The holiday season is over and after some of the not-yet-deserved-rest, the whole team is running around like mad. Why? Because the month of September will be very eventful!
We finally managed to lock down the Kickstarter campaign’s start date to 18th September. Continue reading
Hi everyone, it’s time for an update!
We don’t have much to show you today, but we wanted to present a couple sound tracks from Thea 2. On launch, Thea 2 will feature 33 tracks that fall into 3 categories – battle themes, settlement themes and map themes. And there’s of course one menu theme.
We’ve hired the same guys that did the music for Thea: The Awakening – murmur sound workshop! Nik & Victor did a great job last time, so the decision to ask them to write music for the sequel was obvious.
Today I wanted to share one bit I’ve been working on recently – day/night cycles.
Those of you who have played Thea: The Awakening surely remember that one of the game’s features was a day/night cycle that affected visibility and difficulty. We’ve decided to keep this element in Thea 2: The Shattering as well. An opportunity to work on this bit appeared after Khash has added handling of specular maps into his terrain and water shaders this week. So to test how things work, I played a while with different light setups and thought it would be cool to put together a switchable animation with a set of lights that would show the day/night cycle. After two days of trying to get the light and shadows right (being fairly new to different lighting settings), here’s a short video showing the progress:
Other terrain elements also got an upgrade – water got an improved normal map, can now bounce off light and also blends with the shore much better. Also terrains can now use emissive maps, so I can add a nice glow to lava tiles on the volcanic island (yet to be done). And KIhash is improving terrain blending as I type this post. Of course there’s still much work needed – rivers are a bit buggy, fog of war is missing, etc. – but I do hope we’re going in the right direction.
Below are a three more screens from different biomes.
Since a number of people asked, we’ve set up a Newsletter!
You all know what is it for, so just go and sign up if you want the news delivered to your e-mail.
On the development front – works are progressing and Khash has begun coding a first pass of the card minigame (and things related to it, such as networking). Having it in playable state will be a great help for event writers. We have no new screens to show just yet but when we do, we’ll definitely share them with you.
It’s no secret that Thea: The Awakening turned out quite well for us. But it’s been a while since our last news entry (and I have to admit I neglected our website a bit…) so people were wondering what exactly are we doing at the moment. We kept our head down for a while and since autumn promised to announce our next title “soon”, but the time has finally come!
The second big DLC has just hit the stores! The main focus of this DLC is a co-op mode for 2 players, where you’ll be able to play with your buddy and overcome the dangers of Thea together! Continue reading
I have no idea how many games get released each year, but I it’s more every year. Gamers have a good choice of titles, but only some titles are worth the time and money. This is where reviews come in, either in the form of written text in a big magazine, or store page reviews. But there are no truly impartial reviews and a reviewer may like different things in games than we do, right? Different things annoy or give joy to different people so the best idea of what a game is like is to watch someone play it. YouTube has gained a massive popularity among gamers in the recent years, there are tons of content makers spitting out various video material. But from the dawn of game development, the custom is that reviewers don’t buy the games they review. They get it from developers. Continue reading
Today a couple words about returns and refunds.
As you know, some time ago Steam has introduced refunds, which I think in general is a great idea. People are less afraid to try out new games and if something doesn’t go right, whether it is a hardware problem or the game just turns out to be something else they anticipated – they have no feeling of being cheated.
On the other hand… Continue reading
The DLC we promised is finally here! Have a look at the trailer, which sums up the most important features:
Below is a list of stuff you can expect:
Continue reading
Here’s a couple numbers related to development and sales of Thea:
