A tactical RPG where all players' choices come together to drive a living story, created by a AAA veteran and a chart-topping author.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hi Everyone,
We’re only one month away from launching City of the Shroud, but to tide you over, I have an exciting announcement: soundtracks and wallpapers are ready for backers!
Both rewards are handled through BackerKit, just like with the Steam keys and rewards surveys. You should soon have an email from BackerKit for both the soundtrack and the collection of wallpapers.
Wallpapers:
When we ran the Kickstarter campaign, we had the wallpaper reward as a single desktop and mobile wallpaper. As we worked on the game, though, we realized that a lot of the art we were making would work really nicely as desktop backgrounds.
So, instead of one desktop wallpaper, we’ve decided to send you 24 wallpapers. They include the Brute smashing the ground art (with and without game logo), the Mage art from the Kickstarter campaign / our early branding (also with and without game logo!), and all of the various incarnations of the area background artwork used in the game. We hope you enjoy them!
We also had the materials available to make two mobile wallpapers instead of one, so for those of you who want to sport City of the Shroud on your phones, you will have a choice between the Mage and Brute pieces (also with and without game logo!). I’ve tried to include a number of common phone resolutions, so hopefully you’re covered!
The wallpapers are being distributed as a .zip file via BackerKit, so all you’ll need to do is follow the BackerKit link to the download page and download the file!
Soundtrack:
The soundtrack came together really nicely - we hope you enjoy it! It contains 16 tracks, including music from our trailers and a special piano version of the theme that plays on the map screen. Here’s the full list:
There may also be a bit more in the works…
We’re distributing the soundtrack through Steam - you’ll get a Steam key, just like with the game, which will let you add the soundtrack to City of the Shroud in Steam, where it will download to the game’s installation folder. As with the game’s Steam key, you’ll be able to get the soundtrack Steam key from your BackerKit digital download page.
Why are we doing it this way? Because it will let us update the soundtrack in a single location where you will automatically get the update… in case that becomes necessary. Not that I’m saying it will. But who knows?
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In other news, we’ve been hard at work getting everything ready for launch! This mostly entails back-end work like making lots of versions of the same image at slightly different resolutions, which is a time-honored game development tradition (and I’m not even talking about the wallpapers!), as well as triple-checking network-related features like Online VS battle connection handling and disconnection warnings. We want to deliver as smooth an experience for you as possible!
We hope you’re as excited to play the game as we are to deliver it! We’re almost there!
All The Best,
Keaton & The Abyssal Arts Team
Hi Everyone,
We’re launching the game on August 9 on Steam! Chapter 1 will be available for Windows and Mac for you to experience, and influence, the story of Iskendrun and its inhabitants.
Chapter 1 is big! It’s got five narrative branches, multiple boss fights, tons of quests, rebindable controls (you can play with one hand on a controller!), multiple difficulties, adjustable game speed, adjustable text speed, our Balance of Power story-influencing system - and that’s not even everything. There’s a lot going on!
We’ve been working extra hard to get the game to this point, and there’s still plenty of bug fixing and polish to do between now and release, but we’re really happy with how the game has come together.
In fact, last month we added a frequently requested feature we call “Wait Mode.”
When we took the game to shows, we’d often get asked if there was a way to pause the game so that it’d be possible to survey what was going on or to issue commands. After a lot of hard work and planning, we found a way!
You can now press the (rebindable!) Wait Mode button and the action will freeze - except you can still navigate the map and issue commands to your characters.
That means it’s possible to pull off simultaneous combos across characters, like this:
Now, if you want the game to play slower and give you unlimited time to deliberate your next move, the option is there!
Want the game to be faster but to let you pause to issue commands? Done!
Or, you can disable Wait Mode altogether and play the game in its “classic” setup. The choice is yours!
We also made another quality-of-life improvement: the status effects on a given character are now visible in the UI, along with how much time is left on them and how many stacks there are.
Say one of your Brutes is Corrupted - you’ll see a Corruption icon next to their entry in the side UI along with how many stacks (if applicable!) of that status effect they have. The grey countdown circle shows you how much time is left on the effect, too!
Before the rush and excitement of launching the game consumes me entirely, I want to take a moment to cover the Kickstarter rewards we'll be preparing ahead of the August 9 launch.
First, we’ll be preparing the wallpaper(s!) and soundtracks to send out ahead of release. These should arrive digitally before the game releases.
One thing to note about the soundtrack: we still have something up our sleeve, so the soundtracks will be “updated” at a later date… ;)
Once Chapter 1 is out (and I’m able to reclaim some semblance of sanity), we’ll start in on the remaining rewards that don't need to wait on anything anymore, like physical goods. The production journal is an ongoing process (we have to finish the story, after all!), so that's still a ways out, and the remaining design-related rewards will benefit from being able to play the game to inspire ideas
Thank you all for your support and patience over the years. It took longer than we thought it would, and we encountered all sorts of unexpected obstacles in the course of this journey, but we’re now ready to release Chapter 1 to you and get the story of City of the Shroud into your hands - both literally and figuratively!
We are so grateful for your support in getting here; we couldn’t have done it without you. We’ll be back with more announcements before the August 9 launch, so until then, thank you x 1,000,000!
All The Best,
Keaton & The Abyssal Arts Team
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hi Everyone,
I hope you’re excited for City of the Shroud’s impending release this summer! It’s been quite the journey, and there’ll be even more once the story gets underway, but in the meantime, I wanted to let you know what we’re up to!
You can probably guess, but we’re working hard to polish up the game to get it ready for launch! We’re currently hooking up the final bits of conversational logic, testing out all of the battles to find any remaining bugs, and making some final adjustments to improve the user experience (UI adjustments, etc.).
This means playing the heck out of the game, trying to break it as much as possible. To give you an idea of the kinds of things we’re working on, yesterday I found that one of our portal effects, which uses wind physics to swirl little glowy bits around and into itself, would suck other particles - like attack effects - into it if the characters using them were too close. Watching the smoke from Disintegrate a well as my healing spell get sucked into a portal was pretty cool, but not exactly what we’re going for in terms of gameplay (the moves worked fine!).
Also, to tide you over while you wait for Chapter 1, the PAX demo is now available on Steam. To access it, just follow the instructions in the image below:
The new demo has the tutorial from the beginning of the game as well as a preview of one of our boss fights. It’s similar to the Rezzed demo’s boss fight, but we switched up the team to include the Machinist. Try to unleash his Ultimate ability, Skyfall - it’s a blast!
PAX itself was also a blast - tons of people played the game (tons), and the response was great. The dialogue was a hit, players really enjoyed the combat, and we even got interviewed several times. A couple of those interviews went for over an hour! (My throat did not survive, but thanks to the memory foam in my shoes, my feet and back did.)
Indie MEGABOOTH was also a wonderful and humbling experience - it was an honor to be among so many great games and meet so many extraordinarily talented developers. I’d like to give special shout-outs to Hidden Achievement, developers of the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game on Steam, ysbyrd games, LUNARSIGNALS and their game The Moon Fields, Tangled Mess Games, who are making Volantia, and Craig Barnes, my Train Jam compatriot and composer on Streets of Rogue. From helping me lug all of the PCs and literal bags of sand to my car, to being amazing friends and booth-mates - thank you!
And to the backer who stopped by the booth while I was occupied - thank you!! I’m sorry I wasn’t able to talk with you more, and I hope you didn’t catch the con plague (I did…)!!
Overall, PAX was great - there were tons of interesting people, a stream of fun, fantastic players, homemade (life-saving) cough-drops, and plenty of adventures along the way. Even my car refusing to start for several hours in just-above-freezing weather in a parking garage only to turn on instantly once the tow truck arrived couldn’t dampen the experience (also, I got to eat good ramen).
With that, I hope you’re excited to enter the world of Iskendrun and fight to determine its fate - we’re almost there!
All The Best,
Keaton & The Abyssal Arts Team