Hello everyone!
While we have been quiet on this front, behind the scenes the wheels of development are constantly turning, and we wanted to share some greetings and a progress update on Frostrail’s development with you before the year is out.
This year has been action-packed for our studio. We’ve revisited pretty much every corner of the game: redrawing and improving huge chunks of art assets, expanding our lore and documentation, laying the foundations for campaign progression, and homing in on the desired feel of close-range combat. We’ve also welcomed new people to the team!
The game has come a long way since last spring’s announcement and trailer, and we are now at a place where all the different pieces are coming to their own and falling into place together. It’s an exciting time for us, seeing an idea become concrete after such a long time in development.
And as the game is now properly taking shape, we’ve shown it to a handful of players for the very first time. In November, we held a limited playtest. Here are some key learnings the first playtest yielded:
The core concept of train driving, exploration and crafting passed the inspection and testers seemed to be having fun with it!
The general visual direction was also well received.
Onboarding and tutorials currently cover the very basics and will be expanded later.
Enemy AI still needs work in the 3D environment.
Usability and accessibility will be given more attention.
We will continue monitoring and improving general performance.
In a nutshell, the playtest reassured us of what we hoped to hear: while there’s still work to be done between now and a finished product, we are definitely on the right track. This was really heartwarming to hear, and we want to thank everyone who joined the playtest once more! We hope to get many more of you on board following playtests, when the time comes.
We are eager to keep improving Frostrail now based on everything we learned from our first brush with real player feedback. For instance, we’ve been planning on improving the in-game tutorial and fleshing it out as the onset of Frostrail’s story, and the playtest gave us some really valuable pointers about what mechanics the tutorial should focus on. We’ve also already made keybindings more flexible for a future playtest in response to some clunk experienced in this first one, and will be improving our UIs similarly for later playables.
One more thing we want to introduce you to in this post is our revised visual style. Frostrail today looks a bit different from the style glimpsed in the reveal trailer last spring, as we’ve since homed in on a visual style we can produce reliably and in the kind of quantities the game requires. The current, lower-fidelity style allows our relatively small team to produce more content while keeping the overall style consistent, and the game as a whole more performant. This makes it possible for us to deliver a coherent, immersive and atmospheric world to you, and we hope you will enjoy the new look our artists have chosen!
That’s all from us this time. What do you think? We’re always eager to hear what you are most looking forward to about Frostrail.
As the holidays are drawing near, we will soon be taking a little break from work. Rested minds make better games, and so we will close the office doors for a couple of weeks around the festive season. We wish all of you a beautiful and hopefully snowy turn of the year and will return with more news in 2026!
