Ladies and gentleman, Thea: The Awakening has been selected as one of the finalists of Indie Game Contest 2015 (part of Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival). The game will be presented on the festival which will take place in Strasbourg between 18 and 27 September. The winner will be announced on the last day, keep your fingers crossed for Thea!
We’ve got a good one for you today. It’s one of those bugs, that we’ll remember and mention as an anecdote for the next year.
So, our testers noticed that some certain buildings sometimes disappear. They build it one day, and then sometime later – gone. Khash tracked it today and turned out these buildings were built from “Food” as one of the ingredients and so, as our mechanics normally does, were attached a “Food” tag to them. This way, such building turned up on the villagers’ menu along with other food items and the first fellow that fancied a fresh Pasture sandwich just chomped on it, removing it from the buildings list.
Unfortunately, this “feature” was removed, the villager told off and buildings taken off the menu.
Among other things, we’ve added a screen, where the player can restrict usage of certain food or fuel items if they need to save it for another purpose.
Hey folks!
Before I start with anything else, just a quick reminder that tomorrow is the deadline for sending your entries for our Short Slavic Story Competition so be quick! Prizes are waiting!
Now for a a quick summary of what our team has been up to over the last 2 weeks:
So yes, we’re being busy. And today we’re submitting the game to Indie Game Contest 2015, so keep your fingers crossed 🙂
See you next time!
Yesterday started our story writing competition and we invite you to take part!
Write a short tale in Slavic setting and get a chance of winning some very cool prizes:
1st Place: Early Access Steam Code to Thea: The Awakening*; a Cmuch T-Shirt and the Thea Pin.**
2nd Place: Early Access Steam Code to Thea: The Awakening*; digital package (includes: Thea cover art in both desktop and poster resolution, samples of Thea’s music)
3rd Place: Early Access Steam Code to Thea: The Awakening*
*You’ll receive an early access Steam code for the game when available
** You can exchange the game for our Honey Hex Framework!
All the rules can be found on our facebook here.
The contest runs until 15th of July and entries can be sent in either Polish or English, so get your keyboards ready!
Research and technological progress is a subject we haven’t talked about much earlier, so today I’ll take this opportunity to shed some light on this.
So, in Thea, there will be three categories of technological advancement – in gathering materials, in crafting recipes and in construction of buildings. First category – gathering – specifies what kind of resources you see on the main map and what can be gathered by your people. Some basic resources will be available from the beginning, but to get to the best rare ones you will have to spend some advancement points to unlock them. Second category – crafting recipes – contains recipes for items that can be crafted such as weapons, armor or foodstuffs. The third category allows you to unlock certain constructions that, when built, will benefit your settlement in some way. For example – a cabbage field would produce some vegetables each turn but from time to time your people might find a baby in a cabbage 😉
Unlocking one technology will require one advancement point. These will be awarded in events or by crafting items. Rarity of items crafted will influence the progress speed – common ingredients mean slower progress, rare – faster.
This screen above is a hot mess and I probably shouldn’t even be showing it yet, but I do just to illustrate the resource tree we have in Thea already. All of those will be unlockable, and once gathered (or received in an event) – can be used for crafting. And the crafting category is almost just as big. We don’t think you’ll be able to unlock every tech in each playthrough, but rather specialize – choose what materials you want to gather based on terrain around you, and what to craft from it.
Hope you find our take on research interesting, see you next time!
First, apologies for not writing last week. No excuses 😉
After the feedback from Digital Dragons players we’ve decided to restructure our UI a little bit and that’s what me and Khash have been working on recently. Many people asked to try and recreate the navigation style based on the world’s best known TBS – Civilization. So that’s what we’re going to do. The right click mini menu will be out and its functionality will go to a set of action buttons, camera and unity movement will also be more familiar for Civ fans. We’ve also redone the Inventory and Equipment screens and added a new screen where the player can create and equip a new expedition.
Another thing we did was to clean up all cooking recipes, added three new resources (fish, nuts and mushrooms) and expanded on the cooking menu.
Also – Iv is preparing a facebook contest for our fans and rewards will be really neat, so keep watching our facebook page in the next weeks!
A quick summary of Digital Dragons – our team came back quite happy, brought some good contacts and tons of feedback from players. There were even queues to play Thea so our Tutorial Man (3.14) had a lot to do. He wrote down all remarks people had and we’re processing that right now. The bottom line is that people really liked the game but a number was somewhat confused with the interface, so that’s definitely an area we need to work on some more.
We have also announced our plans to release to XBox One console early next year, which earned us a couple mentions in the press. Some publishers also showed their interest in working with us, talks are in progress. Overall – a really good experience. Big thanks to Yuuki, Iv and 3.14 for pulling it off 🙂
There are a couple photos on our facebook page too.
A week has passed Digital Dragons start tomorrow! Yuuki, 3.14 and Iv are already there, preparing mentally and making sure the alpha build actually works. For those attending the event – see you there!
The other half of the team has been doing “final tweaks” for the last couple days and there’s a high chance the game won’t crash and burn tomorrow morning (but you never know). A couple features have been added too to improve the visuals and the general feel. For example – we now show 3d models of some of the map resources. So you’ll be able to tell straight away if there’s some coal or silver nearby. There are also special structures such as old tower, tomb or cave. Examples on the screenshot below.
This week was one of the busiest so far but all the work put into the alpha build paid off. Time for some well-deserved rest.
Catch you later!
This is a very busy week for everyone here, but also a very exciting one! In a little more than a week part of our team is going to Krakow in Poland to show off Thea: The Awakening on Digital Dragons! We want to give you a taste of the game by allowing you to play an early demo version. So we’re fixing various issues, squashing bugs (at least the most obvious and annoying ones we manage to catch on time) and generally trying to get the game to a stable, playable state. Of course, there will still be inaccessible menus, placeholder description texts and other problems, but such is the beauty of an alpha version. So – if you’re planning to go to Digital Dragons in Krakow between 21-22 May – make sure you find us in Hall A. There’s something we wanted to announce there too!
But the event and game demo are not the only things that occupy us – we’re in the middle of our Kickstarter campaign! Nice rewards await for our backers, so if you’d like an exclusive T-Shirt, an artbook with bestiary or a button pin for your collection – please support our project. We’re already reached 20% of our goal with your help, so thanks to all who believe in us!
I have had this idea for a long time now, but it was always something that was pushed aside. But having Thea Greenlit today was a trigger to start writing a dev blog. So – once in a while (hopefully at least once a week) I’ll write a few lines about how the development is going, maybe post a screen or two and generally keep you guys updated.
Yuuki will still be handling Facebook and Twitter (and all the other things she does so well), she usually writes updates a lot faster. This blog will try to focus more on the technical side of development, so keep visiting if you’re interested in that aspects of making the game.
For people wanting to make their own hex-based game – our Honey Hex Framework takes part in May Madness Sale on Unity Asset Store with a nice discount of 65%! The sale runs from 5th to 15th of May so don’t miss it.
That’s enough good news for today, see you next time!
