Children of War: Blood and Snow Kickstarter Campaign Launched
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Independent studio Shadowforge has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise a total of $50,000 for an isometric, open-world RPG called Children of War: Blood and Snow. The team has brought in nearly $8000 so far, and there's a teaser trailer ready to convince you to shell out more cash:
It's also spawned at least one interview over at N4G:
Cat: What is Blood and Snow?
RL: Speaking technically, Blood and Snow is an Action RPG set in an open world, viewed through an isometric camera. This game has a deep level of customization that allows you to more fully immerse yourself into your character. There is a large open world with random events and side quests. Most notable is a strong central story line presented in the form of a main quest line. There are mysteries with lore strewn across the world waiting to be found. We love the feeling of discovering something new and feeling like it's possible that you're the first or only one to ever discover it. To enhance the experience there are relics, landmarks and characters with stories that fall outside of any quest line, waiting for the player to find and enjoy.
Cat: In a podcast I watched you mentioned the customization modules and the battle arena. Can you talk more about those - and their release timeline?
RL: You control the look of your character, weapons even mounts right from the beginning. Along those lines, we wanted to make sure that players who are interested in crafting would have options that would allow them to make truly unique items. The way we're accomplishing that is to create a crafting system which not only ties into the customization system where you can assemble weapons or armor from several different components, decorate them and paint them to your liking, but where your skill determines the overall quality of the item being crafted. If you're making a sword for example, you'll need to create the different components: blade, hand guard and hilt. None of these components have specific ingredients, rather they have a template that tells you how many of what kinds of ingredients you'll need. It's up to the crofter to choose the types of metal, wood, leather etc that go into these components. The creation of these components also relies on the skill with which the player executes the crafting mini-games. Shaping molds, carving, smelting, filling molds and many other steps will rely entirely on the individual player's ability to accomplish timing and position based procedures.
The battle arena is what we've planned to allow players the flexibility to test out abilities and combat without having to commit skill points to their actual characters. You'll be able to jump in, create a character at any level you want and play with different builds rather than just reading about the skills and trees.
We plan on releasing these modules on their own as we develop them so that backers and pre-purchase players can get their hands on the game as early as possible. These releases should start in just a few months. With the customization module we plan to allow players to save characters they've created and save them so that they can jump right into the game on release. We're also planning on polling our backer and pre-purchase community to determine which modules they would like to see first and that will help to determine our development schedule.
