Hi Acom,

While the main workforce is located in Sweden, we have developers of several nationalities, among them, fortunately for us, US residents.
Since it's such a shame to have european developers locked out of KS, I suppose it is a matter of time before the "US only" lock is lifted though, either that or a competitor will come around.

Hi again Tigsource,

I am a game designer at an independent studio located in the medieval world heritage town of Visby, Sweden, developing a 4-player co-operative Hack and slash game called Legends of Aethereus - currently in late stages of development, we're running a Kickstarter to fund the last remaining months of development. We are quite numerous for an independent upstart - about 18 people working on the game or with PR and marketing.
Development has been quite a journey so far - with that harrowing bit of polish and tying things together left to do and you learn a lot from trying to tackle a project this big independently, even when the team is made up of professionals, there are countless challenges facing a company without a big moneybag/publisher backing you up. On the other hand, we have had the liberty of trying things that might have been considered too risky with an investor, such as the procedural generation of levels (and general design directions, such as making a complex game that rewards skill).

Anyway, it is a game about going on expeditions with your buddies to an unexplored forest continent, killing monsters, crafting new gear and racing to obtain ancient artifacts before the *evil* venetan empire does so.

Swamp area with my favorite nasty spore-things which glow in the dark and slooowly float towards you, then explode.


The arena, fighting the Khagal


The ancient temple grounds, not sure what's being fought here, but the shot looks cool. 


We've two videos with gameplay on our kickstarter page & a couple on youtube

Kickstarter Page:
http://kck.st/Nq6a6Q

Narrative Trailer:




And some pure silliness:




Regards
Jakob B Rogert

Yes, this game is so full of the happy kind of approachable and quirky design that games used to have. Playful, I believe is the word.

Yay! Not surprised to find you here, Saint - and happy to do so! This looks oddball and interesting!

Just wow. Throwing these two concepts together of course works fantastically. Great idea and applauds for the execution. Most of all, this is inspiring. The fundamentals of the concept are so good more games of this kind has to be done. It does bring about a certain board-game-y social experience when multiplayed.

Thank you for your positive feedback! And well yes, while there are of course design directions taking us away from the Advance Wars formula (just remaking a game isn't the way to developer heaven), I believe too many developers shy away from the turn-based formula by sheer instinct.
This is an update of environment art for the three different factions & mockups - attempts to visualize the ingame layout. Meanwhile, a paper prototype has been tested which proves our wild guessing that this game will be fun and games workshop-style codexes are being written for each faction. We're racing to get the first iteration of the game playable by christmas and start editing maps.

The mustaches are going nowhere. =)

The Robota's cities - futurist


The Eternal Empire's buildings and grenadier



The Ecclesiarchy's homelands


And mockups:

We're using the Unity engine, with some GUI add-on.

Hi. My name is Jakob B Rogert. I'm obligatorially introducing myself. I'm running Digital Agitation with a few friends in sweden, while teaching game design at Gotland University department of game design and computer graphics.

We're currently working on an art project and a wargame for a swedish independent games competition run by gameplayer.se. In the past, we've developed a dungeoncrawl digital board game called Azida Keep and a commercially published title called Prom Queen, inspired by the princess maker games. Our website.

I'm a nethack addict in terms of play and development and my main interest is in making game systems which can propel narratives during play (randomly generated, meaningful narrative).

My skillset is primarily academic and industry-lenient game design, but I'm usually doing production, programming and prototyping as well.

Hey hey, I've been watching Tigsource for a while and thought I'd add our current wargame project over here. We're basically three-five people developing independently (After having tried to do things commercially, getting burned.) on Gotland, Sweden.

So: this is our new publisherfree project - concept document here. It is, to describe it briefly, a gooey wargame comprised of advance wars, company of heroes, memoir '44 and combat commander.

And here's some concept art: