Sovereign Syndicate
PAX East Build
Fully Funded! What’s Next?
It’s been a busy few months here at Crimson Herring and I wanted to take some time to share everything we’ve been working on.
In our last update I shared a lot about our recent playtest, our Steam demo, and what it was like to participate in Gamescom. About the same time, we had a major funding announcement and I’d like to share more about what this means for our studio and Sovereign Syndicate.
We’ve recently received a generous investment from the Canada Media Fund that will allow us to complete work on Sovereign Syndicate and make it the best game we can. It’s been a huge relief for us to have consistent and dependable funding to allow the team to focus on delivering the game without distractions or interruptions.
While this was exciting news, we also had some technical debt and unanswered questions about the game that we needed to address before we could proceed in earnest.
To that end, we’ve spent the last few months answering these questions and solving some technical issues to allow us to spend 2023 fully focused on production; with aim to deliver Sovereign Syndicate for PC release in Q1 of 2024.
I’m excited to share these latest developments with you in upcoming playtests and a relaunch of our demo; but here’s a sneak peek at some of the things we’ve been working on:
- Improved player onboarding experience to help players understand the user interface, tarot card, and character development systems more easily
- Improved UI with some thought and preparation for future controller support and console release
- Support for localization
- Upgrade to Unity Universal Render Pipeline (URP) making the game more performant and increasing graphic fidelity
- Implemented new narrative tools to improve organization, speed narrative pipeline, and prepare for localization
- Improved level design and asset optimization, improving performance and adding NPC’s and more interactable items to various scenes
- Growing the team to facilitate additional content production
With these new tools and systems in place I’ve been pleased with the quality and speed of new content generation to meet our production deadlines.
In future updates I’ll be sharing our development roadmap, planned marketing activities and conference attendance, and information about future playtests and other opportunities to get involved with our community.
Thanks again for all your support, as always you can join us over on Discord or subscribe to our mailing list to keep up to date on all the latest developments.
Discord: https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Newsletter: https://www.crimsonherring.com/newsletter-signup/
Until next time, Take care!
Demos, Trailers, and Gamescom, Oh My!
It’s been a busy month here at Crimson Herring, and I wanted to take some time to share everything we’ve been working on.
We completed our recent playtest and incorporated all of your great feedback into the demo we launched at Gamescom. We’ve had thousands of players download and play the playtest and demo over the last couple of months, and we continue to get great feedback to help make the game even better.
Launching our Demo and participating in Gamescom and Devcom was a great experience and generated some media coverage for the game as well. I always enjoy watching content creators play our game and the comments and engagement from the audience. If you haven’t had the chance to play our demo yet you can download it for free on our Steam page.
As part of Devcom we were selected to participate in the NRW Indie Expo and won third place! If you haven’t seen our Twitch stream with the folks from Devcom you can check it out here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1571976309?t=03h25m01s
It was really fun to record live during all the Gamescom excitement and I look forward to participating in more festivals in the coming months.
We also refreshed the Steam page with new screenshots and launched a couple of new trailers showcasing all the great work we’ve been doing. I really enjoyed working with the trailer creators, writing scripts, and hiring voiceover talent, and I think the trailers came out great! Special thanks to Evolve PR and Suzanne Wallace for their work on those.
We’re also working on some new content and other exciting changes. I’m really looking forward to sharing what we’ve been up to in the next playtest. As always, you can catch us over on Discord if you want to chat and stay up on all the latest developments or head on over to our website and sign up for the newsletter.
https://www.crimsonherring.com/
https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Until next time, Take Care!
New Playtest Launches Today!
It’s been a few months since our last major update. We’ve been hard at work on the game, incorporating all your great feedback from the last playtest.
We launched a new playtest today with all the latest changes. Head over to the Steam page and download the latest, or just update it if you kept it in your library from last time. The playtest is public and doesn’t require a key.
As I mentioned our last playtest generated a lot of great feedback, both positive and constructive, and we’ve spent the last few months reviewing this feedback and taking action to move the game forward.
Here’s an idea of what you’ll see in the latest version.
- New character creation and customization options
- Simplified skills and character sheet
- Improved tarot card mechanic
- Improved flow and readability of dialogue
- Improved communication of changes to your character, inventory, journal, and tasks
- Improved loading times and framerates
We’re excited about these changes and look forward to your feedback! As always, you can catch us over on Discord if you want to chat and stay up on all the latest developments.
https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Until next time, Take Care!
Development Update
Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to play our recent playtest. We had over 500 players and we’ve been overwhelmed and humbled by the quality and quantity of feedback we received, and the passion and excitement from our community for the game we’re building.
We also crossed a significant milestone recently with over 10,000 wishlists! Thank you for supporting us and sharing our content. We can tell that we’re on to something here that people are really excited about and we’re committed to making the best game we can for you.
As I mentioned our playtest generated a lot of great feedback, both positive and constructive, and we’ve spent the last month reviewing this feedback and creating a plan of action to move the game forward. Here’s an idea of what we’ll be working on over the next few months.
Adding character customization options:
While we don’t think a full blown character creator is appropriate for the game we’re building, we do think we can do more to allow players to choose their starting stats, back story, and tarot cards. We have some interesting ideas on how to do that that we’ll be iterating on.
Improving flow and readability of dialogue:
We’re working on some improvements to the dialogue panel. Increasing text size, font and colour changes, improving overall flow, and adding additional context to skill checks and dialogue results.
Game systems design improvement and simplification:
While people were intrigued by our character sheet and the combination of phrenology, skills, humours, and tarot cards, the initial design was somewhat convoluted and confusing. We’re working to simplify our approach and make the systems work together in a more cohesive and easily understandable way. Here are a few examples to give you an idea of where we’re headed.
- Removing the underlying skills and focusing on the brain regions / internal voices
- Utilizing humours as experience gauges to level up associated brain regions
- Associating dialogue choices and card decks with specific brain regions
- Using colours to thematically draw these elements together better
- Simplifying tarot card draws and moving Major Arcana to a separate mechanic
We’re excited about these changes and look forward to having the community do another playtest in the coming months. As always, you can catch us over on Discord if you want to chat and stay up on all the latest developments.
https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Until next time, Take Care!
Playtest Patch #1
-Improved visuals in Sewers
-Fixed rotation of reversed tarot cards
-Fixed issue where tarot UI would sometimes not load properly after save/load
Sovereign Syndicate Playtest Live Now!
It's been a couple of months since our last update. Lots of exciting changes, let's get to it.
You may have noticed we've done a Steam page refresh, adding new screenshots and a trailer that shows off more gameplay and the new UI. We're really excited about all the fresh content and feature changes.
To get some additional player feedback and show off all the latest content we've also launched a public playtest in preparation for our full demo release. If you're interested in playing please click on request access and you'll be immediately accepted in to the playtest.
We're looking forward to getting a lot of feedback to help make the game as good as possible so don't be shy about sharing your thoughts, or telling your friends about the playtest. Feedback can be submitted directly in game from the pause menu feedback option.
We've also applied to be in several game festivals this year, so hopefully you'll see us at some of your favourites. We're planning special content and some additional announcements for these, so keep an eye out for us.
As always you can catch us over on Discord if you want to chat and stay up to date on all the latest developments.
https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Until next time, Take Care!
Development and Funding Update
Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. It’s been a few months since our last update but we’re looking forward to a great 2022 for Sovereign Syndicate.
It’s been a busy few months over here at Crimson Herring Studios, putting the final touches on our demo; but I wanted to take a few moments and share some really exciting news.
Our Game has been selected by Canada Media Fund to receive $250,000 in development funding!
Check out the announcement here:
https://cmf-fmc.ca/news/cmf-announces-a-4-4m-investment-through-its-prototyping-program/
We’re really excited about what this means for our community and everyone working on Sovereign Syndicate. Being able to grow our development team and accelerate production means a lot to us. And we’re hopeful this funding will open more doors to additional funding and business opportunities to help make the best possible game for our community.
Thanks again for all your support!
We’ll be releasing our demo to our Discord community soon for some user feedback and QA testing. So head on over there if you haven’t already.
https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx
Thanks Everyone, Take Care.