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

Snowflakes turn to steam as they land on the scarred flesh. The blood of the slain drips from their rough beard. They howl as they raise their broken blade to the moons.   

Noble savage indeed – Thank the Golden they are on our side.

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It’s official! Swedish publisher RAW FURY and I have formed an adventuring party and our quest journal is now crystal clear: 

“Quest Begun: Make ‘Skald: Against the Black Priory’ amazing!”

Raw Fury is a level 12, chaotic good barbarian: Illiterate yet strong as a bull, their heart burns white-hot with passion for awesome games. Founded in 2015, they’re based in Stockholm and on a quest to serve as a publisher for “boutique and indie games”. A strong emphasis on ethics, transparency and partnership-based developer relations is their guiding star.

 

Raw Fury has published more than 25 titles to date with plenty more coming up. Check out their other games here!

Meet the “Fists of Fury”

Part of Raw Fury’s secret sauce is that they are a “hands-on” publisher and offer a whole suite of incredibly useful services to projects they sign. This means Skald has it’s very own dedicated team of talented and passionate RPG-fans all working with me to make Skald the CRPG of our dreams! Everyone, say “hi” to the “Fists of Fury” (yes that’s their actual team-name and not something I just made up):

Daniel Jonsson (@wdjonsson) is a reasonably boring Game Producer at Raw Fury. He holds Mutant Chronicles as the best RPG of all times, and he still reminisces about the Paul Bonner artworks. Outside of work he is a recreational chess player (1600+ ELO on chess.com), recreational runner and recreational procrastinator. 

Jacob Kroon is a reasonably creative Sales and Analytics person at Raw Fury. He has a lifelong love story with RPG’s, claiming Realms, Suikoden and Baldur’s Gate among his favorites. The gentleman is partial to the wizard class and is also rumored to be playing the mythical saxophone and pickling a decent cucumber.    

Susie McBeth is one part mage and all parts brand manager. When not diving deep into fantasy and sci-fi books, she enjoys living out the life of a decadent Toreador in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and going deep in RPGs like Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. She also drinks way too much tea and has a soft spot for killing zombies. 

Rasmus Liljenberg is a fairly strict Quality Producer at Raw Fury. Testing, coordinating and gathering data. He uses all the tools to make sure the developer’s vision of the game is not lost during production. When not analyzing games he also plays them for fun. Although he doesn’t have a specific favorite RPG, you can see him playing anything from tabletop DnD to Morrowind and The Witcher series. It has been rumored that you might find him hunched over midi keyboards making weird music, blips n blops and orchestral pieces. 

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The team can now be found lurking in the Skald Discord as well. Look for the “Raw Fury” tag and be sure to make them feel welcome. 

All in all I couldn’t be happier about how things are turning out for me and our game. 2022 will surely be the Year of the Skald and I can’t wait till we kick off the new year!

Keep following this devlog, my twitter and the Skald Discord to stay posted on our awesome quest to bring you more retro-RPG awesomeness! 

 

Cheers,

 

AL

Greetings all!

One week till we’re dropping the curtain on who our newest, amazing party-member is! I’m psyched to be able to talk  openly about it and show off some of the fantastic stuff we’re working on! Believe me when I say, 2022 will be the year of Skald!

Just make sure you watch this blog and my Twitter account on December 15th!

But before then, and by popular demand, here is the epic conclusion to the three-piece Skald short-story “The Silve Dancer”!

If you haven’t yet, I strongly recommend you read Part 1  and Part 2 before you dig into the conclusion of the HISTORIAN’s ill-fated dealings with the Court of Auspice.

Enjoy!

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The Silver-Dancer

Part 3

In the darkness of the resonance-chamber a change had come over the group of blind wretches that sat by the sarcophagus as soon as the magos had gone under. Their moaning had ceased and they were now whispering instead. At first, it sounded like nonsense to the HISTORIAN, but the strange whispers would occasionally converge and overlap on certain words: 

“I see it… Shimmering… Looming ing ing…”

The wretches had once been men and women with an aptitude for auspices and, though their minds were gone, no doubt a certain sensitivity persisted: Now they were channeling their master’s voice.  

“Hard hard hard to see, see… Dangerous to get closer oser oser…“

“You’ll get me what I came for, soothsayer!” the HISTORIAN boomed as he mounted the first step leading up the dais. The wretches moaned as they covered their ears.

“If you don’t, by the Golden Dead, I’ll drown you myself!” 

—

“…drown you myself!” rang out around the magos. The words sounded as if carried by water. He hesitated a moment but there was no way around it. He needed to finish what he had started or he would never be free of his tormentor. With the ease and grace of a sparrow, he weaved through the groping tendrils of sickly light as he scanned for a color-pool: The tell-tale discoloration where the silver-scape and flesh-world almost touched. Like peeking through a lense of smoky glass, the flesh-world could be viewed through a color pool by someone with the proper training. The members of the Court of Auspice had perfected this art millennia ago. 

There! He spotted the color-pool close to the luminous center of the glow. But there had been something else as well hadn’t there? The shadow in the corner of his eye? No. He had to focus. Even for him this would be a difficult projection, for the Reticular turbulence was rising and he still wanted to avoid touching the actual glow itself. 

It took much more effort than he had anticipated but he made it. Here, so close to the source of the glow, it’s presence was palpable! Like a flesh-body orbiting a great sun. Whatever was causing this in the flesh-world had a power like nothing he had experienced before. 

—

“Commencing inspection!” 

Even though it was modulated through the wretch-chorus, the voice sounded strained and oddly mechanical.

“Islands, islands… Mountainous. Raging seas… The Outer Isles, isles, isles!” 

The HISTORIAN’s breath quickened. The decrepit old fools had their use after all!

“Think I see the source ource ource…”

A moment passed as the wretch-choirs babbling rose excitedly without offering any coherent words. Then: 

“There is a structure ucture ucture! Black. Imperial make. First age I think ink ink.”

The babbling intensified.

“Wait… ait ait! I’m not alone lone lone!”

The last words came through with a sense of urgency. Then a loud bang as the great doors to the resonance chamber were flung open! The HISTORIAN whirled to face who he immediately recognized as the High Master of the Court of Auspice. 

The ancient magos had long lost any natural use of his limbs and his shrivelled corpse of a body was suspended in a fluid-filled container that glowed internally with a sickly light. A dozen servants trailed behind, dragging grotesque cords and tubing that hung after the container like spilled viscera. Two rows of six silver-armored knights flanked the procession with their great two-handed swords. Magi-killers. The HISTORIAN shifted his stance imperceptibly and stilled his breath as the eyes of the ancient husk fixed on him through the glass container.

The tramp of the knight’s heavy boots died down, and an eerie silence filled the chamber. Even the wretch-choir produced only the faintest whimpering. The HISTORIAN moved backwards up the stairs of the dais another step. Under normal circumstances, the Master of Auspice would be mad to attempt to lay hands on him. Then again, he had come of his own free will to the heart of the spider’s web.

Without warning, the voice of the High Master boomed through the chamber. Though the blood-red eyes bored into the HISTORIAN, no movement of the corpse-like figure indicated that the voice was produced by any normal vocal organ. Instead it sounded metallic and hard and seemed to come from all around at once:“You have no right! The magi of this Court are mine and mine alone to command!”  

The HISTORIAN smiled wryly:

“That may be, but you on the other hand is for the Princeps’ to command. Are you not?”

“INSOLENT!” the voice boomed again. “The Court of Shadow may hold itself above the other courts but you would be wise to know your place nonetheless! We see you. For all your subterfuge, we have always seen you. The Helix projects? The polar expeditions? The black camps?” 

The last words dripped like poison. The HISTORIAN had underestimated the Court of Auspice. They knew more than they should. More than even their scrying should allow. How? Sprawling analysis-webs spread out before the HISTORIAN’s inner eye as the full ramifications began to reveal themselves.

The Master of Auspice delighted in the fact that he had managed to shake the envoy of the Shadow Court. They had overstepped and now he would pay the price. A metallic laugh filled the room and almost drowned out the rising screams of the wretch-choir!

Abruptly, one of the knights took a half step backwards as he raised his greatsword. The HISTORIAN was ready and drew in reticular energy so fast it felt like he was going to red-out. Luminous particles materialized around him and currents arced from his fingertips as he rose ever so slightly into the air. The other knights fanned out in front of their Master and somewhere inside a helmet, a man cried in terror. A reflection on the face of the glass coffin was all the warning the HISTORIAN needed.

He spun, mid air, as he drew in more energy still. Behind him, on the dais, the fluid in the sarcophagus churned and spilled as something massive shifted. Rending space itself, something was forcing itself into being. As a great horrible mass of half-flesh rose, a myriad of eyes formed and died in an instance. All were grotesque simulacra of the eyes of the man that had gone into that sarcophagus mere minutes before. With an otherworldly cry, the massive abomination launched off the dais in a mass of churning tentacles and fangs. Men screamed and the Master of Auspices’ eyes widened in terror. Where the HISTORIAN had stood mere moments before, nothing remained but a haze of glowing particles.

The doors of the resonance-chamber slammed shut with a loud bang leaving those inside to their horrific fate.

—

The HISTORIAN panted as he wiped the blood from his nose. Though the cost had been great, the shadow-shift had saved his life. It had borne him no longer than just outside the doors of the chamber, but that was all he needed. In a final effort that nearly caused him to collapse, he had welded the doors together with his bare hands. He did not know how long it would hold, but he could not linger: He was already nearly spent and the hour was much, much later than he had hoped.

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That’s all for now – see you on the 15th!

For everything else, follow us on Twitter and join our Discord!

Stay warm!

Cheers,

AL