Dear Couriers, we have a collection of juicy updates for you today once again, so let’s dive right in:
Title Update
As of today, our game’s title has been updated to The Legend of Khiimori – We are amicably parting ways with the Windstorm brand in mutual agreement between IP holder Alias Entertainment, developer Aesir Interactive and publisher Mindscape.
This decision reflects the evolving creative direction of the project. As the game has grown, shaped by the in-depth feedback and enthusiasm of our community, so has our vision for what The Legend of Khiimori can become. We’re confident that this change will be a benefit to our project and our vision for the game, as it has developed over the past year and a half since the initial announcement.
Alpha Playtest Insights
As many of you know, we’ve been running an alpha playtest with our Kickstarter backers for a few months now! Last month, we conducted a proper survey to gauge people’s opinions on our WIP game, and we’re stoked to share some of the results with everyone!
The people who took part in this survey are our alpha backers, and as such, are hugely invested in the game, and so their opinions might be a tiny bit biased (we love them though!) So with that being said, here's what we found from our survey:
- 90% are really happy with the World Design
- 85% would recommend the game in its current state to their friends!
- Over 80% agree that our human and animal animations in the game are good!
- The biggest points of criticism at the moment are Inventory Management, Performance, and Collisions (getting stuck), with 30-40% of backers agreeing that those aspects of the game aren’t good in their current state yet. We agree with the backers, and are actively working on improving these aspects, see details below!
The tester insights are super helpful for us to understand where to focus our efforts in these last few weeks before the Early Access release and right after. An overhaul of large parts of the user interface and user experience has been underway for the past months, which is an important step for us to improve player guidance and how we convey information to you in game. This also affects the Inventory Management pain point reported in the survey!
The issues our backers are experiencing with collisions in the open world are crucial to enabling satisfying navigation. Figuring out the best way for horses to react to rocks, slopes, cliffs and every sort of terrain is a complex issue: we want to strike a good balance between the realism of which terrain horses can reasonably be expected to move across, and the smooth gameplay fun of exploration, so that going off the beaten track does not feel punishing. We’re working intensively on improvements to this collision logic at the moment.
Performance optimization is another ongoing priority: Our game is high in detail and intricate in terms of ongoing behaviors and systems influencing each other, which makes smooth performance on mid-range hardware a challenge. Our dev team is constantly improving on this front, and we expect it to stay a highly relevant topic throughout Early Access.
Since the demo we showed at gamescom, we’ve also added more scripted tutorial quests, added more variety to courier quests and fleshed out our prestige system for developing your reputation as a courier over time.
In short: we have loads of work left to do for Early Access, and we fully expect to receive a lot of additional feedback and reports from you all in November, so we can further improve the game! Remember that the Early Access release isn’t the end of our development process, but the place where all of you get to join in!
Language Info
We can now confirm that our game will be translated into 33 languages with the Early Access Launch! Please note that this applies to in-game text specifically.
At Early Access launch, The Legend of Khiimori will be available in: Bosnian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Mongolian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian.
We’re particularly excited about having the game translated into the Mongolian language, which often isn’t a priority in game localization, but was a no-brainer for us considering the game’s setting and cultural inspiration.
What about voice acting? We’ll have more info on our voice casting soon, but we can already tell you that the game will not be fully voice acted for the Early Access launch. You’ll hear our main character Naraa react to her environment and the gameplay action in English, but please expect all in-game dialogues exclusively in written form for the time being. With the game’s main narrative content being planned for later, we currently need to maintain flexibility on dialogue contents – adjustments are much, much easier to make to text content than to voice lines.
Ready for Early Access?
We’ve said this before but we want to take the opportunity for clarification once again: At Early Access launch, some issues with performance, stability and functionality are to be expected. Thanks to our Alpha Playtesters and their diligent bug-reporting, we’ve already done a ton of work on this front, but we’re bound to discover new issues as player numbers scale up.
We’re in this for the long haul and we’ll do our best to deliver fixes and improvements over the months to come. The best way for you to help us in this is to send reports, be patient with us, talk to other people in our community for help if desired, and give us the time we need to turn this game into the best it can be, with your feedback and your support.
Thank you so much for your ongoing trust and enthusiasm! We’re beyond thrilled to have you all on board and we can’t wait for everyone to finally get their hands on the game very very soon.
Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:
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