Greetings fellow gods,
Today, I would like to present to you the first trailer showcasing the early to mid game adventure gameplay of Soulash 2, a sandbox traditional roguelike about exploration, adventure, rise to power, and conquest. Here it is.
Since the release of the first Soulash game, I've been blessed with an opportunity to pursue game development full-time with the support of an artist from the very beginning, and I've decided to take this opportunity to redesign Soulash from the ground up and pursue the direction I dreamed of back in 2021, built around all the stretch goals of our failed Kickstarter campaign, and incorporate additional requests from players of the first game like character portraits, better movement, no durability on items, deeper crafting, procedural worlds, trading and more.
Soulash 2 will be a game about a world on the brink of destruction where you may choose which part of its story will involve your characters. It will feature procedurally generated worlds, regions, and simulated history of civilized settlements to enhance replayability.
It will have a completely redesigned character progression based on skills that unlock new active abilities, amplifiers that enhance abilities, passives, and actions to interact with the world, and crafting and building recipes.
It will have a deeper crafting system that involves selecting resources of a specific type to customize the attributes of your items, with an additional incentive to hunt down particular monsters and beings for their rare resources.
It will allow us to build our own huts, castles, towers, or our very own Black Pyramid, anywhere we choose, from scorching deserts to ice-covered wastelands.
And it will feature three distinct game modes:
- High Fantasy - a slow-paced gameplay where our characters can't die from our mistakes, and we can enjoy the fruits of our labor without much loss.
- Dark Fantasy - the default mode for players who like high-stakes combat but also wish to enjoy building something more significant than one character's life and continue influencing the same world.
- Hardcore - a brutal, quick permadeath mode where the world dies with you.
And if you would like to know more, I've been very open about the whole development process in devlogs released every 2 weeks, so everything you might expect from the game will be there, including how things were implemented, what is missing, how some things changed as I was discovering things, my hopes and dreams, my design choices, and the struggles along the way.
Soulash 2 early access will begin around early December and last a full year. During that time, I plan to expand the game with additional conquest systems like army management and the story that will bring us some endgame goals. We'll have a public free demo before the EA, so wishlist the game to not miss out on the announcement, as the demo will be available only for a limited time.
I'll continue to listen to your feedback and requests and try to incorporate as much as we can during the time we have, but we operate on very limited resources, pursuing a strong, ambitious vision I've been passionate about for a long time and just like with Soulash and its release, what I can promise you is honesty during the full development duration. So please make sure you support the game in early access only when you like to participate in the game development process that can be, at times, pretty messy but provides an opportunity to voice what you hope to see from the game and gives me enough time to address it or when the game already meets your standards of expectations. We have the funds from Soulash and Patreon and a realistic vision to create a complete game, and I won't tell you about the next 10 years of development that I do not know if I can fund. What we hope for from the early access is to build a fanbase around the game, create a community, and work with modders to provide even better tools that don't require programming knowledge to unleash your creativity with unique content.
And I hope whenever you join me on this journey, you'll find as much joy in playing this game as I find making it.
Thank you for your ongoing support,
Artur