SKALD: Against the Black Priory is coming to Mac! Spread the word to the Mac-based CRPG community and have them check out the Kickstarter!
Due to the game engine SKALD is built in I always intended for this, BUT I simply didn’t have time to do my technical due diligence before launching. Now I have, and SKALD is going to be coming to Mac!
This means that all backers will get a choice in the backer survey, choosing between a Windows and a Mac build.
There is one caveat: The ALPHA demo and BETA version will only be available on Windows for now.
The adventure extends beyond the isle of Idra, into the icy hellscape that is the northern polar regions. Its hostile climate, cyclopean ruins and eldritch horrors will test your mettle as you sail into the eternal night of the high north!
Wouldn’t this be cool to explore? Illustration art by Ivan Laliashvili
The high north will significantly extend the game’s overworld size and will add hours of gameplay intended for higher level characters. I love to dip into source-material like HP Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”, John Carpenter’s “The Thing”, or the brilliant TV-drama “The Terror“. The motif of polar expeditions finding impossibly old things in the ice and going mad has always appealed to me (must be a Norwegian thing).I really want to make this so let’s make sure we reach that 90.000 NOK stretch-goal!
Even with SKALD launching on Kickstarter June 3rd, the game is far from finished. However, it has always been important to me that I have a playable ALPHA build to serve as a demo by the time the Kickstarter finishes.
This is both to serve as a proof-of-concept and also to dip my toes into getting tester feedback.
Even though crunching to finish the demo is a lot of work it’s still a ton of fun. One of the main reasons is my amazing group of freelancers!
Marco’s speed paint for the SKALD splash screen.
These guys have truly gone above and beyond for the SKALD project and it’s time to give them a shout-out!
MementoMoree has been creating art since his late teenage years. Proficient in most types of art, from pencil & paper to highly detailed 4k textures, he’s found solace and pleasure in the retro pixel art!
Marco Pedrana is a digital and traditional artist (illustration, storyboards, comic art, paintings, installations, pixel art), focusing on narrative art, regardless the media or the scope. He works in advertising and game design (Aeon of Sands: story, texts, graphics, audio, VCS testing). He loves D&D, his cat Agony, Spring, and the sounds coming from the meadow outside his window.
Edwin Montgomery is a composer and sound designer for games, films and performance. A long-time RPG obsessive, he wrote the soundtrack for inXile’s remastered release of “Wasteland” and is currently working on the 30th Anniversary version. He has created music and sounds for a variety of fantasy game worlds, including Warhammer 40,000, Game of Thrones and Neverwinter. Edwin did the sound design for the SKALD demo.
MementoMoree’s “Rat Queen”. Hope to animate certain central characters in the final game (think Wasteland 1 or Bard’s Tale)
Please take the time to follow these guys on Twitter and be sure to check out their other projects and portfolios! Also be sure to support SKALD on Kickstarter so I can keep paying them to do awesome work!
SKALD: Against the Black Priory is an upcoming classic turn-based RPG. It’s set in a dark and gritty fantasy universe, full of tragic heroes, violent deaths and eldritch horror.
After a great run on Kickstarter, I’m now super happy to announce:
The game is currently in beta-development and it’s coming to Early Accessfall 2020. It will release for Windows and Mac first and then handheld devices down the line.
You can also join our Discord server. This is really where the SKALD community lives and we’re always happy to get more members. Also: Discord members occasionally get to test development builds.
Check out that lovely CRT filter!
Finally, wishlisting SKALD on GOG.com might earn us a spot in their web-store and that would rock! In other words: Wishlist SKALD on GOG.com now!
Do you want to follow the SKALD project? Subscribe to our newsletter today!
The Kickstarter goes live on June 3rd and crunch is upon me! One of the coolest aspects of running a Kickstarter campaign is designing awesome rewards for passionate fans!
SKALD: Against the Black Priory will feature a range of rewards from the game itself, the sound-track, a printed hand-drawn map, manuals and perhaps even a collectible big-box edition!
The Anatomy of Rewards
My strategy for the Kickstarter is simple: Run a low risk – low rewards campaign with a low target number and an emphasis on digital rewards. There’s a couple of good reasons for this:
First of all, my primary motivation for running a Kickstarter is to put SKALD: Against the Black Priory in your hands as soon as possible whilst making it the best game it can be. For a one-man team, even whilst working with freelancers, this means prioritizing coding, writing and designing the game itself.
Second, I’m based in Norway. Most of my backers are not. Neither are most of the production facilities for physical rewards. Shipping costs and logistics add up.
Digital Rewards
One of the (many) advantages of Kickstarting a video-game is that the final product tends to be digital! This allows for easy distribution which in turn cuts down on logistics, cost and risk! I like this.
Samples from the lower “digital rewards” tiers. 1 Dollar = 8.7 NOK.
Shown above are three of the lower reward tiers (1 Dollar = 8.7 NOK). Up to 300 NOK (approx. $35) the rewards are all digital and include the game itself, a demo (due in July 2019), access to the BETA version, sound track and digital copies of the manual, campaign guide and map.
The manual and campaign guide will outline the SKALD system as well as describing Idra and it’s surroundings and the most prominent characters, items and monsters. All in a classic old-school RPG style!
Concept for the manual cover-art!
Whilst serving as a hint book for SKALD: Against the Black Priory, the campaign guide will also contain enough information to allow you to drop the setting into a tabletop RPG and create your own adventures in the SKALD universe!
A page from the Monster Manual 2 for 1. edition AD&D . I want this!
As for the map, it will be hand-drawn and colored and available either as a digital file, a paper print or an exclusive cloth map depending on the reward tier.
Physical Rewards
There’s no doubt about it: Backers LOVE feelies! The printed manuals, cloth maps and trinkets that came in gorgeous boxes are a big part of the experience for a lot of players!
The feelies from Ultima IV.
At higher reward tiers (Approx. $55 and up) the Kickstarter will feature printed versions of the manual, campaign guide and map (paper and cloth prints). If all goes according to plan, I’ll even throw in an exclusive collectible “big-box” edition with extra feelies for hard-core backers.
That’s it for now (it’s back to work for me). Be sure to subscribe to this blog and follow on Twitter to stay posted!
With the Kickstarter in June fast approaching it’s time for another update! As always I wish I had more time to spend on this devlog. Time however, is currently my most precious asset on this project. What time I have is still being put into actual development and I think that’s a good idea.
The animation-system really makes the world pop!
So far everything is on track for Kickstarter in June. There is still a lot of work to be done to get the campaign ready but work is progressing at a steady pace.
During Easter-crunch I spent a lot of time repaying technical debt as I plugged memory leaks and optimized the draw pipeline. The payoff is that the game now consistently runs at 60 FPS+ and has a much smaller memory footprint with no leakage. Oh, and I also added animation for characters and the environment!
Another big reason I keep making steady progress is that I’ve had the opportunity to work with some more amazing freelance artists for music and some of the graphics. The result is some pretty cool assets I can’t wait to feature in the game:
It’s incredibly fun and rewarding to work with people that go the extra mile to help realize your vision.
“Your debt is due” A trio of bandits by @MementoMoree
Finally I really want to shout out the “Nox Archaist” project by 6502 Workshop. This little gem of an indie-game is currently on Kickstarter where it has had amazing success so far! As a modern 8-bit game for the Apple 2, this game is a love-letter to all the games that inspired SKALD!
I can’t wait to sink my teeth into this!
The project looks really solid with a large chunk of the game being complete already. More importantly, Mark and the other members of 6502 Workshop seem like great people who deserves all the support the retro-gaming family has to offer.
I support and endorse “Nox Archaist” 100% and so should you!
That’s it for now! Be sure to follow this blog and look me up at twitter if you want to keep posted!
Beware, beware the horrid sleep, That bring you dreams of ebb and flow, The churning seas and dreadful deep, And waves that lay the mountains low.
But fear the mother most of all! Awake before you hear her bell! A thousand young will hear her call, And that was how the giants fell.
(Children’s rhyme from Idra)
A splash screen by Marco Pedrana (Aeon of Sands)
Easter is fast approaching. For me this means 10 days of crunching to make “SKALD: Against the Black Priory” ready for Kickstarter! First and foremost this time will be spent preparing a short, playable “proof-of-concept” demo.
In general, I would say spending time making a demo is not a good use of resources. However, at the time there appears to be a slight crisis of confidence towards Kickstarting projects and a demo might go some way towards showing backers that SKALD is legit.
SKALD is a passion project and I love working on it. For me, publishing a less that awesome product is out of the question. At the same time, NOT publishing is also not an option! This means that I need to be highly disciplined in avoiding feature- and scope creep. Both in the game itself and in the Kickstarter campaign.
The latest iteration of the GUI. With a slight “retro” filter applied.
My primary goal is to have the Kickstarter make me break even with expenses and allow me to commission a handful of freelancers for a couple of tasks (music comes to mind).
A big upside with developing an RPG is that it’s pretty easy to scale the project up if I get more funding than expected: More professional art, more music, larger dungeons, more dialog and so forth.
For rewards I’m tending towards caution. I would love to use feelies for rewards: Maps, booklets, dice – you name it! However this would scale the complexity, and thus the risk, exponentially. SKALD is pretty much a one-man project and any task that takes me away from actually writing code delays the release of the game.
Most likely, the rewards will include access to the demo, the finished game and beta access, as well as in-game rewards (a thank you note, your portrait in the game etc). I’m currently setting up a discord server for backers.
SKALD will release for windows on Steam first. Other platforms will follow in short order.
SKALD lives and dies by the love and support of it’s fans! If you want to help out the two most important things you can do are to subscribe to this blog and follow SKALD on twitter! Don’t be afraid to reach out for questions or comments – I love talking about my project 🙂
You awaken to the sound of seagulls. Their crying reminds you of your childhood. Have you gone to your ancestors?
The last thing you remember is chaos and the sea swallowing your vessel. Freezing water and then darkness. How could you possibly have survived?
Legs shaking, you stand up and survey the shores upon which you have landed. There is no mistaking it: Idra. By some miracle, the Emperor has delivered you to this cold, forsaken island. Now, you must find the strength to do his work!
A sickness has taken hold here: Carroleth. Carroleth the heretic! Master of the Black Priory. That foul order of enlightened men, which has strayed so far from orthodoxy. It is to them that you must deliver the Emperors justice – by steel and by fire!
You shudder in the cold breeze.
It feels as though the very land sets itself against you. You will find few allies on Idra and even less hope. Pray your sanity holds…
Hi everbody! It’s time for another update on the SKALD engine and the upcoming title: “Against the Black Priory” (AtBP)!
AtBP sees you in the role of an imperial agent dispatched to the island of Idra to uproot a mystical religious order, turned apocalyptic cult. The expedition is off to a disastrous start however, and surviving Idra will take all your wits and skill.
For AtBP I have chosen to go with a strong
retro look and feel. The game draws heavily on inspiration from classic “Golden
Age” RPGs like the early Ultima games, the Gold Box Series and the Magic Candle
series. In other words: Games we love!
The game will (hopefully) feature a good mix of each of the four basic RPG pillars:
Explore the enviroments and plot – overland, underground and on the high seas!
Interact via dialogue and “choose-your-own-adventure” style sequences
Fight using a menu-based, fast-paced, tactical combat system.
Develop your party of up to 6 characters.
Visually, I have chosen to work with 16 colors on AtBP. To get the proper retro-feel, I went with the classic C64 color palette:
The basic tile size is 16 x 16 and, for the desktop version, the game runs at 640 x 480 resolution. Note that the SKALD engine is built in Unity3D and is flexible enough to handle any number of graphical settings. However, working within some self-imposed constraints has really helped focus the design of AtBP.
Thematically, the SKALD universe is dark, grounded and unforgiving and I really want AtBP to dip its toes into the cold and dark waters of eldritch horror. I try to stay clear of binary good/bad characters and enjoy writing difficult choices that have real (often painful) consequences.
The Current State
At the time of writing, the SKALD game-engine (and thus AtBP) is 90% feature-complete. There are a couple of important systems that still need implementing as well as a bunch a smaller “nice-to-have” systems I would like to have down the line (but that can wait for now).
The big task ahead however, is adding content. This means designing, writing and drawing stuff. The flexibility of the SKALD engine and its tools makes adding new content a breeze. However, actually creating stuff will take time nonetheless. Fortunately, this is also a lot of fun and it will allow me to start engaging more and more with the community as the focus shifts more from the technical development to actually crafting a roleplaying experience.
The SKALD engine can publish to any platform that Unity supports. AtBP will release first on Steam. Mobile will follow.
The Road Ahead
It’s no secret that SKALD and AtBP is a one-man project that, whilst immensely enjoyable, is taking up a lot of my spare time. Now there are also expenses on the horizon in the form of software licenses, new hardware and, potentially, freelance content-creators (for some of the art and music). This means that I need to find funding somewhere.
After a lot of consideration, it’s starting to look like Kickstarter might be a good way to getting some funding whilst building a stronger community around the game. If everything goes according to plan, May 2019 might be a good time for a Kickstarter campaing (but more on that down the line).
For now, if you want to support SKALD: “Against the Black Priory” the two most important things you can do are to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on twitter! Don’t be afraid to reach out for questions or comments!
