Announcement, Progress Report
over 5 years ago – Fri, Aug 03, 2018 at 11:07:37 PM

Release Date

It was mentioned before, but I wanted to reiterate our updated release date, to make sure everyone's on the same page. We're looking at Q1 2019 as our official release date, for PC, Xbox one and PS4.Still no new information for the Switch version, but we're in talks with Nintendo and we hope to have good news on that front ASAP.

Next thing I wanted to touch on on that front is Keys for the game. While we can obtain Steam Keys for Fell Seal at any time, we eventually found out that Keys for the console version can only be obtained after we've passed that console's final certification. Cert is pretty much the very last thing you do right before the game ships on console. So, what it means is that we won't be able to procure those Keys until a few weeks before the game is set to release.

We also need to finalize a few things with GOG for the DRM-free keys. Those are the reasons why we haven't distributed the Keys yet, even though we initially thought we could have them ready very quickly. We're hoping we can at least send everyone on PC their keys soon and then hold off for the console keys until those are ready, but we're still looking at the best strategy.

In any event, we'll get everyone their Key as soon as is possible, nothing to worry about there :)

Gamescom 2018

Quick reminder that we'll be at Gamescom 2018 in Germany. The event is from August 21th to Augest 25th and we'll be attending every day. We'll be at our publisher's booth (1C Publishing) and they have promised to make it big and exciting for the fans.

If you're in the area, please make sure to drop by and say hi! There'll be goodies and the very latest build, including our newest boss fight, which should be pretty cool looking!

And now, unto the progress report!

Progress Report

We've been quite busy this month. We released our monthly Beta Backers Build just yesterday and it's a bit different from past builds. Mainly, we didn't add any new story maps/events last month. Instead, we had a very large update pass.

We added about 90 new Sound Effects. We redid all the crafting ingredients and recipes as well as all the loot, steal and poach tables so they drop the proper items and ingredients throughout the whole game. All chests contents got populated as well as map rewards, etc. Basically, the game experience is a lot closer to the final product we're envisioning! Now, the main thing missing is your feedback so we can fine-tune everything!

The other interesting addition to the build is that we did a polish pass over all maps to add dynamic ambient props, effects and some parallax. It's looking pretty nifty!

That's what our volcanic map looks like now:

We also added some dynamic props to the world map:

Otherwise, we have a few new maps ready.

And our newest boss, of course!

That's it for this month's update!

If you actually missed our Kickstarter, I would recommend you add us to your Steam Wishlish and keep an eye out for an announcement in the coming weeks. We have something interesting in the works!

Once again, a big thank you to everyone for your support!

Social Rewards votes are in, Progress Report
almost 6 years ago – Mon, Jul 09, 2018 at 04:12:00 PM

Announcements

The results are in for the for social rewards!

For the hats, we have the Bowler Hat as the big winner (50% more votes than the next one!).

For the accessories, we have the Monocle as our big winner (2x as many votes as the next one!).

We'll start the work on those soon and we should have them ready probably within 2 months. It'll be a while because the person that'll be working on them has a very stacked plate already, as he's working on a special enemy, created and designed by our awesome Legendary Arbiter backer. Can't wait for that one!

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Next big announcement is that we'll be at Gamescom 2018, in Germany.

We've never been there before, but as we understand it, it's the equivalent of E3 in Europe in terms of size. Maybe even bigger? The Europeans we've spoken to certainly seem to think it's more awesome at least, haha.

Once again, we'll be under our publisher's umbrella (1C Publishing) on site, but as I understand it, their presence will be much bigger at Gamescom than it was at PAX East, with a big pavilion and all sorts of goodies. Not to spoil any surprises, but I believe there might be posters, banners, t-shirts, energy drinks and beers with Fell Seal art on them. Interesting...

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We also have some new promotional art for the game. A brand new image cover that looks really awesome (if we do say so ourselves!) and certainly puts us in the mood for some tactical action!

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Finally, we have some news on our Xbox One build, namely: it's running great! Here's how it looks on our TV at home:

As a quick reminder, we're still fully planning on having a PS4 version as well (although we haven't started our tests on that platform) and we're still hoping we'll get a Switch version going (although we have nothing new to report on that front yet).

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Progress Report

As usual, we delivered a big Beta backers build update earlier this month. The biggest highlight was that we added the Bzil race (that was our stretch goal, if you remember!) to the game, along with a recruitable Bzil character. The full patch notes for the Beta Build can be found on our Steam page, right here:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/699170/announcements/detail/1684792419485561991

Bzil Race:

After getting some solid input from our Beta backers, we implemented the specifics of how the Bzil race works:

• You can only recruit 1 Bzil character. He's that special.
• He will not having access to any human classes, only monster classes.
• Any class you have access to, you can just learn their abilities using AP, the regular way. Each monster class has its own unique skill tree.
  
• You can equip 2 passives, 1 counter and 1 sub-class, just like normal.
• To unlock a new monster class, you need to defeat monsters of that type in combat, while having your Bzil character present during the encounter. He doesn't need to land the last hit or anything, but he must be deployed during the battle.
• At the end of the encounter, you will get a "monster essence" for the monster family of each enemy you defeated. Higher tier monsters yield more essence (1 to 3). Once you have 5 essences, the monster class is unlocked and you have access to it!

There are 19 different monster classes the Bzils have access to. The classes usually have less active skills than the human classes do, but they have many different and unique abilities that are sure to give you a lot to think about.

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New Maps:

We have lots of new maps, new monsters, new spells... new stuff all around!

Here's one of our new maps:

Which comes packed with an old friend that has been sitting on the sidelines, ready for action, for a while now: the Blardger:

We also have lots of new map concepts in the works. We're currently up to a solid 36 unique maps and we still have many to go!

And new monsters, of course, including this nasty looking guy, who's going to be trouble (mark my words!):

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That's really just a quick summary to be honest, as there's probably too much material to show in a single update. We have new concept art, a lot more maps, more monsters... For fully detailed updates, the best is always to follow our weekly devlog posts on our website, right here: https://www.fellseal.com/

Once again, thank you everyone for your support! :)

Social Rewards, Progress Report
almost 6 years ago – Sat, Jun 09, 2018 at 01:41:59 AM

Social Rewards

First, we prepared some options for the social rewards that were unlocked during our Kickstarter.

We have an accessory and a hat for everyone to vote for. Please leave your selection for both of them in the comments below. We'll tally all the votes 2 weeks from now and create the social Accessory and Hat from the most popular votes!

Progress Report

We released our monthly Beta Build last week and it had a lot of new content and a focus on polish. For the full notes, check out our Steam patch notes page: 

https://steamcommunity.com/games/699170/announcements/detail/1653264683481797583

Here are some of the highlights:

We have several new maps (new forest, desert and poisoned areas), including this one:

We have a ton of new spells, including most of the gadgets for the Gadgeteer class, as well as new spells for the special story classes and for many monsters.

We have fully revamped the world map. The previous world map was always meant to be temporary until we had all the world locations setup and we're finally done with that part. Here's what it looks like:

More customization options for units, in the form of beards. We added a whole lot of them and we're almost done adding all the customization options we have planned. We're mainly missing the social rewards and some more accessories. Here's some of the beards in action:

We have a pile of new monsters as well. I think we have 5 new monsters this month. It's been going pretty fast on that front! :)

And of course, we've been adding a lot of new story battles and events, as well as patrol battles. We added 4 story battles and 4 patrol battles to the last build and we have more in the works!

Finally, as we've been focusing on polish, we fixed a lot of bugs, integrated a lot of feedback from our Discord community and updated some visuals left and right.

We released another version of our free demo too, which you can find on Game Jolt, Itch.io, Indiexpo or IndieDB. Here's the Game Jolt link:

https://gamejolt.com/games/fellseal/278902

Product Keys

We've had a few questions recently about product keys for Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark. Our keys are fully ready for Steam, but getting the Xbox One and Gog keys ready well in advance is a little more troublesome. Since we'll be releasing on PS4 as well after all, we also have to get those ready and we're leaving a little time for people to contact us to switch to a PS4 version if they desire.

Bottom line is: the process is taking a little bit of time than we'd like, but we'll put an announcement about it as soon as possible.

No worries, everyone should have their keys well before the game releases officially! :)

Once again, thanks everyone for the support! :)

New Beta build, Progress report
about 6 years ago – Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 11:59:10 PM

Annoucement

First, a quick announcement: we just released the next big Beta Build on Steam (build 0.2.4). It has pages of changes (which you can read in details Right Here), but the highlights are 3 new maps, 4 new story battles, 3 new special classes and a big selection of new haircuts for your recruits:

PAX Report

PAX East went well and was a lot of fun! A big thank you to everyone that visited our booth: it was awesome meeting all of you!

We had a blast at PAX and got to meet a lot of incredible fans, journalists and devs. We're very excited for our next big event (probably Gamescom). Although we're happy it's not coming TOO soon, as it was a tiring experience, haha.

Finally, we got a lot of awesome feedback from the PAX event and we've already integrated a lot of the feedback we got into the latest build (lots of UI improvements, general clarifications and better tutorials and tooltips (that's some thing we're still working on improving as well!)).

Progress Report

We have a lot of progress to report (as can be see in that changelog we mentioned earlier!), but here are some quick highlights, accompanied with nice images.

We made 2 new maps since our last Kickstarter update, including this scary lava area:

We have 4 new story battles created and added 3 special story classes. Things are shaping nicely on that front!

We've added a new monster enemy, the Pektite. It's actually a family of elemental monsters, one for each of the 4 basic elements. They pack a magical punch!

We also have several new spell effects, some for our new story classes and some just for old abilities that weren't finished yet (I think we're sitting at around 90% completion for our spells right now). Here's one of the new spell effects:

Seriously, the list of changes and additions to the latest build is just huge. Check it out on our Steam page, which also has our new trailer and new screenshots!

Thanks again for everyone's support!

Monthly Progress Report
about 6 years ago – Tue, Apr 03, 2018 at 01:57:36 AM

First, a quick announcement: we'll have a booth at PAX East 2018, which will be held in Boston from April 5th to 8th.

We'd love to see everyone there, so if you're attending, please drop by our booth, check out the latest build and chat with us!

Now, unto the progress report:

We have plenty of progress to report this month. The first big news is that we have a new trailer for the game (one with newer and better content, such as the new idles and some more impressive spells, etc!) which we should unveil at PAX if all goes well (because it's coming in very hot!).

We've gotten a few new maps ready, bringing our current total maps to 29 I believe.

We also have new monsters, including this friendly looking demon (and a couple stronger variants):

And some new spells, including this one:

And we have a slew of UI improvements, including a revamped class selection menu, with a lot more information:

 And a "start of battle" effect on the worldmap:

 And a few other small things, such as showing the Patrol levels on the worldmap and a cleaner crafting menu. I'm probably forgetting a few things too, haha.

We also have more story events/battles completed, but as usual we're not going to reveal too much on that front because of spoilers.

Finally, on the tech side, we've exported all our classes/abilities data to an XML file and added a system to allow modders to override current classes and add new classes/abilities easily. This now allows modders to create encounters as they wish, as well as create/modify classes and abilities, tune and modify the AI as well as the balance of many global values (such as buffs/debuffs and what they do, etc).

Finally, we also had a quick optimization pass to lower memory usage and fix some lingering issues with the MAC and Linux builds, which should now hopefully be as stable as the Windows build.

And last thing is that we've had to change our Twitter account after Twitter suspended the accounts of over a dozen Indie devs recently. We're not really sure why we and many other indie devs ended up targeted this way and Twitter's customer service hasn't been helpful either, so we've decided to focus on our 6 Eyes Studio account (rather than our Fell Seal Account). Anyone that wishes to follow us should check it out right here:

https://twitter.com/6EyesStudioLLC

Thanks again everyone for the incredible support you've shown us! :)