Here is another update from our dev process. Just a heads up for those of you who may have thought project is dead. No, not dead yet! Just delayed. Which is something usual. As we got deeper in this process we realize as optimistic as you might be, reality will slap your face as hard. That's what happened to us. We, i mean me - the game designer and owner of the project and my programmer buddy who is simply the other half of the apple, are gaining our experience with this debut. (You might even include a bunch of artists, animators, voice artists and musician who contributed to the project along the way to the WE.)
What's up now?
Right now, thankfully we are at a stage where we can see things more clearly. After all the work, fight, struggle, hardship we are kinda content with the progress made in the recent months and hope that we will release the Demo before December. Which means November. The Sweet November. It will be exactly 2 years since i have officially set up Shargad Game Studios (technically a one man company - yes i am a CEO of my own, pretty fun, recommended except all the money you will sink in) in 19 November 2020. Knowing how often small bugs caused us lots of time loss, our November goal might easily extend to December.
Why set up goals if you can't make it?
Tricky thing is; you aren't bound to set up goals if you will always have to delay. No one is forcing you. However without having these goals and deadlines you might lose the urge to finish the game. It is an unseen pushing force indeed. Of course it is better to be more accurate - compared to us.
Long story short we are pretty close to a demo release. The reason i can't give an exact date is because i still didn't test the game. On paper everything looks fine, the game design rules, numbers, skills, stats and all that. I need to test for the balance purpose first and i dont know how long its gonna take. Luckily, we have you, the great people of Capua to test the game further on, even better than me once the demo is released.
What is the meaning of a demo for us?
We intend to treat our demo more like a short beta version. We will keep updating and improving the demo until we actually release the EA version of the game (hoping sometime in Q1-Q2 2023). And then full release in the Q3 or Q4 of 2023.
We still have a lot to do. Lots of things to code, artwork to finish and animations... which gave me headache more than anything. VO is another tricky spot for me. It was my decision alone to go with VO unlike most games in our genre made with a similar budget. It is a burden and it is really hard to find high quality VO talents with small budget. These are all some nice topics to discuss further on but the time will come for that.
All is good
For now, just know that development is in process. Demo is underway. We are far from dead. Just stumbled couple of times down the road but all is good. We are certainly in a better shape than the roadkills Dahmer collected back in the days.
Hope life is treating all you great people well. Don't miss the arena fights in the weekends. They are pretty fun.
Cheers Semih
Finding the path in the desert...
Signs of life
I was not planning to make an announcement but i felt i had to just to clear mind of those who wishlisted the game by some reason and might not be following us on twitter which is where we are active.
Just to let you know, we are very much alive and project is going well. "Well" is a subjective term of course but after so much struggle we had early on the development, right now any small improvement could mean well.
Team of strangers
I guess it is classic for indie teams to encounter hardship in game dev process but i can comfortably say we are not a classic team. There is no one in the so called "team" that knows one another in real life. We are bunch of strangers doing the work remotely. Sounds funny? Not too funny for me as i, designer and producer of the project faced with lots of trouble to get things going.
This is a passion project started very roughly late 2020. I worked with programmers from other side of the world who doesnt know what is programming at all. Since i was as clueless and inexperienced, it took me quite a while to understand something is not right and we are going on the wrong direction.
Revival
Long story short, i had to take a bold decision to make a huge change management. With some bit of luck we managed to revive what could have been a dead project now. Programming is not the only thing in game development. Art and visuals are pretty core stuff to begin with. I had a long period of working many people here and there, just giving me 1-2 characterr and leaving the project as well. Not to mention animations. Worked with too many individuals and after some point it was really hard to gather everything and put it into the same pool. What i mean is having idle animation files on different version of Spine is a nightmare. But thats the story if you are doing an indie project and you dont have tons of money to spend to monthly salaries of pro animators but just work with random freelancers. If they are good, after a while their price will see a steep increase. At that point you have to either increase your budget or make another bold decision to sacrifice some bit of quality.
Not proud but yeah, i had to choose to apply my budget on more important things (like actually getting the game done) rather than having polished animations or else. At the end of the day we are having a 2d turn based rpg focused on party and skill customization. It ain't gotta have a polish level of Ruined King. Not realistically.
Voice gives life
On top of all that we have voice over. I mean not voice over from start to end but 20+ playable characters, 30+ NPCs all have some sort of voice lines you can hear throughout the game. Games i can compare our game to doesnt have it at all, for a solid reason: good VO is expensive. And finding so many people is really hard. See, Darkest Dungeon found only one guy, just for narration, and he had a great impact on the game. They didnt add VO to their characters for a reason. I dont know why i cant follow rules of reasonable people and do things within the budget. But the reality is; i had to do VO for multiple characters myself to actually get the job done. Good news is; you can turn it off anytime you want. I won't feel bad if you do it. But i prefer you play the game (once it is released) with VO on. Which is what gives the characters some sort of life imo. (Please check our Teaser. Thirsa -the demon- is one of the few pro VO artists i have worked with. She makes the Teaser sound better.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1IByDxOFLw&t=2s
Demo release?
So much blabla and there is no clear explanation about the current status of the game nor release date right? No. I learned my lesson to not throw unrealistic dates anymore after everything the project had suffered. However, unless some huge tornado happens and swallows us all, i guess we will release a demo in August. Can't say 100% because you know, this is game dev. But i am pretty sure we will have a small, decent, playable demo by then. I really wanted to release it this month only, in the Steamfest, but recently we really faced with some weird bugs we never had before. And i think the biggest problem (and also good thing) about Shargad: First Blood is the game design is too complex. Most systems are entwined with each other. So you can't code each system one by one. You have to do a bit of everything to see the bigger picture and then go with your guts. Hard to create solid frames of work which makes the planning even harder.
Right now, i am hopeful as i never have been before. Because combat system, which is the most intricate system of the game had seen a good progress within the last month. We have around 24 playable characters and each of them has 4 main skills, 2-3 supportive skills. 4 main skills have each up to 6 perks which marginally change the effects of each skill. We spent really a lot of time coding this and i still have to give good time to playtest myself to see how its working.
In the demo you will be able to play only 4 of this 24 characters (and just 2-3 quests) while we intend to release whole ACT 1 - which includes 8 playable characters by Early Access. After that we will keep building up the rest of the game until the Full Release which will be i guess Q1 2023. By a miracle it could be earlier, but i dont believe in miracles after i started this job, so lets hope not later.
This is the current road map for those of you who are interested in our project. If you are already patient enough to read this announcement, i am sure you are patient enough to wait couple of months more, right? Sounds good.
Regards, Semih
The Light at the end of the Jungle
The Jungle
After a long journey filled with trials, errors, mistakes, wrongdoings and whatever word you can find to bear the same meaning, at last we got into a path which leads to something solid at the end of this ruthless jungle. Something solid doesn't mean we are still not far from a full release but a playable demo seems within reach. Our main goal is to push for Steam Next Fest at the end of February, however that seems like a tough goal - not impossible but hard, really hard.
Skills
We spent a lot of time on building the Skills - Perks tree system. In most similar games, the skills level up in a straightforward fashion. As you see in the pic below, if you wanna level up your skill in Shargad: First Blood, you have 6 perk choices of which you can pick 3. Either from column A or B. And you dont necessarily follow a straight path of A or B; you can pick A1 then B2 and then B3.
Some paths are locked straight because of prerequisites (say A1 is prerequisite to A2, if you pick B1 then A2 option is greyed out) but overall you might realize that you, the player has a lot of room for skill customization.
Honestly i think this is the punchline of this game - not artstyle, not animations (especially not with such a tight budget) and not else but the variety of skills and heroes player can choose. It is impossible to try them all, thus we are hoping to add replayability value to the game with this aspect - a hope to let players test new builds even after game completion.
No Hell, No Piece of Cake
Another thing we can account for game replayability value is the difficulty. Difficulty is progressive upon game completion. So you start the game in the standard difficulty mode. When you complete the game, you progress from the same game file to next difficulty level.
We have 3 character classes for the main hero Abbas, but you can make the class choice it inside the game. Means, you can complete the game as Skirmisher, and you can choose Warden for the next difficulty. You dont need to start a new game from scratch to test other classes of Abbas. Fundamental reason i personally did not want to offer difficulty choices in the beginning of the game is; i feel the difficulty system is a bit too loose in rpg games. There are very easy and very hard difficulty levels which are either piece of cake - noone who has a small bit of rpg knowledge would play, or too hard - noone in their right mind would want to torture themself to try something unattainable. And come on, we are doing an indie game, although it is my personal wish many people would spend hours on this game, i am aware they have other bigger titles to sink their time in.
Nowadays we got too many good games out there and the competition is real. The market is getting larger (yes pc gaming is not dead as some futurists prophesized a couple of years ago) but that doesn't necessarily mean it is something good for indie games. Now you have to make your mark more than ever, to get the attention of the player. How do you do that? No one really knows. But surely, as in all things, you gotta find a unique trait of yourself and work on your strength rather than trying to become something you can never be.
Lore and Story
What is unique about our game? I never thought of it. But i am hoping my personal work on the lore and world setting for the last 7-8 years is something to make a difference. Generally story and lore in most games are very superficial, as most of you could notice. Be sure you will get something deeper here, both lore and storywise. At least i can comfortably say lots of thought, effort and research went into this.
Mythologies is something big for Shargad. I have setup the main infrastructure of the lore, and gods pantheon based on Mesopotamian mythology. While we use a lot of features from African mythology in the game - and borrowing from many other cultures and folklores too. Sometimes mixing and matching, sometimes directly stealing (well mythology is pretty old right? so it doesn't even count a steal)... But truth is; while there are so many races and cultures in Shargad, i never thought of making up a language from my ass. I can make one or two, but not fifty! So i borrowed from the various languages as well. If i got a culture called Galunas, i'm not gonna create a new language for them, Spanish would make it. I got Macalakies - weretiger folks, so should i create some bullshit names consisting of 5 apostrophes and 6 consonants one after each other? That ain't gonna happen. I got some nice Southeast Asian cultures in this world which can help me out. I will not spoil and explain everything i did while creating the lore, but you got what i mean.
Conclusion
Lastly, i guess when and what will happen to the game deserves some mention. We are hoping to release a playable free demo in the month of March. It is still a hard goal but i think we can make it. Getting ready until Steam Next Fest seems really really hard. I did write it is not impossible in the beginning i guess... But yeah, it is close to impossible. Though we will try. Thanks god i am not alone in this. I got a programmer buddy and a couple of freelancers who sticked with me for a long time, and i guess, the time to reap what we sow is nigh. Need some more push. So feel free to push us in twitter with your questions.
