Archeo: Shinar
Archeo Shinar has been fully released!
After 7 months in early access, we are glad to announce that Archeo: Shinar v1.0 is here!
We put a lot of love and hard work in this game, but this premiere is not the end! We are going to support this game for at least 6 next months. We will try to improve it, fix if anything needs to be fixed and add more to this wonderful community!
Ready? Pick. Explore!
Cheers!
One day to go!
One day to go!
Tomorrow Archeo: Shinar will be fully released. Are you ready for the new adventure?
Cheers!
Archeo: Shinar Story Trailer
Story Trailer
The story trailer is here!
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Cheers!
More about the voice over
More about the voice over
How many voice actors?
We have 8 voice actors. Every one of them represents a different character or a different subject. We wanted to have one voice for one character and we managed to arrange that.
Where to find voice over in the game?
First of all, all the plot-relevant letters and events have voice over. This means that also all animated clips have voice over too. We don't have voice over for standard random events or the standard expeditions, but if it's a part of the plot, you may be sure it will have voice over. But what about the tutorial?
We decided to add voice over to the tutorial, all 5 parts of the tutorial have full voice-over. No need to read Cuppy's text bubbles anymore!
How long is the full voice-over?
There's no simple answer to that. We have about 1 hour of voice over relevant to the plot. Plus the tutorial. Usually, the player will listen to 0,5 - 3 minutes tracks, during the animated clip or in a letter from the opponent.
Who are the voice actors?
We tried to find the best fit for our characters. This means that Lennox's voice should be British, Roztopchin's voice should be Russian and Vanessa's voice should be French. We have a British actor for Lennox, a Russian actor for Roztopchin and a French actress for Vanessa. All of the actors are professional voice actors. We needed to pick not only actors with certain native language but also fluent in English to deliver you the best experience.
How much longer do we have to wait for the full release?
The full release will be sooner than you think. The sound effects are ready, we are polishing the game, synchronizing new assets (voices and sound effects), testing, testing and testing various features.
Voice over is ready!
We have finished recordings for the game. All voice actors finished their work and we are closer than ever to the release of the career mode!
It was a rough ride, it took us more time than we expected, some of the chosen actors were rejected, but we are here, with all those recordings ready to be implemented in the game.
What's even more interesting is that we are implementing them right now, and if everything will be ok, we are going to start the final tests after the animated clips are synchronized with the voices.
How many actors do we have involved? How long are the recordings? What does need to be done before the final release? Do not worry, we are going to keep you updated more than ever!
More news coming tomorrow, and get hyped for the story trailer! With the recordings, we need to synchronize it and we should be able to share it with you in the near future.
Cheers!
The new gameplay trailer is on the air!
Trailer
We have updated our gameplay trailer and we hope you will like it even more than the previous one.
We are getting ready for the final release, more details are on the way, stay tuned and get hyped, we are going to share more on this Monday!
Cheers!
New easy difficulty
New easy difficulty
What is going to change on easy difficulty? As you may know, we've created a special difficulty for players focused on messing around and/or the story. In the full game, there are going to be 4 different options for difficulty, when for now in early access you can only experience 3 of them.
Let us introduce Easy difficulty!
But why is it different? Because it's not based on balancing numbers without changing anything in the game. With this option, the player will enable new features, which will make the game easier than ever before.
1. Friendly Institute
The Institute is going to help player after first and the second strike. How? With money! When you are struggling to pay off you explorers, the Institute will help you by sending you more money! Isn't that wonderful? Just don't spend it on Gin, ok?
2. Honest Explorers
The explorers will tell you if there's no chance for them to succeed in a random quest. This should help you choose the right ones to the task. However, this feature works only for random quests plus.
3. Time is irrelevant
Do you know that with every second delay on random quests they are getting harder and harder? No? Now you know. But don't worry, on easy difficulty, there's no delay, just take your time and pick your best explorers. But don't wait too long, you still have the time limit!
4. Childish opponents
Maybe, just maybe, your opponents aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. Their reputation will grow slower, their decisions are going to be... questionable. But hey! This way you will have more time for Cuppy. And guess who have prepared 129 new songs for karaoke night? Yes, you are right! It's Robert Mond!
5. Expedition Difficulty Description
Every expedition is going to have a description telling the player how hard it is. No more evaluation of the risk, no more overpreparing, we are going to tell you if it will be hard. Just do you best and try to estimate what 'hard' means in the terms of your explorers' skills.
6. Greenhorn Landlords
Who knows how to participate in a land auction? I know who don't know - your opponents. They are going to be very safe and won't risk too much on the land auctions. If you want to buy land, then just buy the bloody land. Who would stop you? General Knabl with his penny offer?
We hope the easy mode will allow you to experience Archeo: Shinar in a different way. We don't want to punish people for not wanting to struggle with the economy of this world. If you are here just for the story (or for your own reasons, like establishing communism once and for all) then who are we to judge? You want easy. Here's easy. Well... It's not 'here', but it will be in the full version of the game.
Cheers!
Progress Note
The bad news is that we had to scrap mission 3, we found more bugs and the story is not satisfying for us.
Let's start with that mission 3. No spoilers ahead. It was a very different mission from usual play and it was confusing as hell. We have implemented 2 fixes to change it, but after all, we needed to scrap it and create something else. The new mission 3 is fully playable, it's not a copy of any other mission, but it's not what was intended in the first place. The mechanism is good now, it's not confusing, but after all, we need more tests.
Estimated time of the career is wide, as you can see. Why? It depends on the game difficulty, player's performance, player's decisions, and overall situation during the playthrough. We don't think that a fresh player will be able to finish the career in less than 10 hrs when a few bad decisions can make it 20 hrs or even more. Our test group (people who have some experience with the game) had results between 8 and 16 hrs, but the median is closer to 16 hrs.
And the story. The story feels old in our eyes when the players will see it for the first time when the game is fully released. We are still working on it to make it clear, easy to follow and not so easy to predict the ending. There was an idea to implement more than one ending, but we are sure that there won't be any alternative endings (or hidden endings). We know what story we wanna tell, but we are still struggling how to tell it.
With this Progress Note, we want you to know that the game is stable, the career is playable and now we are polishing the product (and story) to make a good impression (not first, because of early access, but kinda first, because we have not published anything about the career mode yet). We hope you are excited because we want this to be an amazing adventure, great strategy, and a unique experience.
The end of the last discount before the full release and an Easy difficulty
The last discount in the early access has ended and... we are surprised! We thought that you will wait till the full release, but a lot of you bought our game on that sale. We are very grateful for your trust in us, it's really awesome to get your support now when we are pushing ourselves to work as hard as we can during these last weeks (yes, weeks, we know it's still more than a month, but we are calling it weeks) in early access.
And hey! We've got a surprise for you too! 3 month ago we decided to change our difficulty levels. We changed their names and deleted 'easy' because even the easy one wasn't easy for more than 80% of the players. We changed some values in a few functions to make the game easier and called it a Normal difficulty. And for those 3 months, you had only Normal, Hard and Super Hard (aka Dreadful) difficulties. Why there was no easy one? Because we decided that we can't just change math behind the game to make it easier, in fact, it wouldn't make the game easier for casual players. We needed to add more features for the easy mode to make the game forgive mistakes, give a helping hand to the player and stop trying to destroy everything. And the easy mode will be there on full release!
How exactly will it work? It will show the player how hard the expeditions are (not exactly what's the difficulty, but the game will give a hint about the estimation and after a while this hint should be clear what does it mean), the explorers will tell if they just can't succeed in a certain quests, the AI won't be so harsh (especially on the land market) and the game will give the player some money after a strike. We've seen that a lot of players struggles after the first strike and they can't play further, they just get the second one in the next rounds. We want to help with that on easy.
There will be also some invisible changes in the math behind the game to make it easier, but the main idea was to add a few helping features for not so hardcore players.
We hope that you were as surprised as we were after the last sale. And again, thanks for your wonderful support!
Cheers!