Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms Production Update
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It's been a few months since we last heard any news about Gamera Interactive's narrative-rich action-RPG Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms. And according to this Steam announcement, that's because the developers have been busy overhauling many of the game's systems in order to bring it closer to their original vision, not to mention some Covid-related delays.
There's a lot there, but if you'd like to know what's happening with the game, you should check this out:
Champions!
We have something special for you. We felt that this was a good moment to give you a general overview of the Alaloth - Champions of The Four Kingdoms development situation.
After the release of our last gameplay trailer, a little over a year ago now, we started to post regular updates on Steam, focused on the game’s lore and development. We hope that you’ve enjoyed the content we’ve shared across our channels throughout our development journey, it's been great to see your support along the way.
We’ve had a few delays and hurdles to overcome due to Covid-19 and some other last minute, unpredictable events, but we feel that we’re heading in the right direction now. Although we haven’t been able to get back to Gamera HQ since March 2020, our team has grown to 18 people (!) and we’re hoping to adapt to a hybrid work model soon that will allow our team to develop a closer bond. 2021 has felt like a fresh start and we feel like we’re approaching another great milestone.
We’ll share more news about the future with you soon, but for now, let’s focus a little on the what’s been happening over the past few months as you’ve, rightfully, been asking for updates for a while now here on Steam, on our Discord server, and in many different RPG communities and we know our recent radio silence didn’t help matters.
We believe that honesty is always the best way to go and today we want to try to honestly answer a few of the questions you have asked in the last months. In general, we’ve lately been silent for a very simple reason: we were not happy with the game as it was and we were focused on addressing its issues. It was as simple as that. We totally understand that the lack of news and updates has been disappointing for you all—it has been disappointing for us too. In spite of all the obstacles that we’ve encountered, some beyond our control, our team is doing everything possible to work on the issues we’ve found along the way and to raise the overall presentation of the final game. We’ve been doing our best to hold on to our original vision for the game, but the project has changed since our initial announcement and we’ve had to adapt along the way.
Although we’ve had to adapt the game to get around various challenges we’ve encountered, we’ve been able to hold on to our original vision of Alaloth being something between the classic RPGs we all know and love and our favorite modern-day action games. We’ve always said that Alaloth was born as a tribute game to all the nerdy stuff we love like D&D, The Lord of The Rings, the high-fantasy and soulslike genres in general, and of course awesome games like Ultima, BioWare’s works, and Diablo, or even board games such as Warhammer. All of this was more or less the alpha & omega for someone born in the 80s who grew up playing pen & paper and PC/console games.
Having such a great respect for all of those inspirations, it really means a lot to us when fans and even the press see the connections and acknowledge that the titles of gaming’s glorious past are the foundation of our game. People have told us that Alaloth brought back memories of classic RPGs from the 90s and early 2000’s and that’s made us really happy, it’s an honor.
What we’ve been working on
In our most recent Steam updates we talked about the world of Plamen, about game design, characters, and narrative, among other things. Now we want to go deeper into these topics to give you a full picture of what goes on behind the scenes during such a complex development cycle, and how often things can change (and change again) along the way.
COMBAT, EXPERIENCE, & STATS
Alaloth - Champions of the Four Kingdoms is an RPG that fuses classic presentation with skill-driven combat. That’s our take. We’ve finally put in every single weapon, armor type, and item that needs to be iterated, playing with the numbers to find the perfect balance in action: we play, test every single set-up, change values, and repeat.
As you know from our previous updates, we have 3 different Ways of Power, each with 3 different professions to choose from with 4 skills each. Once you pick a race, you get racial traits of course too, and we added 12 other special traits to make your own build unique.
We had many internal discussions about Stats as we wanted to create something special for this. Characters will have 4 different Stats (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, and Luck) that can be increased up to 5 times each. To do so, players will need to gather Stat points by leveling-up of course, but only a limited number of Stats Points will be available this way. Extra Stats Points can be collected by finding special books (Hero Books) that are scattered all around the world, making exploration and quests crucial, even considering that players are going to get XP through fighting rather than by completing quests the classic way.
This will allow everyone to plan in their own style. You can essentially speedrun the game, by just focusing on collecting all necessary artifacts and not doing any side quests to reach the endgame, defeating Alaloth, as quickly as possible, without the experience of eating the whole cake as it were. However, if you want the full experience of the game, you can take your time traveling through the kingdoms of Plamen and learning about their legends, history, and people. Side quests will lead you to more combat which will give you the opportunity to level up, but you have to remember that traveling as a champion, you’ll have to face challenging champions from other kingdoms and that as time goes on, Alaloth will grow more and more powerful. We’ll expand on this in future updates.
WORLD MAP, CALENDAR, OTHER CHAMPIONS, & MOUNTS
The world map has been probably the only thing we’ve fully reworked during the development process instead of fixing it through iterations. And we’re not just talking about the graphic style. The world map has always been a tool that has helped us monitor the scope of the project and it’s also one of the key elements of the game.
We think of the map this way because when you build a fantasy world, everything is reflected in the world map. So doing something like adding a new location is not as simple as closing your eyes and picking a spot on the map. To add a new location we have to first go through a ‘world bible’ that’s more than 200 pages long, full of names and stories. We have to double check everything in order to ensure consistency with the game’s huge lore database and to make our fantasy world unique and believable.
We started out with 4 kingdoms each with 6 Fighting Areas, 6 cities, and 3 points of interest. We ended up with 7 Fighting Areas (with 4 additional unique boss fights around that can be unlocked with reputation, even if every area basically has its own boss), 7 cities, 5 points of interest, and random generated bounties with other ad hoc environments, taverns, and more for each kingdom, plus 4 dragon caves throughout Plamen. We also started out with a few pawns moving around the map and now we have more than 15 different guilds and organizations, as well as cults, septs, and wandering chars. Another change was that we originally began with the idea of 3 Moonstone-like champions but now we have 40 champions representing every single playable house or clan, each with their own background, skill, fighting style, equipment, and so on (when you start the game, you’ll roll 3 random champions from this set to serve as your opponents in your run to defeat Alaloth). So as you can see, we've added quite a lot to the game.
Time is a key part of the player experience as well and we’ve been working on this too to find a good balance, eventually adding different game modes to allow players to customize their runs for either more rpg or action. Considering that you can move whenever you want, mounts are another important thing to mention when talking about time. You just see pawns on the map when you move, so you’re not supposed to ride a mount in real time, but your speed is determined by the terrain and different mounts move slower or faster on depending on the difficulty of the terrain (rams are faster on cliffs, wolves run better in the desert, super warhorses are best for open fields, while gryphons fly)].
Mounts are also important because they impact the max weight you can carry, and weight is crucial in Alaloth because you can’t always be carrying around 10 different types of armor or 5 different weapons. You’re supposed to know where you’re going and what you’re going to fight or hunt so you have to choose your equipment wisely. Four more potions or an extra sword? It’s up to you. And remember, you can’t access your inventory during fights…
BLACKSMITHING, COOKING, & ENCHANTING
When we thought about crafting for the first time, we had in mind something immersive, a bit more unique than what’s usual. We think we’ve managed to reach our goal. To craft your weapons and armor, you’ll need to find a blacksmith (lords and ladies, don’t craft their own of course!). You’ll have to buy ingots, metal scraps, and anything that’s necessary for the artisan to make your suite of choice. There are different types of armor to choose from which will impact your stamina management (there are light, medium, heavy, and tank types of armor) but materials are unique and are very different by lore, offering different bonuses for different occasions.
Moreover, every kingdom has its own set of materials which are as unique as the different armor sets available. If for example you want to buy an elven set of armor or collect the materials for one but are from a different kingdom, you’ll need to take your time to travel to Larastir and look for them there, look for them in markets, or wait for merchants to come through your area according to the calendar, celebrations, and so on.
Items have limited durability, so you’ll have to take care of your equipment. Eventually you’ll be able to enchant weapons and armor by visiting enchanters in capital cities. This will be the only way you can install or remove gems from your equipment (basically offensive or defensive stones with different properties).
Last but not least, cooking will allow you to get a special bonus before a fight (if you choose to eat before entering a Fighting Area, using the cooking pot in the Safe Area spot) or during one (you can bring in some consumables which are timed).
CLOSING
That’s all for now. As you can see, our work on Alaloth never stopped, we just entered stealth mode so that we could focus on the game’s development and to take extra time to improve the quality level. It’s for these reasons that we skipped major events this year and didn’t send out any news for a while and we’re sorry for leaving you all in the dark, but now we can say that we’re back in action so we hope that we’ll be able to update you more often. We’re available on Discord of course but you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook as well to get the latest updates.
Thank you for your support!
