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[SaylorMan]

--- Project Ashes ---

THE PITCH:

Project Ashes (Tentative Title) is a narrative-heavy, turn-based tactics game inspired by the likes of Fire Emblem, the Banner Saga and X-COM. The game is set in a medieval world in which sapient life turns to a special ash upon death. This ash fuels the world's magic, with any person being able to absorb it to harness its energy. Different cultures, religions and groups view the practice of magic in their own way.

What does a medieval world look like when anyone's death can greatly empower others?

Left to right: Cato, Ako, Roland, Souza, Kitarni, Alvy & Hadrian

You play as Souza, a former soldier who has left his old life behind in search of something better. Lead a ragtag band of characters cross-country to find a cure for Alvy; a dying 11-year-old child. Along the way, you'll encounter the Ujmaradi, a group invading the island country in order to reclaim lost lands.

Your choices will shape the story and characters along the way. What kind of leader will you become?

COMBAT:

UI and many other things are yet to be properly integrated

Battles take place on an isometric grid and pit you against Ujmaradi raiders, wild beasts and several other enemies. The player and enemy go turn by turn as they command a unit to move, attack or use other abilities such as magic to complete their mission objective. Our goal is to have a variety of mission objectives throughout the campaign.

Souza's attack. Look at that hair bob around!

The Ash of defeated enemies can be harvested for use in combat or future narrative moments. Project Ashes is challenging, however it is NOT a permadeath tactics game. When your unit's HP reaches 0 they flee the battle and will develop injuries that incur future stat penalties. To counteract this you'll have to use magic to mend wounds, but remember, all magic uses ash!

Balancing when and how you use your party's ash will be integral to Alvy's survival.

Here is an Ujmaradi spearman going on his morning jog.

DEVELOPMENT:

Here's how we use Articy:Draft to develop our branching story paths!

A team of three of us are developing the game slowly, but surely! We're using Unity as our game engine, Krita for art production and Articy:Draft for narrative planning. We're hoping to reveal a Kickstarter sometime in 2021! This game has been a dream project of ours for a LONG time. We've spent just over a year developing it, but we've been exploring ideas in this universe since our high school days.

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The plan is for us to post a development update, big or small, every second week. So stay tuned!
We'll update this post to link to future dev posts.  

Otherwise, you can catch more updates over at our Twitter: https://twitter.com/StudioHipSword
For more in-depth worldbuilding posts check out our Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/ProjectAshesNZ/
Or if you'd like to chat and hangout come join our Discord: https://discord.gg/CXS6z6A

[SaylorMan]

DEVELOPMENT UPDATE #1 - The Art Process


Hiya. Brett here, the lead/only artist for Project Ashes. Just thought I’d give you guys a peek at my artistic process and what I’ve been working on as of late.

The combat art of Project Ashes is definitely one of the most ambitious undertakings of my artistic career. As opposed to the rotoscoping seen in many games of this genre, we’re going for a more traditional 2d animated look. The characters are sketchy, gritty, and not overly cartoonish. It’s super cool-looking… and really hard to produce!

To keep our detailed characters consistent, some of the more difficult animations go through several iterations.

^ This is the first draft of Ako’s Move-Up animation. Here I’m just trying to get the basic movement down. I’m mostly concerned about the leg movement at the moment, so his upper body is fairly static.

^ When animating frame-by-frame like I do, it’s easy for the drawings to get distorted over time. Here I detail out the two most important keyframes to make sure I don’t get too off track.

^ I redraw the frames from iteration 1, using the keyframes from iteration 2 as my guide. I also finally start working on the torso.

^ Now that I’m fairly confident in the body’s movement, I redraw the frames yet again to capture Ako’s clothes and anatomical detailing.

^ We’re skipping ahead quite a bit here! Finally happy with the main movement, I refine lines, colour the shapes, and animate all his secondary details on new layers. Luckily, this is fairly easy since the hard part is done. And that’s our finished boy!

Not every animation needs as many iterations before even reaching the colouring stage, but I hope you can now appreciate how much work goes into these characters! At the moment I’m working on the big purple guy from the OP… please pray for me!

- Brett/Lunchbillion

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Saylor here, the writer/producer/dropped-out-of-school-and-am-making-stuff-up-along-the-way person. While our artist was getting this amazing piece of work done, I've started work on the final scene in chapter 1. It will hopefully be finished in the coming weeks. Rhys, our programmer, has been squashing bugs! Some earlier, unforeseen issues popped up and he's spent the better part of the last week fixing them.

As a team, we've made some great story breakthroughs in our narrative, particularly late-game stuff. And we're currently discussing exactly how our visual novel sections will look.

We'll post another development blog in a fortnight so stay tuned!

[SaylorMan]

DEVELOPMENT UPDATE #2 - A little bit of Everything + GIFS!

Not every week of development is made equal; Brett, our artist has made some good progress on combat assets over the last two weeks. He'll tell you more about it below.

Meanwhile, I've been rewriting some early scenes to better realise Kitarni (see avatar) as a character. Once a week we do a 'narrative pass', where Brett and Rhys read over my recent work to give me feedback... hence the rewrites! Thanks, team!

Here is a sneak peak at Hadrian's (WIP) attack and the process behind it

"I've pretty much just been trucking along working on character animations with a particular focus on the big guy Hadrian. The detailing on his exoskeleton takes a really long time to draw - and yet so far his animations have gone quite smoothly. They've certainly gone through less iterations than the Ako example from our last blog. Pretty weird, but I'm not complaining!

At the moment I'm working on one of his attacks. As you can see we've got our writer/producer here as pose reference. (We got him heroically wielding a broom for the spearman earlier) Still figuring out the flow of this movement, but I'm sure I'll find it soon enough." - Brett/Lunchbillion

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We also launched a ProjectAshes Discord server: https://discord.gg/CXS6z6A
You're all welcome to join, give us feedback, ask us questions etc! We'll look to expand the channels as we increase our members.

[rtek]

That's a ton of work. Good luck with the project.

[ternbasedcombat]

This looks SO GOOD!

Do you already have a composer? I would love to write a track for you!

TM

[SaylorMan]

Thank you @rtek! We're getting there.

This looks SO GOOD!

Do you already have a composer? I would love to write a track for you!

TM

Thanks for the interest! We're always on the lookout for help. If you or anyone else has something to offer feel free to send me a private message or email me: [email protected]

However, funding is nonexistent at the moment. We are trying hard to build to an eventual Kickstarter Campaign and/or source local funding.

[MikeHart]

Oh I love that art style. All handdrawn. Gives it a great vibe.