Welcome to completion. Yes, we are here. The day has arrived. All that good jazz. The game is now feature and content complete - enjoy! ( Amma looking at those 4000+ people on the wishlist when I say that - you know who you are! )
We have fixed the performance issues, the game looks amazing and its ready to rock and roll.
Troubleshooting: If Astrid falls through the floor when you load the game, that means you have an old save game interfering. You will need to start the game from the beginning if that happens as your old save is no longer compatible with the finished game. Follow these steps:
Quit the Game
Find your save game folder. For most of you it will be C: > Users >YOUR USER NAME > AppData > Local
Look for the IntoTheShroud folder there
Delete the entire folder and subfolders, making sure it's the save game folder and not the actual game installation
Restart the game
Known Issues
No Major Issues. There are minor spawning issues that happen at random sometimes resulting in deer flying or floating, or NPCs spawning on top of each other. This appears to be random and we will address this in a hotfix later as I am not sure what is happening to cause this. It should have no game breaking results. But will likely look pretty hilarious when it happens. Feel free to meme the living shit of it.
But mostly...
This has been a 2 year labour of persistence and focus for the small team at W.R.K.S Games. Its not perfect. But it is very good. The game looks glorious and we hope you enjoy the hell out of it.
with best regards
Kosala "Kos" Ubayasekara Founder and CEO
Pushing launch to Sunday the 9th May
Afternoony all!
A heads up that we are delaying the launch two days. Still waiting on the final VO to arrive on Thursday and need some time to put that into the game and do the final end-to-end QA before getting it to you. So launching on Friday seemed a bit tight, going to delay till Sunday to give our QA and Testing team a little more time to get the final polish in.
A release date at last!
Good afternoon all!
i hope you are all enjoying a blazingly beautiful Sunday. We have finally arrived at that time: we have a release date.
Blood Bond - Into the Shroud will be updated on May 7th on Steam - to the final build. We thank you very much for the patience and for the long wait for those that joined us since Early Access.
Trying to create an old-school RPG for modern times was not without its challenges, but we have finally arrived at the finish line. There is good news and a little bit of bad news:
The Good Shit
The game will be fully voiced. Yup, every single character.
The game will come out in 5 languages (subtitles and game menus etc) including Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Russian.
The game will have a post-launch roadmap of additional content, all of it will be free. We will tell you more after the launch.
The game will be coming out console in 2022
The game is fully controller compatible
The Less than Good Shit
A lot has happened since we started this journey. We now have distribution deals all over the world and the game is coming out in many more areas than just Steam.
As a result of it, I had to make some comprises on ensuring continuity of the gaming experience between regions and stores. We are therefore not going to use any Steam-only features. Like Steam Achievements and Steam Trading Cards etc. I know this will disappoint some of you, but they are not compatible across regional stores in non-US and Western Europe locations and a great deal of the world does not use Steam.
Looking forward to finally getting this into your hands,
best regards
Kosala "Kos" Ubayasekara
Launchers, Covid and minor release delays
Good morrow folks!
A snap update to say that we need to delay the final launch till the end of March (again!). We have had two issues. One is that our trusty QA and testing team member Radu has been down with Covid for a week and is now fit and fine again. We are going to take it easy on him for a while as he is in charge of testing our upcoming storefront along with the game testing as well - so we are not inclined to rush either.
Additionally, our publisher not only distributes keys to other stores but also the gold master file-based copies and retail copies. As such we need a launcher for the game and the WRKS Launcher is now being developed.
As we are still a small 15 person team the same team working on our store front also needs to work on the Launcher. They are just finishing up the store deployment and are now transitioning to Launcher development - and to cut a long story short we expect it all to go live around 4-6 weeks from now.
Apologies for having to keep you waiting another few weeks, but I am using the time to keep building and tweaking, and improving. We still need to finalize the last two chapters of the game and get the end to the end storyline in there - but I will drop a note here just before we go live with the final build.
best regards
Kosala Ubayasekara (who is happy to have a really really patient community of gamers!)
50% off Blood Bond - Into the Shroud
Good afternoon all!
Blood Bond - Into the Shroud will be fully completed by end of January. For those of you that have been with us for the long journey and are lounging on our wishlist waiting for us to complete, we have launched our only ever 50% discount on the game.
For the Winter Sale on Steam, you can now grab Blood Bond on the cheap and then wait till we finish up in January to embrace the full game.
As we now have a publisher for the game, who will be carrying the game outside Steam from January onwards, there will be no future discounts on Steam during 2021.
The Steam version will remain under our own self-published control and we will of course leave the game on Steam and it will be fully supported throughout 2021 including the two free updates we will be rolling out next year.
We wish you an excellent holiday season and hope that you have a restful end to what has been a turbulent year.
best regards
Kosala "Kos" Ubayasekara Founder and CEO W.R.K.S Games
The W.R.K.S Games State of Play 2020
Our annual State of Play for W.R.K.S Games is published and can be read on our Medium.
Thank you for your support this year on Steam, and much more is to come!
best regards
Kosala
The first Jordenheim Motion Comic
As many of you are aware, we do more than just build PC games. Inside our content universes like Jordenheim, we create PC/Console games, tabletop games, web content, and now....motion comics.
Presenting our very first foray into this genre - Enjoy!:
[previewyoutube="-xB4bOn8tDE;full"]
Patch 4.2 - Patch Notes - The Surprise Patch
Good afternoon all!
Patch 4.2 goes live on Thursday the 29th of October.
Our goals with this build I know I said there would be no more patches before the full build, but so much progress happened the last month and some much asked for features - here is a surprise patch for you all before the holiday season. The goals of this patch are all about performance and polish. Our most asked for update was a better performance. As this game does its cool comic book style with scene wide real-time post-processing, each pixel on the scene is underdoing post-processing in real-time as you play. Performance has been a huge challenge and I have been plowing away at it over the last few patches. We have finally come to the end of that journey now and reached a much more accessible state of the game performance-wise.
Features
No new features have been added in this build.
Improvements
The final big push for performance fixing is here. The EPIC settings are designed for the upcoming RTX 3080 and next year's next-gen cards. Any high-end PC system should be able to play at a comfortable 50+ fps by setting all graphics settings to HIGH and Shadows to MEDIUM. If you are on a mid-level system, set all settings to MEDIUM and Shadows to LOW. At this point most PC's in any configuration should be able to get at least 40fps with the game still looking great.
Camp locations added to compass.
All menus are controller friendly now.
Visual effects improved and enhanced.
Combat improvements: Vikings are more spontaneous and dodge better making for more challenging combat. Boss fights are more cinematic and slower-paced forcing you to strategize and pace yourself to win.
Environment reacts better to you, deer will run away, NPCs have their own walking paths and agendas, some appear only at night vs daytime, etc.
Improved lighting and visual polish to the game.
A few new quests added.
Dialogue system improved.
Bugfixes
Dialogue with women in the East forest now no longer makes you stuck in the dialogue tree
NPCS missing names now found their names
Dialogue with huntsman no longer repeats endlessly each time you come back to him
Known Issues
There are still voiceovers missing for Astrid. These are under development and will be added in the final game build.
3rd Party Integrations
Steam Achievements and cards are not part of this patch release but will be in the final version of the game. Any quests completed or points where you would normally have gained an achievement will be remembered by the game and you will be awarded your achievements from this Chapter when you play the full game later. So no progress will be lost by playing the current chapters.
We just launched the final pre-release patch on Steam. For the last 18 months after exiting Early Access, we have undertaken a staged released of the game with you. It was a bold experiment that was about two things: Firstly to see if it is possible to phase the launch of a single-player game into chapters and give people an episodic experience successfully. Secondly, to ensure we get maximum feedback and input before finalizing the game.
The first part, I would have to say was a failure. The second part was a wild success, resulting in a ton of feedback that genuinely shaped the game and even landed us a co-publishing agreement.
Over the last few months, the feedback frequency and type have diminished and we are seeing a lot of repetitive feedback. I take this to mean that the game features and foundations are starting to get to a mature state and we have iterated enough on these.
Thus, there will be no further updates until the final game is done. I am aiming for Nov-Dec of this year to get the fully completed 5 chapter game out to you guys. In the meantime, I will post regular updates on the game development here. At the launch of the final completed game, we will split aside only Chapter 1 of the game into its own free-standing game demo and make it available for free to everyone as a Prologue to the story.
The full game (this one) will continue to be sold at the current price post completion on Steam. And all of you that have bought the game until now or up to the full release, will be receiving all Chapters at no extra cost as promised.
best regards
Kosala Ubayasekara
Patch 4.1 - Some Fine Tuning and Bug Fixing
Good afternoon all!
Patch 4.1 goes live on Sunday the 13th of September.
Our goals with this build Quality of life updates and bug fixes.
Features
No new features have been added in this build.
Improvements
The incredibly loud yelling of the Khristian Militia is now a lower decibel.
The map updates with locations you discover.
The food buffs now have their own section on the character sheet as does item buffs.
Bugfixes
Deer Antlers count fixed on the quest that the hunter gives you. The game is now correctly able to count to 6 - nailed it.
The Tinkerer or Two quest not completing has been fixed - He now accepts the fact that you can indeed complete this quest.
Mr no face NPC is fixed and has found his face. He is now able to face life. It's all good.
The mystery of the disappearing village if you took a particular path across a hill in Chapter 1 is fixed. The village has been found again. No trees were murdered in this investigation.
Vista quest now updates correctly. All your vistas now actually belong to you!
You no longer get multiples of Sven's map. There is but one map to rule them all.
Known Issues <*> There are still voiceovers missing for Astrid. These are under development and will be added in the final game build.
3rd Party Integrations <*> Steam Achievements and cards are not part of this patch release but will be in the final version of the game. Any quests completed or points where you would normally have gained an achievement will be remembered by the game and you will be awarded your achievements from this Chapter when you play the full game later. So no progress will be lost by playing the current chapters.
