Hi everyone !
We are so happy to finally share with you first insights about La Royale: Below Deck!
We want the development of our game to be open and inclusive for our community, so every comment is welcome, and we will be happy to answer and discuss with you :)
First thing first, here are some basics Q/A you may ask about us and our strange project:
- Who are we :
BLACK COG VFX is a French indie animation and visual effects company.
- Why the hell are we doing a game?
Because we are passionate about games and telling stories, a narrative game is for us the next step of our creative journey as a studio.
- What is this game about?
The premises of the game go back nearly 8 years ago as an in-house project.
As we make an historic reconstitutions of the La Belle Poule frigate we get astonished of how it was different from everything we and the rest of people imagine.
We were surprised that nearly had never been done before in games. By then, we start to play with the idea of a game set in a fully accurate ship with crew, battles, real size without concessions to cliches, movies, pirates stuff, and so on.
Just historical (sometimes brutal!) Truth.
- Why VR
We had considered VR in terms of pro and con:
Con :
- Basically, nobody wants it ^^
- It drastically reduces the game audience.
- It is a pain in the poop deck to optimise, integrate. It adds a lot to problems in an already problematic environment.
- Besides some famous exceptions, most of the VR games don't shine for their visuals.
Pro :
- It is really awesome. As a dev team used to the ship for many years on screen, being immerged on deck with the waves, the 40 meter masts, the boat slowly rolling in the sea and the crew everywhere is a vision we were not prepared for.
- Master and Commander but it's Alyx, who would say no?
- Will a non-VR version will be issued?
If we had a sufficent demand for it, we are planning to make a screen version of it.
- What's next:
The game is in active dev and funding phases, so having a committed community who support the project is critical for us.
We have a kind of no BS policy at the studio and we are willing to use it in our game dev as we do in our other works. So here are some engagements of the studio that you can count on:
- No AI whatsoever in that game.
- No prerendered promises, even in unreal.
- Everything we show is in current usable builds of the game.
- A playable demo will soon be issued with early access for our Discord community. (join us, it's free!!)
- Live stream and devlogs will be accessible on our Discord for free and also with our Patreon sub for specials, early access, and so on.