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[Sunburned Games]

You like whales?

I can offer you some seagulls instead, omnipresent beings along The Great Whale Road. I am pretty sure they were always more numerous than whales, even before industrial whaling. I found those buried in the second round of animation tests, so this has to be considered a sketch.



Hamingja,
Joachim @ Sunburned Games
 

[grandslam]

I didn't get completely interested in this until I found out it has axes

[Sunburned Games]

I didn't get completely interested in this until I found out it has axes

Did we mention swords before?



It was between axes or trade. There will be trade too, obviously. But axes has definitely more swagger.

Best.
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

 

[Jasmine]

Haha, brevity aside, I am glad that you at least took time to dance around my gameplay answer. ;

Yeah, I really loved Austin Wintory's organic approach to the Banner Saga soundtrack. Rather than simply try and go 'epic', he wanted to (this is based on how the soundtrack made me feel, mind you) base it on authenticity. Or as close as he could possibly get. I loved it, regardless. Can't wait to see what gorgeous local talent you scoop up!

Also -- these female characters look AHMAZING! The animations..

I'll stop fan-girling over the art now.

[Sunburned Games]

Haha, brevity aside, I am glad that you at least took time to dance around my gameplay answer. ;

Yeah, I really loved Austin Wintory's organic approach to the Banner Saga soundtrack. Rather than simply try and go 'epic', he wanted to (this is based on how the soundtrack made me feel, mind you) base it on authenticity. Or as close as he could possibly get. I loved it, regardless. Can't wait to see what gorgeous local talent you scoop up!

Also -- these female characters look AHMAZING! The animations..

I'll stop fan-girling over the art now.

Thanks, thanks, thanks!

Our man for animations will be on holiday for two weeks (not sure who approved that), so the oceanic pigeons were a stopgap. We will be focusing on combat game design during this period, as we have an aspiring game designer starting on Tuesday, who will be looking after this area.

We have been listening to the Banner Saga soundtrack again. I agree that it works very well for the game, taking the story and everything into account. A tiny bit too triste for me, so I had to balance it by listening to the soundtrack of Pixel Piracy. Smurfy pirate voices and drinking songs versus Nordic folk and serious orchestration.

We got the first music sample today, and I have to say that it is good. But there are more to come, so we won't rush any decisions.

Have a good weekend!
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[Sunburned Games]

Under the Hood 3: Narrative & Exploration

Much of the inspiration for our game comes from stories - sagas, historical accounts and last but not least historical fiction. Being a fan of series like The Warrior Chronicles and The Long War, stories were an important design influence from the start.

Instead of going with an overarching main story, we decided to focus on the stories of single characters instead. The aim is to give all champion level characters a background story, desires, fears, and a quest or two. Some of these quests will be adventures, others mainly dialogue-based and sometimes we might even mix in a classic go-there-fetch-this quest.

At the start of a singleplayer game the player selects their party leader from a small selection. The choices will be culture specific and we are considering to combine this with a background story selection step, to define the starting setup for each game. So players will be able to influence if they were born into a family of farmers, slaves or nobles. Once the player has chosen they are presented with a ship and their first followers.

Managing these followers and recruiting new ones is a core objective in The Great Whale Road. Not all characters will be compatible, and the leader's renown will decide if personal differences are a cause for witty banter or gory bloodshed. Imagine the family drama at Christmas when granny knows how to use a spear and your uncle is a psychopathic axe-murderer.

Recruitment, crew management and quests will integrate with the exploration gameplay. When we started to look at the historical setting and the world map, we realized that we would have to find a compromise between procedural generation and manual design. In general, a historical map limits the options and you cannot go wild adding rivers and land masses procedurally. On the other hand the coastline along the North Sea changed quite a bit since the seventh century, which provides some flexibility.

We will be placing historical (towns, trading hubs) and fictional (beach markets, small hamlets) locations along the map. They might not always be at the exact historical location, but they won't be too far off either. The player will navigate the coast, hearing rumours about places, heroes and villains further afield.

In the current version of the design, the player always has a home settlement to return to and supporting the settlement is essential. But we can envisage a mode where the player is a refugee, migrant or exile looking for a new home, and finding one would be the main objective. After all, historically this was a relative short time after the migration period. And yes, occasionally we watch the news too.

Hamingja!
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

PS: We will be visiting IndieCade (we are very excited indeed), and I will remind everyone a few more times over the coming weeks. If you want to chat about the The Great Whale Road, and get a sneak preview of our demo let me know.

--------------------
First published on: http://www.the-great-whale-road.com/blog/

[Sunburned Games]

A Wee Progress Update

We are continuing to focus on the multiplayer combat demo for our planned Kickstarter and Greenlight campaigns, starting at around Thanksgiving. As we will be travelling to IndieCade, we were rescheduling a bit to have a version of the demo ready by the 20th of October.
 
The new combat screen is progressing well, and looking at our 'world domination plan' on the whiteboard next to me, it will be ready for testing by the end of September. We have then around six weeks to add additional functionality from the combat backlog. As you can see in the selection and movement test below the screen is now isometric, which gives us more room on the screen overall. The new UI has the same style as before, but we made it more minimalistic. We should have some pictures and screenshots ready by the end of next week. Maybe the biggest decision in the background was to switch fully to 2D.  

We are pleased to announce that an aspiring game designer has joined our team this week. Lance (who is Spanglish in case you wonder) will look after the combat gameplay. Axel, our technical director and our man with a game design degree, is ecstatic. He was seen happily staring at Visual Studio last night.

From October onward we will take on a 2D art intern from a university in town to work with our artists on more characters and equipment. And I will be looking for a writing consultant/contractor. I am counting heads as I type these words, and now we have four people working full time and three people working part time on The Great Whale Road (which includes me as I am spending more and more time on marketing).

Another minor milestone was reaching out to our pre-selection of composers, and we have three music samples to choose from now. More about that, once we have made a decision. We started looking for a narrator for the trailer and potentially in game. Let's put it that way - the quote I got back from the agent of one guy we like left me hyperventilating for a while. And I wasn't going for Ray Winstone!

Hamingja!
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[Sunburned Games]

Feelings!



This might be the first character concept we did in the final art style. We really need to write a story for him.

Hamingja!
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[Sunburned Games]

Who Rows Faster - Artists or Developers?

It has been a week since the last progress update, I think. I can't really say which half of Sunburned Games is in the lead. Development was getting bogged down with multiplayer a wee bit, but progress has been made. I might work with one of our developers to write a proper tech update for next week, if someone is keen to read about this kind of things.

On the art side we completed the redesign of the UI and icons, which are now all digitally hand-drawn and have a nice archaic feel to them. But have a look for yourself:

(For a slightly larger image: http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-great-whale-road/images/new-ui-and-icons-screenshot)

Any feedback on colours is welcome. We are quite happy with the compromise of fitting in and standing out, but that might just be us. Also we did not check if they will work for colour-blind players, and I would like them to.

We will show the demo to whoever asks while we are at IndieCade, but we won't be making it publicly available until we are kicking off our Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight campaigns in November.

Have a great weekend,
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[Alec S.]

This is looking great!  I like the way you decided to show the character art popping out of the hexes.

[stryfe]

Same as Alec, I loved the feeling of depth in the played cards.
Keep going, you are in my watchlist!

[Sunburned Games]

Thanks Alec & Guipaz! Our tech director was questioning some of the design decisions we had made early on, and he was very right. The new screen looks a lot more 'engaging'.

There is still some work to be done, fine tuning of character sizes and the backgrounds (sea, ships, etc.) are only drafts now, which will be completed over the next few weeks.

So long,
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[Sunburned Games]

Quick Update

Design & Art:
It is amazing to have an additional designer on board (who is not coding or doing business stuff at the same time). Lance has hit the ground running and already produced a myriad of content. Our artists have been busy doing the second pass of the UI and combat screen components. It all comes together nicely:



Music & Sound:
We have finally selected our composer (and a studio for live recordings) this week. Victor hails from Barcelona, and we are looking forward to integrating his work into the demo, trailer and at one point the game itself!

Development:
Multiplayer underwent some refactoring and is working again (some say 'for the first time properly'), and it looks like we will be going with Playfab and Photon to avoid having to manage our own infrastructure. On one hand Playfab's design is not focussed on premium games, but on the other hand it will give us a lot of flexibility to fine tune balancing etc. The rest of this week our developers will implement side effects and other good stuff.

What's Next?
Our upcoming major milestones are:

• October 5: Start of the 'closed multiplayer demo testing'
• October 22-24: We will be at IndieCade
• November 17: Our Kickstarter kicks off

We are committed now.

Hamingja!
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[oldblood]

Not sure how I missed this before. This looks really great.

Getting big Banner Saga vibes from the art (without the overt Eyvind Earle artistic references) which is never a bad thing... And probably to be expected given the setting. Looking forward to more updates!

[Sunburned Games]

Not sure how I missed this before. This looks really great.

Getting big Banner Saga vibes from the art (without the overt Eyvind Earle artistic references) which is never a bad thing... And probably to be expected given the setting. Looking forward to more updates!

Thanks sir!

It's hard to ignore The Banner Saga if you do a 2D medieval turn-based RPG, but it was actually only a minor influence during the art style finding process. God, I annoyed everyone with Prince Valiant and I forced the artists to look at King of Dragon Pass. I fondly remember the look of confusion on their youthful faces: 'How many copies did that game sell?'

Maybe that means that I am old and barely hanging in there. Interesting game you have created there yourself. Scary and certainly disturbing, but very interesting nonetheless. Reminds me to go easy on the single malt.

Chin chin
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[Sunburned Games]

Thank god, it's Saturday. Limping away from the studio after an especially brutal SCRUM planning session yesterday afternoon.

This is the art for one of our 'war cry' cards.

Have a good weekend!
Joachim @ Sunburned Games
 

[Sunburned Games]

Help to Spread the Word and Feedback Welcome!

As posted earlier we have locked in our Kickstarter date, kicking off the campaign on November 17. Everyone who has done a KS (or Indiegogo) will know how much work that involves, and we are just getting started.

So while the lion's share of the team works on the game and the demo for Kickstarter, the remainder will start on Kickstarter content this week. I drew the short straw and will be focusing on marketing, PR and community management.

So any hand you can give us to build a larger community before the Kickstarter will be much appreciated.

• You can check us out on Indie DB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-great-whale-road
• Like and share our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thegreatwhaleroad
• And as a last resort follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/WhaleRoadGame

I have to admit that Reddit scares me a lot, so anyone with Reddit experience can explain to me how to best get started with that mythical beast without getting my head ripped off.

If you don't fancy either let us know what culture we should include first in early access (spring 2016). The Kickstarter demo will have Northumbrians, Danes and Franks. But there are plenty of cultures left and waiting to be prioritized. You can find a list of cultures with descriptions here: http://bit.ly/1Kx18zN

Last but not least we are looking for a small group of folks willing to sign a NDA and test the Kickstarter demo. Testing will be starting before IndieCade, around the 15th of October.

Thank you in Advance!
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

PS: Did we mention that we will hang out IndieCade?   
 

[oldblood]

[Interesting game you have created there yourself. Scary and certainly disturbing, but very interesting nonetheless. Reminds me to go easy on the single malt.

Never go easy on single malt. It's the blended stuff that will get you into trouble...

Great art as usual and best of luck on the KS prep. That's going to keep you busy for awhile. Regarding reddit, thats tricky... I've posted a handful of things on there that had a positive response (which I didnt expect) and things I assumed would do well were thrashed. The crowd is fickle and the spam-policies are restrictive. If you're not active on reddit long before attempting to promote on it (see /r/indiegaming and their 90/10 rule) then you probably wont be able to post without it being automatically deleted (and what does post wont get much traction). I'd start getting as active as you can across as many reddits as you can prior to submitting anything. And yes, thats easier said than done when you're busy developing a game...

Small side note: I'm not sure what you're looking to protect, but the NDA may make finding testers restrictive. Most are pretty busy with RL and their own gaming and the idea of having to sign/scan legal documents just to test someones WIP may turn a lot of people off. Finding good testers who will provide you feedback (without requiring payment) is pretty challenging without putting legal restrictions on it. Just my take.

[Sunburned Games]

Never go easy on single malt. It's the blended stuff that will get you into trouble...

Great art as usual and best of luck on the KS prep. That's going to keep you busy for awhile. Regarding reddit, thats tricky... I've posted a handful of things on there that had a positive response (which I didnt expect) and things I assumed would do well were thrashed. The crowd is fickle and the spam-policies are restrictive. If you're not active on reddit long before attempting to promote on it (see /r/indiegaming and their 90/10 rule) then you probably wont be able to post without it being automatically deleted (and what does post wont get much traction). I'd start getting as active as you can across as many reddits as you can prior to submitting anything. And yes, thats easier said than done when you're busy developing a game...

Small side note: I'm not sure what you're looking to protect, but the NDA may make finding testers restrictive. Most are pretty busy with RL and their own gaming and the idea of having to sign/scan legal documents just to test someones WIP may turn a lot of people off. Finding good testers who will provide you feedback (without requiring payment) is pretty challenging without putting legal restrictions on it. Just my take.

Looks like I'll have to brave Reddit then. I was asking the team, but nobody volunteered.   I found one Reddit where you are allowed even encouraged to post news about your own game, but I will go out there and partake in the festivities ... if only its user interface wasn't so ... I don't have words for it ... 1996?
 
It's a simple NDA, but yes I get the point. I think we will limit it to friends and colleagues, anyone our minions can get physically hold off.  

Thanks!
Joachim

[AD1337]

Reddit has various unique subreddits, each with its own culture. I suggest you read them daily for a few weeks to start getting an idea of how to share content there.

itch.io made a graph with purchase referrals per sub-reddit.

My personal experience is that r/indiegaming is the best for us indies. Painters Guild got a few top posts of the year there. But this one is tricky: they're very much against self-promotion, you need to label your own posts and what happens is that they don't get upvoted or simply get deleted. So what you do is ask someone to post your content there. I just tweet "hey, does anyone want to post this cool video on r/indiegaming? thanks" and a random internet person will do it. You get way more upvotes than self-promotion. Also very important: share an image or a video, never text.

r/Games and r/Gaming were too big for me, so I didn't even try them. I think their content is too organic for us to try to "game", all you can do here is make a good game and hope people talk about it there.

r/Gamedev is for post-mortems, technical posts and for sharing wisdom and details about development. Instead of an image or video, your content here should be a long and actually insightful text post or blog/article link. But you can also post on the Marketing Monday and Screenshot Saturday threads. These used to be great, but recently I think they're not as good.

r/GameDeals seems like a great one, but I honestly have no idea how to use it.