Monthly Update - Big News and progress report
about 6 years ago – Sun, Mar 04, 2018 at 07:27:29 PM

Hello everyone!

Here's our monthly update, packed with big announcements and lots of progress!

Big News

We have multiple announcements this month. First, the big one:

After a lot of thinking, we decided to sign up with a Publisher. As such, we can now guarantee that we'll be having a PS4 version as well as getting on GOG for the DRM free version. There will be many other extra online stores carrying Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark as well, which will be announced later.

There's currently no change to the status of the Switch version: we're still hoping to get it done, but it'll probably end up being after the other versions are released.

We'll be announcing the name of our Publisher soon, but they are preparing a press release about it and asked us to hold off until their announcement before mentioning their name.

Tied to this collaboration with our publisher, it is very likely we'll be at PAX East 2018 in April. We've wrapping up some details currently, but it's looking good. We'll have an announcement about that when it's finalized and we certainly hope everyone will drop by our booth to say hi! We'll be happy to thank you in person for all the support and helping us realize our dream game!

Also, after looking things over with our Publisher and looking at their schedule and ours, we've decided to target Q1 2019 for the final release date. This will allow us to launch on all 3 main platforms (PS4, XBox One, PC) simultaneously as well as ensure we have enough time for all the polish and features we're planning, as well as localization in 5 different languages. Basically, we want to make sure the release is done the right way and the game is as good as we want it to be on release!

We haven't actually had anyone write to us about Steam Keys yet, but we want to keep everyone in the loop: we've already sent the Steam keys to all our Beta Backers and we've been wanting to send the keys to everyone else ASAP. We've been holding off mainly because we've been in talks with our publisher for a while and we knew it would grant us access to PS4 and GOG and we know many backers were interested by those options. We're still not actually 100% sure how to handle keys for consoles at this point to be honest, so we'll be looking into that with the help of our Publisher so that we can start delivering keys ASAP.

Finally, we just released the new big Beta Backer build (about 15 mins ago) and we'll keep updating the big build monthly, with an update to the experimental build in between. The latest build has some more story battles, patrol battles and a LOT of balance changes, primarily centered around better AI. There's also a lot of visual and UI improvements and we're still working on more of those. The detailed notes of the build are going to be on our Steam page shortly (after I'm done with THIS update, haha ^^), which you can find right here: 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/699170/Fell_Seal_Arbiters_Mark/

That should cover the big announcements for this month. Now onto the...

Progress Report

The steam page is actually going to be a good spot to get the specifics of all we did (with more precise balance notes, etc), but we've been tirelessly working on adding new content, new assets and especially polishing gameplay.

First big bit of progress is that we finally completed the new Idle Animations. A few monsters are still missing theirs, but they should be dealt with soon enough. All humans and most monsters now have their idle, with their equipped weapon showing for the humans (which helps you figure out what they might be up to even faster).

We also have a lot of UI improvements to give more information to the player while in combat. The in-battle description of abilities was updated to use the same description box as in the menu, which shows a lot more details. Here's what it looks like now:

There's a slew of other UI improvements, including better controls, fixes for larger and smaller resolutions than 1080 and a lot of other small quality-of-life details.

We also have a lot of new sprites, including new monsters and new outfits (we're almost done with the outfits!)

We have a new map as well and a lot of new spell effects, but there's some spoilers involved in showing some of those. Anyone that can't wait though can always check our Discord for most of the game's maps as well as follow us on Twitter for more regular updates!

Hopefully everyone is as excited as we are about our progress and we'll have a lot more to show next month!

Monthly update: Beta Backes build is live and lots of new content!
about 6 years ago – Thu, Feb 01, 2018 at 12:03:38 AM

Hello everyone!

Biggest part of the update is that we just released the first official Beta Backer build earlier today on Steam. It contains 5 new story maps, 7 new patrols and a lot of story events, bug fixes, new assets, etc.

The plan is to release roughly a new build or 2 every month, each including more story maps and a compilation of all tweaks and fixes from the last build.

We're really hoping the Backers will love the build!

Now, on to screenshots and specifics!

Balance and such

We've spent a fair amount of time rebalancing a few things for the current Beta build, so we have a lot of tweaks and changes left and right.

Most of them are centered around increasing physical damage and reducing magic damage a tad, as the mages were REALLY strong. We also exported most of the damage formula components to our GameOptions.txt file, so they will be tunable by modders if wanted.

We also rebalanced several abilities and some items. And we're honestly still just getting started on that: we really want to get the balance "just right", so it will be an iterative process for sure!

New Assets

We've mainly been focusing on creating story events, which involved creating lots of small props and custom story sprites and actions, so we don't necessarily have a lot of new stand-alone maps and such to show, but we did get a bunch of new things.

Idle Animations:

We're almost done with the new idle animations. Only a few monsters are still missing theirs. They came in a little hot to be added to the beta build we just released, but they will be part of the next build. I'll save the screenshots of those for when they're in the official build, but it should be looking pretty nice!

New Spells:

Although it hasn't been our main focus during the last month, we've still been adding a few new spells to the game. A lot of them are centered around our physical abilities rather than pure magical spells. Here's what the Templar's Syphon Strike looks like:

New Maps:

We created a few new maps, mostly those needed by upcoming story events. Here's some of the new ones:

New Monsters:

We have a new monster, the Daodrenner that's fully ready:

And we're working on a new monster. A mole-like monster that can bury underground to displace itself on the map, amongst other things. Here's the concept art for it:

Portraits:

We're still adding more and more portraits, primarily from our Portrayer and above tiers. Here's the latest batch of them (and we have a lot more incoming still!):

Keys for the regular version of the game:

We'll be looking at generating the keys for the regular version of the game (rather than the Beta version) fairly soon.

Nothing is set in stone at this point, but we've been in talks with various publishers recently and we think we might decide to work with one of them. If that happens, it should pretty much guarantee our PS4 and GOG versions, so we've waiting on that before finalizing the keys, just in case.

Again, nothing final there, but it's something we're strongly considering.

Thanks again everyone!

Another exciting project

It's been a while since we had a project recommendation, but another tactical RPG just came up on Kickstarter and we think it looks pretty awesome! They're already 19% funded after less than 2 days, so it's looking extremely promising!

Check out Bevontule on Kickstarter, right here!

Lots of progress and info about Steam Keys
over 6 years ago – Tue, Jan 09, 2018 at 07:18:31 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Backer Surveys closing on January 9th and monthly update
over 6 years ago – Wed, Jan 03, 2018 at 12:00:30 AM

Hello everyone! :)

We hope you've had wonderful holidays and wish everyone a great upcoming year 2018!

Backer Surveys and new demo

We're going to close the backer surveys on Backerkit next week on January 9th, so if you haven't filled it yet, now would be a great time to get that done!

Also, in case you missed it, we recently updated our demo on Game Jolt and Itch.io with a newer version that has the proper story character sprites, more ready spell effects, the new key configuration menu and a LOT of bug fixes. Feel free to check it out:

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

Itch.io: https://6eyesstudio.itch.io/fell-seal-arbiters-mark-demo

Monthly Update

We're still planning on releasing the first beta build near the end of the month, so we've been working towards that goal since our last update.

We've added a lot of new maps to the game, including a new forest map and our first volcanic map:

As usual, we've also been adding a lot of new portraits, including a few from our Arbiter Portrayer and Mercantile Arbiter tier backers:

We've also been working on a polish phase for our story, which is what we've been waiting for to resume creating story cutscenes for the game. Most of the polish is cleanup and tying up loose ends, but we did end up making some significant changes to some of the mid to late game story. As we expected, the changes had an effect on the way some of the early story is being told, which is why we'd been waiting on that to resume adding new early cutscenes.

But now we're in a good spot on that front, so we added our first new cutscene since the initial demo and work on further cutscenes is moving steadily (which is mainly what we're missing for the release of the first beta version):

We also have the final sprite ready for the Blardger, a troll-like monster we showcased before:

And we have a few new spells and some new outfits for characters, including the new pirate outfit:

We're finally almost done with outfits, as we're only missing a few matching outfits for the females (the female pirate outfit and 3 others). At this point, our outfit artist is going is finally going to be able to start the work of adding the new idle animation to every sprite in the game. We're hoping we'll have about half the idles ready by the time we release the Beta Build, with the rest of them needing about a month of work to be finalized.

Lastly, we revamped some of the menus, especially around the abilities selection, and we still have some more tweaks in the works in that area. We really want to ensure they convey the right amount of information as cleanly as possible!

That covers it for last month! Thanks again for everyone's support!

Finally, if you want to keep giving us a hand and haven't done so already, adding us to your wishlist on Steam is a great way to help us gain visibility and traction on there, which will be instrumental in ensuring the game is a success!

Thanks!

All BackerKit surveys sent!
over 6 years ago – Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 02:42:53 PM

Hey everyone!

We sent a small wave of backer surveys yesterday to make sure everything was working smoothly and it seems like everything was in order, so we went ahead and sent the rest of them just now, so you should be seeing your survey in your mailbox right now! :)

As usual, thanks a lot for everyone's support and patience. If there's any concern or issues with anything in the survey, make sure to let us know.

For the social rewards (new hat and new accessory), we're still preparing the sketches to the backers to vote on. We'll have a Kickstarter update dedicated to the vote in a little bit.

A last note about the custom portraits, designs and sprites: we're hoping people will send those to us on our Discord server, where there's a a whole system in place to communicate information, show a preview of the maps and allow people to share and exchange ideas. That being said, if Discord isn't your thing, that's fine too! Just contact us on our main email [email protected] with all the relevant information (including your portrait picture and your backer name) and we'll take it from there!

A shout-out to an exciting project

A project we like is up on Kickstarter right now, the ambitious and beautiful Raji: An Ancient Epic. The game style is action adventure and it is set in ancient India.

 Check out their project right here!