Forged of Blood May 2018 Progress Update
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Following three months of relative silence, a new developer blog post for Forged of Blood brings us up to speed with the current state of the game and assures us that the tactical turn-based RPG is still on schedule to be released in 2018. The update covers art, animation, programming, and narrative, so if you're curious about any of those, you might want to check it out. An excerpt:
Our last update was over three months ago and we’ve been noticeably quiet for awhile – so much so that a few of our fans had decided to poke us to see if we’re still alive – but rest assured that we’re still hard at work on Forged of Blood. So where are we now? Well, we took a couple big hits on the production schedule when we had a couple medical emergencies and took on a few systemic overhauls to our key game systems, but I’ll take this update through one section at a time.
We’ll start with the art side, which has since wrapped up the 3D portion of our production rather nicely. The last three months has mostly been spent on expanding our map count with more unique scenarios tied to specific story driven combat missions and playing a long overdue game of cat and mouse with our asset production list. Our biggest challenge has been reviewing and taking inventory of all our art assets to see what needs fixing and to catch crucial items that may have fallen through the cracks in the last couple years – and boy there are plenty. So far, we’re in the process of building one final largescale custom map – that I had admittedly neglected to put into the pipeline months ago – and hammering through the tedious process of cleaning up our 2D UI assets.
On the animation side, we’ve wrapped up a couple of the big cinematics – music and all – and have begun to make a dent on the endgame variations that Forged of Blood players will have access to. To help make life marginally easier for contractors and the animation side. I’ve parsed the epilogue cinematics into three segments, each with a number of variations that take into account the successes, failures, and personality choices in the game. Each of these segments will act as a standalone finale that reflect the player’s choices in their respective areas, that will then be combined into a final cinematic. Each scene will have to be specially crafted with unique voice-over and music work then paired with custom illustrative assets before it can be put into our system.
As for our programmers, they’ve taken on the brunt of the overhaul work to Forged of Blood in these past months. First and foremost, the key castle and strategic systems have been cleaned up and are now in the final phases of implementation. This will be followed by another UI pass… umm, when I get to it. They also made a huge step in overhauling and updating the narrative system for our various story arcs and quests. The new updates made to the narrative system gives us an incredibly robust and flexible ecosystem to tickle my storytelling fancies – which of course led me to do tertiary overhaul of the story arcs we had planned.
