April.
But we already started working on the game again with new updated features (more info on next chapter). We are determined to go close beta until the end of this year and launch on Early Access on Q1 2027. But I have to remind you that these are not final dates and may change for better or worse. I just didn't want to write something like "coming soon when ready".
Don't be afraid when I mention Early Access. The core systems of the game will be fully complete for EA and we'll use Early Access to refine the balance, change & modify the game based on your feedback, spend more time on story elements and put more content to refined systems which we'll finalize based on your feedback.
4) A NEW AGE
In our early playtests which also included a Steam NextFest run, we got so many valuable comments and suggestions. But we also saw that there are some confusions on what Unawake really is.
Is it like Skyrim? First person Dark Souls? Dark Messiah? Is it supposed to be slower or faster?
In that early phases, the main gameplay loop wasn't finalized and the side systems which empower the main gameplay loop were still on early phases. So it appears putting the game on NextFest in that early stage wasn't a good idea because you can only submit to Steam NextFest only once. Games released on NextFest are normally very close to finish. But releasing on NextFest wasn't our decision. Anyway,... It had some good benefits as well. Nearly 10.000 players played the game and we had very valuable feedback.
Based on this feedback; we have used the time which we had to spent on getting new investors, on refining our game design as well and fully reflect what we initially designed for the game.
Unawake is a fast paced, first person hack & slash game with roguelite elements.
If I have to give more recent examples, I can say a combination of Doom: Dark Ages, Diablo II and Mortal Sin.
We have large areas to cover with next gen graphics, the game is played like a boomer-shooter but with melee weapons and magic and we have a very nice story & lore to support the player's journey. However, the story is mostly at the background like Diablo titles. But we think we have a unique worldbuilding. A dark, adult world which you need to survive with every skill you got.
Here is an overall feature list for the game which we'll delve into more deeply later:
Fast paced. Plays like Doom.
5 different classes. 2 at Early Access, 1 during EA and final 2 are at full release.
Combination of RPG and Roguelite elements. Unlike roguelites, you won't lose your found perks in every round, you keep your perks and create long-term builds. But like RPGs, you won't lose yourself in endless skills and inventory chess. The game is always fast to play.
Likely there won't be even an inventory. You'll replace the items on your journey as you play. There will be an option to send them to the Forge.
The Forge is an area which you can enhance and upgrade the items. It has limited inventory. So if you find a good item but you want to use that later, you can send it directly to the Forge to work on it later. No crafting like in Skyrim or Witcher.
Lots of Perks and skills.
The main environment will be one huge biome, completely hand designed. It will have procedural areas inside this area to have more replayability. The procedural generation will generate hand crafted parts, not all parts. For example I designed a very cool looking corridor area and a super awesome courtyard. The system decides if there will be 1 or 3 corridors, if they are straight or angled, if there is the hall area after the courtyard or prison area. So the procedural system relies on the planning of the area, not the design.
Inside this big main game world, there will be lots of dungeons with different designs and colors.
We expect to have 3 big biomes for full release, 1 for Early Access.
There is a main storyline but no side quests planned at this time. The game's core loop is more than enough to keep us play it as it is. We focus on replayable systems and fun gameplay loop.
I'll give much more details on the gameplay and our systems later. When our deal is finalized and our final roadmap is clear, I'm planning to make monthly live chats and developer diaries. So you'll always be in the loop. There are lots of things I want to show and I hope to start sharing very soon.
You know that I'm always online and answer your questions in the discussion boards but in the live chats I'll be sharing the actual development as well. I'm even planning to make some live level design sessions for enthusiasts and young level designers.
As always, you can ask me anything you are curious about and I'll answer in the discussion boards. We still don't have Discord or social media accounts and I hope to open them all soon at the same time when I can start sharing content.
So... See you later and not too late this time!:)
Ismail Kemal Ciftcioglu
Game Director, Designer, Animator, Writer, Coffee & Tea Maker and other sort of things except programming.