Sovereign Syndicate
Sovereign Syndicate Steam Next Fest Feature Stream 2
You're watching Boring Dad Gaming playing our latest demo for Sovereign Syndicate, a Victorian Steampunk RPG with tarot cards instead of dice.
Like what you see? Don't forget to wishlist!
And if you want to follow development more closely you can sign up for our newsletter and join our discord.
Sovereign Syndicate Steam Next Fest Feature Stream 1
You're watching Boring Dad Gaming playing our latest demo for Sovereign Syndicate, a Victorian Steampunk RPG with tarot cards instead of dice.
Like what you see? Don't forget to wishlist!
And if you want to follow development more closely you can sign up for our newsletter and join our discord.
Game Update: Controller Support and other Quality of Life Features
You may have noticed we pushed an update to the demo recently. We’re preparing for the upcoming Steam Next Fest October 9-16th and we’re making sure everyone gets to see the latest and greatest.
We’ve also been working to improve our UI and tutorials and add some quality-of-life features. This includes the controller support, font scaling, and UI improvements you can see in the latest demo. We’re also adding some additional features at a later date, including Twitch integration, Steam achievements, and a frame rate limiter.
As we mentioned in a previous update, we weren’t certain what we would be able to deliver for localization and platforms at launch until recently. Now that we’re further along and have more clarity on our budget, we can commit to an English PC launch. We’re hoping to follow that up with additional languages and platforms depending on the game’s sales. We’ve made the related updates to the Steam product page so users will know if the game isn’t in their preferred language.
We’ve been working hard in QA finishing up the game as of late. We’re now content complete and into the bug fixing and polish stage. We’ll have an announcement with a release date very soon, so stay tuned for that!
As always, if you’d like to follow our development more closely you can subscribe to our newsletter and join our discord.
Newsletter: https://www.crimsonherring.com/newsletter-signup/
Discord: https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Until next time, Take care!
New Demo Out Now!
We've just released a significant update to our demo, please see below for all the details. Appreciate you taking the time to play and providing your feedback. There's a feedback form on the in-game options menu or you can join us over on our Discord and chat directly with the dev team.
Discord: https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
GAMEPLAY
- Implemented traits system and integrated with major arcana tarot cards
- Streamlined tarot skill check and level up system
- Vigour and Nerve resources changed to Temperament
- Made inventory items consumable where appropriate
- Improved mouse sensitivity
GRAPHICS
- Improved cinematography to better frame player and prevent occlusion
- Reduced fog and bloom
- Improved real-time lighting and shadows
- Improved navmesh and pathfinding to prevent environment clipping
UI
- Updated dialogue panel with iconography to better communicate changes to secondary systems
- Re-formatted dialogue panel to provide better text readability
- Improved tutorial screens and skill check information presented to the player
- Improved in-game menu screens to better communicate information to the player
- Updated UI to better scale at higher and wide screen resolutions
- Updated player HUD to better display information on current tasks
Until next time, Take Care!
Discussing New Tarot Card and Traits Systems
As I discussed in the last update, now that we’re further along in development we’re taking some time to re-assess whether the mechanics and systems we’ve developed are fit for purpose and reinforcing the core gameplay loop of exploration, storytelling, and meaningful dialogue choices.
Today I’ll be talking about our changes to the tarot card and trait systems.
Initially we were treating major tarot cards more as an augment to the card draw mechanic, changing how the minor arcana (used in place of dice) were drawn based on which major tarot cards the player unlocked and equipped to their decks. This was an interesting approach; but ultimately it was never as fun as we wanted, and a lot of players were confused by how this system interacted with the chance of success for a given draw.
Going back to our core gameplay loop, we asked ourselves how we could better design this system to provide more meaningful character customization and dialogue choices. As a result, we’ve simplified the card draw system. We’ve retained the minor arcana decks and associating them with the players attributes; but instead of having major tarot influence the card game, major tarot are now used to give your character traits.
This simplifies the card draw quite a bit, drawing one card at a time per attribute and minor arcana deck. The result is an easier to understand mechanic that feels more fair to the player and that allows them to focus more on core gameplay rather micro managing their major tarot equips.
For traits, we’d always been inspired by etiquettes in Shadowrun, specializations that players could select during character creation or earn during gameplay that would unlock special dialogue options and paths through the game. We’d iterated on this quite a bit earlier in development, but it never quite felt right.
Now that we’re using the major arcana cards to unlock traits, we’re able to make character creation and dialogue choices more meaningful and reactive to the player’s choices. With certain dialogue choices gated behind certain traits we’re able to offer more interesting choices in gameplay and provide more replay value as well. I’m really excited about how this change has made the game better and easier to understand.
That’s it for today, in future updates I’ll be discussing changes to the dialogue and UI panels and in-game options, so stay tuned for those!
As always, if you’d like to follow our development more closely you can subscribe to our newsletter and join our discord.
Newsletter: https://www.crimsonherring.com/newsletter-signup/
Discord: https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Until next time, Take care!
Discussing New Hope and Despair System
Now that we’re further along in development we’re taking some time to re-assess whether some of the mechanics and systems we’ve developed are fit for purpose and reinforcing the core gameplay loop of exploration, storytelling, and meaningful dialogue choices. I’ll be going over some of the changes we’ve made in the next few updates.
Today I’ll be talking about our change to the vigour and nerve system which we’re now calling hope and despair.
The inspiration for this started with other two resource game systems like Diablo’s health and mana or Disco Elysium’s health and morale. A standard health / hit points and a second resource that together manage damage and healing and consumption of a secondary resource that was used for some other purpose.
Initially we were designing interactions around having a cost to vigour or nerve depending on the inner voice used for the action, and designing areas, interactions, and consumables to restore or damage these resources.
While this system was okay, we didn’t feel like it was doing a good enough job of reinforcing our core gameplay loop and feeding in to meaningful and variable dialogue choices. So, we’ve redesigned it to a single resource meter that measures your characters level of hope or despair.
This meter is divided into five levels, Hopeful, Optimistic, Content, Weary, and Desperate. Different interactions and consumables still effect this resource; but more importantly the level will affect the dialogue choices you have available. For example, a hopeful character may have different dialogue choices or actions they can take in a given situation than a desperate character would, and these choices are gated behind the hope and despair meter to provide for some choice and consequence.
So far, we’re really liking the change and look forward to leaning into this mechanic to provide some more interesting choices to the player.
That’s it for today, in future updates I’ll be discussing changes to the tarot card system, the new traits system, and the dialogue and UI panels so stay tuned for those!
As always, if you’d like to follow our development more closely you can subscribe to our newsletter and join our discord.
Newsletter: https://www.crimsonherring.com/newsletter-signup/
Discord: https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Until next time, Take care!
Let’s Talk Roadmap to Release!
Lots of moving parts here of course, and I’d like to avoid making a release scope or date commitment that we’re not able to hit, so here’s what I’ve been thinking…
We know that with our current budget we’ll be able to make the game we wanted; but without publisher support or additional investment it’s likely that we can only deliver a PC English version at launch.
If we’re able to secure additional funding, then we’ll focus that funding on additional languages and console porting. This would mean release would take longer of course, to allow for additional translation and porting work to be completed; but we’d be able to provide the game to a larger audience.
If we’re not able to secure additional funding for porting and localization we’d still look to do these things post-release using revenue generated from game sales, it would just take longer than we’d like to reach the same audience.
We’re also looking at whether we can attend Gamescom or PAX West, and we’d likely run a Beta concurrently with those events so you can see everything we’ve been working on and provide that critical last-minute feedback so we can deliver the best possible version of the game.
I’ll provide you with updates as the situation develops, and update the Steam page accordingly when we firm up our plans for localization and release date; but if you’re interested in learning more about what’s going on with development right now, Isaac and Chris sat down and discussed it for one of our developer blog posts over on our YouTube Channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0W2ealJspY
As always, if you’d like to follow our development more closely you can subscribe to our newsletter and join our discord.
Newsletter: https://www.crimsonherring.com/newsletter-signup/
Discord: https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Until next time, Take care!
PAX Recap and What's Next for Sovereign Syndicate
I’m really glad we decided to show the game in person. We’d never had the opportunity before, starting the studio during COVID, and I was delighted and humbled by the positive reactions from so many people who enjoyed playing our game. If you were there and came over to see us thanks so much for checking us out and taking the time to play!
The prospect of showing the game in person like that also forced us to work on some additional polish and a re-release of the demo, as we wanted to make sure we were putting our best foot forward to any players, media, publishers, and other vendors. I’m really happy we put the time in and can show off a lot of the changes we’ve been working on since our initial demo release almost a year ago, and the feedback on the changes has been fantastic.
A special thanks to our team that travelled to show in person, and the team at PAX for being so accommodating and generous with their time to make sure we had everything we needed to have a successful show.
We’ll have more on our development roadmap and release plans in the next update; but if you’re interested in learning more about what it’s like to show art an event like this, Isaac and Chris sat down and discussed it for one of our developer blog posts over on our YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gKCKZy1GX4
As always, if you’d like to follow our development more closely you can subscribe to our newsletter and join our discord.
Newsletter: https://www.crimsonherring.com/newsletter-signup/
Discord: https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Until next time, Take care!
The Storyteller's Festival 2023 Featured Stream
We're Headed to PAX East Rising Showcase!
We've been selected for the PAX East Rising Showcase and will be showing Sovereign Syndicate in Boston March 23rd - 26th 2023.
We're running a special playtest for the PAX East version of the demo which also shows off some of the recent graphical fidelity, performance, and UI changes we've made.
If you'd like to help test the game head on over to the Steam page and request access. No password or approval required; if you participated in past playtests the build should automatically update.
Thanks for your help! If you're going to be at PAX drop by our booth and say Hi!