Project Update: The Calm Before the Storm

Hello dear friends and followers – It’s been a hot minute!

I’ve been much less active on social media for a few months and believe me when I say it’s been necessary. I truly wish I had more time to interact with all you amazing people but there is only so much bandwidth in my head and social media can potentially eat up a substantial amount of it so I need to be very careful.

Such is the life of a solo-developer!

Give us some news!

I’m really biting my lip here as I try not to spoil any of the cool, new stuff I’ve been stuffing into the game! My brand manager made me promise that I was going to be patient.

However, I won’t be spoiling anything if I say the late summer and early fall of 2023 will be really busy for us in terms of marketing. This means we want to save as much of the cool stuff for about another month or two. HNNNGGGGGG!!!!

Instead of showing off the game, here is some corporate news (“Yay!” said no one).

Current State of Production

Internally we have a release date set and we are fully committed to hitting it! 

In other words, we’re currently pumping out content! That means levels, graphical assets, game-objects and writing. It’s hard work but we have an amazing team of freelancers and what we’re making looks fantastic.

We’re also doing an important job of adjusting scope to make sure that what we put out is as high quality as possible. Some side-content that was intended to be in the day-one release will get postponed and released in free updates post launch. 

 

This one is all on me: Making RPGs are insanely complex and it has been very hard to predict the amount of time that goes into making different types of content. Some are much faster than expected, whilst other types (especially branching quests) are much more time-consuming – expected for small teams. 

Nonetheless, we’ve cracked the code at this point and though it has taken trial and error, we will be delivering a retrogasmic RPG experience! 

The Norwegian Film Institute

The Norwegian Film Institute (NFI) is backing the Skald project. This means we get to put more art in the game (focusing especially on environmental art and creature design) as well as hire more help with writing, editing and audio design. 

This is honestly a pretty big deal. NFI is a fantastic partner to have on board that offers substantial long term support to projects and companies without any creative constraints whatsoever (sweet, sweet social-democratic tax policies). What’s more, NFI is VERY enthusiastic about Skald. Turns out they’re pretty big nerds with a lot of love for bespoke, artsy games.

In other words, this bodes well for the future of the franchise and company. 

Studio Name Change

The company has changed its name from “Scape-IT” to “High North Studios”! The old name was a legacy name and it feels really good to get a name that more accurately reflects the company. I wish I had a fancy logo to show as well but this is just another item in a very long “to-do” list.

A Storm is Coming

At this point I’d rather say less and save the sexy stuff for when we ramp up marketing this summer. I truly hope and believe it’s going to be worth the wait.

Thank you so much for your incredible patience so far. Believe me when I say that the future is looking really exciting and pixelated for us retro RPG fans!

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To stay posted, be sure to follow the Skald Twitter and Discord and wishlist on Steam if you haven’t already!

Much love,

 

AL

Ho ho ho!

That special time of year is descending upon us and uncle Andy’s coming in hot with red cheeks and smelling vaguely of Christmas schnaps. He’s also bringing gifts!

Demo Update

By the time you’re reading this, we should have updated the demo online. This is a pretty chonky update that more then doubles the amount of content. It includes a bunch of never before seen areas and narrative content as well as a new recruitable NPC.

It also adds in a lot of new features, like the option to build your own character. We only have a handful of the classes, feats, portraits and backgrounds available yet but this still adds a lot of variety so go nuts!

Needless to say, we’ll be adding a ton more of everything in the final product so no need to worry.

The Quest for the Santa Fury

Adventurers and treasure hunters have been searching for her ever since. None have succeeded. Lately however, a rumor has begun to spread in dockside taverns and brothels: 

The Santa Fury has been located. The rush to recover her is on. Will you partake?

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Yes we hid an entire ship in the latest demo and you get to go on a real treasure hunt FOR REAL TREASURE!

How to enter

• Download the demo and start playing. You’ll soon enough find someone who’ll tell you the legend of the Santa Fury and you’ll be off!
• Once you find the treasure and see the phrase “amorphous shape of eyes, mouths and tentacles” take a screenshot.
• Amble over to the Skald Discord and DM the screenshot to our lovely community person, Fiona (Discord name “Feeona#0001″) . Do NOT post the screenshot in one of the public channels.
• Contest is open until January 9th and once it closes we’ll draw five winners who’ll receive a free key to a game of their choice from the Raw Fury catalogue!

Happy Holidays to you all

I’ll be lurking a bit and seeing how the contest is going but I’ll also try to take a few days off. In other words, I’ll see you all on the other side of the year in what will surely be the year of Skald!

I’m so grateful to have been given the opportunity to pursue my passion and I hope this is a project that will bring joy into people’s lives for years to come. Be kind to each other and please be mindful of those who find the holidays difficult. A kind word or gesture might go a long way.

What remains is to wish you all a very happy holidays and good luck on the hunt for the Santa Fury.

Love you all,

AL

Greetings all! It’s update time!

I try to get one update out per month and this one was slated for November but the weeks are just flying by. You’ll have to forgive me and rest assured the time not spent writing this was well spent elsewhere!

If you’re reading this and somehow don’t know what the game is about yet, check out the Steam page and demo before reading on:

—News—

Rawcember DEMO

We’re doing a major update to the demo around the 20th of December as part of Raw Fury’s Rawcember promotions.

This means a bunch of new demo content including a character creator, a new recruitable NPC, several new map areas and… *drum roll*… a special Rawcember contest:

The Hunt for The Santa Fury

Uncover cryptic clues and mysterious leads as you embark on a quest for the mysterious missing vessel the “Santa Fury”. 

If you uncover the secret at the end of the puzzle, you are eligible to enter into the Skald Rawcember lottery and compete for three Steam gift cards!

We’ll be dropping another devlog update when the demo goes live and you’ll find all the details in there!

—Development—

In preparation for the upcoming Rawcember demo I’ve been doing a lot of work on the character creator. It was noticeably absent in the latest demo builds but it’s coming home for Christmas.

Even though only a few of the character options (classes and backgrounds) are playable at the moment, we’ll be showing them off in the demo to at least give you an impression of what we’re aiming for in the final game!

Classed in Skald are each tied to one of five archetypes which, in turn, are tied to on of the five primary attributes. Behind the curtain, each archetype conforms somewhat to the classic tank / DPS / support trinity

Archetype	Attribute	Associated Class	Role
Warrior	Strength	Officer, Veteran, Armsmaster	A resilient combat workhorse and tank.
Rogue	Agility	Thief, Duelist, Assassin	Uses the backstab ability to deal large amounts of damage. Also brings important adventuring skills to the party (traps and locks).
Magos	Intellect	Battle Magos, Inquisitor, Guild Magos	Ranged damage dealers and crowd controllers.
Wandere	Fortitude	Skald, Ranger, Augur	Varied support class that bring a variation of support spellcasting and important adventuring skills to the party.
Cleric	Presence	Champion, Hierophant, Hospitaller	Healers and buffers.

Note that the archetype role is a rough guideline. The different classes may vary greatly in how they actually play. I’ll say more about the individual classes as we go so stay posted for this in the upcoming devlogs.

Backgrounds are much lighter than classes and help flesh out the character in the context of the world. They will add bonuses to skills and may affect starting condition (such as starting gold and equipment). I also intend to use these to provide world interactivity as certain NPCs may react to your background in dialogue etc.

As for attributes you’ll of course be able to edit these as well in the character creator. I’m doing my best to keep the rules as transparent as possible and visualizing the interrelationship between the attributes helps a bit. Note how updating a primary attribute causes the rest of the sheet to update etc.

Some players might be a bit off-put by the wall of numbers but we’ll try to add options for them as well (maybe an “auto complete” function?).

In general however, I think RPG fans enjoy a bit of rules crunch and I intend to deliver that.

Finally, here is a peek at the character editor. Nothing revolutionary here but I am proud of how modular the character models are. You can pretty much edit any aspect of them and this carries over to any outfit you might equip etc. It’s a small thing, but I think customization is a pretty big deal to a lot of players.

—In Closing—

Be sure to check out the updated demo as it drops December 20th! I’m excited to see it any of you manage to learn the fate of the Santa Fury!

To stay posted, be sure to follow the Skald Twitter and Discord and wishlist on Steam if you haven’t already!

Much love,

 

AL

Hey everyone and happy spooky season! I for one love this time of year and I couldn’t help myself from sharing some love with the Skald community!

—News—

Halloween Update for Demo

There’s now a new area to the demo for you to explore. It even has a creepy little Halloween-encounter in it! And I promise: It’s still very much Skald-themed.

Download and play the new Halloween-demo here:

We’ll be expanding this area quite a bit further in the time to come as we try out and test “new” features (more on this below) so keep checking in.

Mac demo is finally live on Steam

This is criminally overdue, but it’s finally here: The Skald Mac demo! To all my awesome Mac fans, I’m so sorry for the wait and hope this makes it up to you! 

Once again, check out the demo here:

—Development—

Some “New” Features

The new area that we’ve added to the demo will be used as a little sandbox for us to add in all the secondary mechanics that need to be (re)implemented. For now we’ve added in trading and leveling up, and next on the list is the character builder and camping mechanics.

New Biomes

Quite a bit of dev-time the last few weeks have gone into redrawing tilesets for some of the biomes that feature in the new demo content.

Caves are a staple of any self-respecting CRPG:

… and this part of the game features a lot of costal areas so costal cliffs and shore lines are a must as well:

I’ve done some work on making the submersion into water look all nice like but the GIF above has too low FPS to do it justice. You’ll just have to see it yourself in the demo.

Next Weeks

We’re spending the next three weeks fixing bugs and reacting to feedback as well as increasing the size of the current build to be as big (or bigger) than the prologue.

Some of this might be featured in the demo (though we might keep it shorter than the old prologue) and all of the content will of course be available to testers.

Still waiting for your tester’s key? It’s coming once I get Halloween out of the way.

—In Closing—

Keep playing the game and as always feel free to reach out to me at any time. Note however: The last weeks have been insanely busy and I’m behind on all my social media. I 100% indend to catch up though so please just be patient with me.

To stay posted, be sure to follow the Skald Twitter and Discord and wishlist on Steam if you haven’t already!

Love you all,

 

AL

Greetings all!

It’s time for a new update already. I get to nerd out hard in this one, so let’s goooooo!

—News—

Testers awaken!

We’re getting pretty close to sending out a round of builds to our testers to get some more eyes on the upcoming demo!

WHEN: Within the next week!

WHAT: The builds we’ll be sending out will be VERY short (about 5 mins of gameplay). It’s critical that we get a first round of testing in to see how the project works on different setups. More info on what to look for will follow as the test builds get sent out.

WHERE: We are moving testing to Steam (from itch.io). This means you’ll need a Steam account to continue as a tester at this point.

WHO: Steam beta keys will be sent out to crowdfunding backers who serve as our primary testers. We’ll start by sending out keys to a small subset of testers to begin with just to see if this is a good workflow (sending out keys takes time and I don’t want to send out 500 keys before realizing something is wrong).

Steam Subscribers

As I mentioned in my previous post, we have quite a few fans who are subscribing to our Prologue Steam page instead of the main game page. Our intention is to move all of our Steam activity to the main game page and we’ll only be publishing updates there from now on. We’ll still nudge the Prologue followers when we post stuff but be sure to make the swap if you’re following the Prologue instead of the main game.

The same goes for wishlisting: Be sure to wishlist the main game – NOT the Prologue!

—Development Update—

As I’ve talked about before, a big emphasis for this period of development has been to add interactivity to the game world. Allowing players to interact with objects encourages exploration.

I needed a UI feature for interacting with objects that was different from the dialogue UI that I’ve used as a catch all so far. The solution was a pop-up box.

They are super easy to work with and flexible enough to offer anything from an interface for interacting with objects to adding more fourth-wall breaking stuff such as giving prompts (“Are you sure you want to attack this friendly NPC?”

I’ve also used them to help make skill-tests more transparent and interesting:

I personally think the dynamically animated dice are a cool touch. It adds a bit of a tactile feeling and ties the game closer to its tabletop roots. Here we see an early draft of interacting with locked doors:

And don’t worry: I’ll be super careful to not make this take too much space. It’s reserved for when you actively use your characters skills to interact with the world and the reason I like this system is that it makes it more explicit what your skills actually do in the game.

Save or Suck?

In general, skill tests in RPGs can be tricky. I’ve written about the challenges before but in short the issue comes down to the fact that a lot of skill tests in RPGs are “save or suck” meaning the game penalizes the player so badly for failing tests that the player is incentivized to reload every time they fail a test. I’m very cognizant of this problem and I think the best way to solve it is to:

1. Avoid having save or suck tests be random. If a test is save or suck, then the test should be static (not based on a random dice roll).
2. When random rolls are used, failing should be as interesting as succeeding and the player should feel “going with the result” is as viable as save scumming.

Of course the problem cannot be fully avoided but I feel pretty confident that I can strike a balance the allows for the best from both worlds.

Dice Mechanics

Warning: We’re about to go down a pretty nerdy RPG-rabbithole here.

Observant readers will have noticed that the game seems to use 2d6 as a basis for the tests above. This is correct! I may tune this before launch but I feel like emulating tabletop dice mechanics has a few advantages to the old (more abstract system):

1. It is easier to explain the rules for the skill test mechanic: Roll over a difficulty number (typically around 10) with 2d6 + skill
2. It is easier for both me and players to assess what is an easy vs a hard test: A roll of 2d6 + 3 vs 7 is easy. A roll of 2d6 + 3 vs 15 is pretty hard.
3. It is self-explanatory how good you rolled on a test
4. It ties the game more closely to it’s tabletop roots and makes a tabletop conversion MUCH easier.
5. Dice-rolls can be visualized (as in the GIFs above).

2D6 is also an interesting base-dice (compared to, say, a D20) since it has a bell-shaped probability distribution. You are much more likely to get a result close to the average roll (7) versus very high or low rolls:

This makes play feel a bit more predictable. Superior skill will win the day more often and unexpected results are, well, more unexpected. This will make it easier to play around you character’s strengths and weaknesses whilst still retaining a potent element of chance and chaos.

We’ll see how it does. Nothing is written in stone.

—In Closing—

Phew, that got real nerdy real fast. I hope it made sense! As always, I love interacting with the Skald community and please reach out to me on one of the sites below if you have questions or comments!

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To stay posted, be sure to follow the Skald Twitter and Discord and wishlist on Steam if you haven’t already!

Cheers,

 

AL

Hail serfs!

I’m taking a short break from coding to say hi and bring glad tidings! I’ll be back with more development updates soon, but for now, here is some media for you:

We Have a New Teaser!!!!

The “Eyes of the Dragon” are upon us as a new Skald teaser drops!

We promoted Skald at the Guerilla Collective stream this week and took the chance to showcase our newest teaser. Check it out above!

I Went to Stockholm!

Raw Fury and I finally found a window to meet up in Stockholm! I spent almost a week with Raw Fury and my team and we had the very best of times.

I got an amazing welcome and the week passed in a flurry of pre-lunch beer, barbeque, amazing Stockholmian restaurants and literally the most fantastic people in the industry!

There is something to be said for having worked remotely on a daily basis with a group of people and then finally being able to be in the same room together. That’s how magic happens.

Beyond meeting my team, through some true calendar-voodoo, legendary Raw Fury founder / CEO, Jonas Antonsson, and I also managed to finally spend some quality time together. We even recorded some of our high-flying musings on RPGs and all things nerdy that we’ll be posting in the months to come. We go deep so be sure to stay posted.

The plan was to take lots of cool pictures but we had such a full program that to my dismay, when I got home, the above images were pretty much all I had. I will say though, they are more or less representative.

And just to be clear: I didn’t just go to Stockholm to bro out. We also had some incredibly cool and exciting business discussions. There is nothing I can talk about yet but let me just reiterate how incredibly excited I am to have signed with such an amazing partner!

Learn how to Pitch a Game

Did I tell you we spoke to Raw Fury scout Johan Toresson? We did and we went deep on how you should go about pitching your game to a publisher. Johan is THE man for finding cool new games so be sure to get his insights!

 

Nerd out on Reddit

This one is very technical, but I had a question about how the “crawling” fog of war system works in Skald.

I wrote up a very high level concept of it and posted it on our Skald sub-reddit. Check it out and keep in mind that the sub-reddit exists and is a very good platform for asking about stuff like this. I do monitor it and I would love to see more activity there.

Have a Spectacular week!

There is so much cool stuff going on I just had to dump some of it out so there you go! There’s lots more coming so just be sure to keep checking out my Twitter and Discord and by the Golden Dead, wishlist on Steam if you haven’t already!

Cheers,

 

AL

I try to keep my game and community a safe-space and politics free. Sometimes however, evil finds you no matter what.

Putin has ordered his forces to commence a war of aggression and full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This hits close to home for the Skald community:

Skald composer and vital community member Surt_R is Ukrainian and lives in a Ukrainian city currently under attack by Russian forces. I spoke to him this morning. Surt_R is a positive guy but needless to say the situation is chaotic and it’s hard to know how the next days will play out.

Surt_R has been with me since the start. He’s an amazing creative and a fantastic guy so I’m asking you all, as the head of our community: come together and support Surt_R.

Supporting Surt_R

Thankfully, supporting him is easy. Surt_R has a large Steam cataloge of his wonderfully quirky games and amazing music!

Disclaimer: Surt_R also made the Skald Demo soundtrack which is available for sale on Steam. Though it is on sale at the Skald site, Surt_R receives 100% of the revenue for that product.

Again: I’m NOT receiving any money for this soundtrack – it ALL GOES TO SURT_R!

I’ll try to  stay in touch with him and if there is anything the Skald community can do for him, we’ll do it!

Supporting Ukraine

I’m going to keep this short and refer you to this excellent article.

Stand with Ukraine. Stand against tyrants.

 

Anders Lauridsen

Happy new year!

Wait, what? Is it February already? All I can say is time flies when you’re having fun. This update is a bit overdue but as always, if I’m a bit tardy in posting on the devlog it’s because I’m making our dream game.

The new year has been a torrent of making cool plans, have Covid wreck it all and instead write awesome code!

Our big carrot of Q1 2022 was that Raw Fury and I were going to GDC in San Francisco to promote Skald. We always knew it was a risky prospect and as Omicron ramped up over Christmas we reconsidered and canceled the trip. And let me tell you: I’m almost glad we did!

It’s given me time to dig deep on a few areas that I always wanted to improve in the game. I’ll try to summarize some of the latest developments:

The GUI System

I’ve rewritten the GUI system. Yes, pretty much all of it. It was pretty much one of the last components of the game where I used Unity’s built in system but it was a bit of a mess. I’m sure someone who’s better at Unity could pull it off, but I really just want Unity to compile my game and leave me alone beyond that.

Thankfully, the Skald engine is really good at drawing pixels on screen with perfect precision and so I was able to use my engine to do stuff like draw fonts, UI-elements and handle transitions and mouse interactions.

One of the first big advantages is that I can now have the game scale perfectly to the screen so it gets pixel perfect resolution.

If you zoomed in on the game in full-screen mode, it used looked like the left image. Now everything scales perfectly and it all looks like the right image. Crisp enough to make your eyes bleed.

For a pixel-purist like me, another advantage of the new system is that we can swap Unity’s vectorized fonts for home-made “real” pixel fonts.

I also added the ability to insert big illuminated first letters at the start of the script. I need to polish the graphic design a little bit but all in all I think it’s going to look amazing.

But there’s more: The new system allows for highlighting of keywords in the text that you can mouse over to get helpful info. Naturally this will also be possible on menus like the character sheets where you can mouse over attributes to get a description or on the map where mousing over objects will allow you to get info in pop-up boxes.

Finally, note how the menu above slides on and off the screen for a bit of a smoother transition.

With all the UI stuff, the technical stuff is now done but there’s still work to be done to really take advantage of its full potential. Stay posted for more updates!

The Animation System

The moment I signed with Raw Fury, one of the first features I knew I wanted to expand upon a bit was the animation system.

Building an animation system that cycles through frames of animation is easy enough. The trouble is scaling it. There are basically three types of models in Skald:

• Simple Models: These are models like the rats in the demo. They have few animation frames and very few customization options. This works because for the most part, you won’t see them doing anything outside of combat so all you need is a few idle frames and some combat frames.
• Custom Models: These models have more complex animations so we can have it perform more complex actions. A great example of that is the big monster below. These are very cool and expressive but costly to make since each frame needs to be hand drawn. The upside is that there isn’t a ton of them in the game.
• Humanoid models: This is the tricky part and where the Skald engine shines. The humanoid models in Skald are “paper-dolls”. That means you can swap costumes, items, skin-color, hair etc and have it show up on the model. They also need dozens of animation frames (and perhaps hundreds by the end). This means hundreds of thousands of different frames to account for all possible permutations of costumes and animations.

Fear not! The Skald engine solves this by doing humanoid animation in a semi-procedural way. Basically each  model consists of a dozen components drawn using a kind of animation skeleton. Legs, torsos, arms, heads, hair, items etc are drawn in relation to each other and colored according to specifications.  This means that for each new behavior we want to animate, we’ll only ever have to add a very few frames.

As an example, look at the image above again. The character falling to his knees is not a unique animation. Any of the characters on-screen would perform the same animation if given the command.

The awesome part is that adding that particular animation strip to ALL HUMANOID MODELS in the game took only about 20 minutes.

Anyways, you’ll be seeing a lot more of this system as we go. Here is an example of me experimenting with adding some animation frames to the player’s attack animation:

Trust me; the system works – it’s just that I’m not a very good animator 🙂

The Level Editor

This one is the Golden Goose for me. My level editor has been a pretty big bottleneck so far. I just couldn’t get it right and I lacked a clear vision for what a great tool would even look like for Skald. Then I saw the amazing “Tiled” editor and I was saved.

“Tiled” had a simple suit of features that were all I had ever asked for and I knew I needed something like that for Skald. I had two options:

1) adopt “Tiled” (it’s free) and use it for Skald or 2) try to write my own version of it? Well, I just told you I rewrote my whole GUI system to get nicer fonts so I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear I made my own in-house version of Tiled.

This may seem excessive, but a good level editor is critical and this way I get one that is seamlessly integrated with my other tools. I also don’t have to depend on external software. Most importantly though: All the Skald tools will now be collected in a single application so the Skald community can eventually get to mod and create their own application using the exact same tools I used to make this game.

I still have some development to do on the editor before it’s fully functional but as soon as it is, I’ll be doing some streaming of me making levels in style!

Next Steps

So in broad terms, the next big step is doing a major overhaul of the demo to be released in spring / summer. This is primarily to show off and test the new features and it’s also a hugely important tool to get Skald on the radar of press and content creators.

To that end, we’re also going to redo the Steam pages, the website and make a new trailer.

We will be doing more Beta testing before then as well but I’m waiting till things are a bit more stable so I don’t get swamped in reports of issues that are already known. Testers are a limited resource and we need to save it until it really counts.

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That’s what I had time for today! I hope it was somewhat informative. To stay posted, follow us on Twitter and join our Discord!

Cheers,

AL