We had a fruitful month of December. That was a month we mostly focused on items which is an integral part of the game. Here i am gonna give small details about it.

We have bunch of item classes such as potions, herbs, foods, fruits, tools, gewgaws and so on...
Two classes which would probably be most interesting for players are:

1- Potions
2- Gewgaws

Each hero can equip up to 3 potions 2 of which are controlled manually. 3rd potion is used on Provision Slot as seen below.
Potions aren't as straightforward as you might find in other games. Health potion is the simplest and most classic one. It heals the user for certain % of life. However, it decreases Vigor (an attribute that determines the max hp) until end of the quest, thus consequantially a player will not be able to spam Health potions but use them when it is really necessary. Additionally, -as every other potion- it has certain chance of giving the user a negative trait called as "Potion Addict".

Potions are only items that are usable during combat. I aim to add strategical depth to the combat by giving positive and negative effects to a potion at the same time. When designing a game, the urge to create more and more complex stuff might possess the game designer. On the other hand, the bitter truth is that this makes the job of programmer harder.

We had discussions back and forth with my programmer mate to get to a common point. At the end, although i had to regulate certain aspects of potions (and items in general) i didn't wanna kill off the interesting effects of potions. Long story short, all these little decisions we make throughout the development process, either makes the game better or helps it release faster but rushed. After all this time, approx 2 years of work, i don't intend to release a game just for the sake of releasing a game.

We are taking things easy, but going steady. There are many game design decisions i had to make, to add a unique aspect on our game. (Otherwise why would you spend time on playing our game but not Darkest dungeon or likes?) But this obsession unfortunately increases the dev time.
I thought we were gonna release a demo by February couple months ago. Now i am more leaning towards a late march or april demo release.

I have no doubt we are getting there and we started to have something solid already. But this truly is a very exhausting process. I am sure lots of fellow indie devs understand me. I don't have extra job to support project budget. Neither do i have time. But i have to focus and work on the project after so long time with the same amount of care and discipline. It is pretty hard. Harder than i initially thought it would be. Nonetheless, when the pain is higher, the result will be better. At least this is what we wanna believe.

Before closure i would like to talk very shortly about Gewgaws. We spent almost a month about these naughty little items. They are very similar to trinkets from Darkest Dungeon. Though each of them has a slot type. And a hero can only wear 1 Gewgaw of same slot type in the 3 Gewgaw slots that he has.

So same guy can not wear 2 Neck items or 2 Head items. (You cant put 2 helms together in real life right?) Well maybe you can wear 2 rings but why complicate the framework more?
Although there is an exception for Dwarves (there is currently just 1 hero planned with race Dwarf). He has no limit for Ring slot type count.

Every single item has a Class, Culture or Race restriction. X item can be worn only by Humans and Elves. This is a race restriction.
Y item can be worn only by Macalakies, Safrimans and Mngwas. This is a culture restriction. And Z item can be worn by Water Mage, Enchantress, Moss Mage and Sparksherald. This is a class restriction.

I mean did we have to create restriction on all items? No. But logically, a human and a water buffalo-man would not really wear the same Helm. So why not apply it on the game design?

Sometimes i really feel bad for my colleague for the programming difficulties he faces, but at the end of the day i believe everything is for the best. We are getting there. Please continue following the game updates on twitter. I try to post stuff time to time to shed some light about the project. We are on track but we are also very very tired. Especially me and programmer.

I worked with many artists and animators throughout the period but as this is not their only job and they are not that much deep into the project, i can't say the same thing for them. We are a core team of 2, although at least 4-5 guys helped us with the project for a long time in terms of art and animations. Lets not forget the musician, who had done a great job. You can listen to our main theme in the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFlWO1j41S0

Btw i have just scratched the surface of Gewgaws. I could talk longer about the Gewgaw quality types, how different each quality type from one another, suffixes prefixes and so on...
But i will leave it up to later. Hopefully you will find it out yourself along with the demo.

Have a nice 2023 and please pray for us.
After all this trouble, work, sufferance, sweat, tears and blood, this is the year we will release the game.

Regards
Semih

Greetings to you good people of Capua!

Here is another update from our dev process. Just a heads up for those of you who may have thought project is dead.
No, not dead yet! Just delayed. Which is something usual. As we got deeper in this process we realize as optimistic as you might be, reality will slap your face as hard. That's what happened to us. We, i mean me - the game designer and owner of the project and my programmer buddy who is simply the other half of the apple, are gaining our experience with this debut.
(You might even include a bunch of artists, animators, voice artists and musician who contributed to the project along the way to the WE.)


Right now, thankfully we are at a stage where we can see things more clearly. After all the work, fight, struggle, hardship we are kinda content with the progress made in the recent months and hope that we will release the Demo before December.
Which means November. The Sweet November. It will be exactly 2 years since i have officially set up Shargad Game Studios (technically a one man company - yes i am a CEO of my own, pretty fun, recommended except all the money you will sink in) in 19 November 2020. Knowing how often small bugs caused us lots of time loss, our November goal might easily extend to December.


Tricky thing is; you aren't bound to set up goals if you will always have to delay. No one is forcing you. However without having these goals and deadlines you might lose the urge to finish the game. It is an unseen pushing force indeed. Of course it is better to be more accurate - compared to us.

Long story short we are pretty close to a demo release. The reason i can't give an exact date is because i still didn't test the game.
On paper everything looks fine, the game design rules, numbers, skills, stats and all that. I need to test for the balance purpose first and i dont know how long its gonna take.
Luckily, we have you, the great people of Capua to test the game further on, even better than me once the demo is released.


We intend to treat our demo more like a short beta version. We will keep updating and improving the demo until we actually release the EA version of the game (hoping sometime in Q1-Q2 2023).
And then full release in the Q3 or Q4 of 2023.

We still have a lot to do. Lots of things to code, artwork to finish and animations... which gave me headache more than anything. VO is another tricky spot for me.
It was my decision alone to go with VO unlike most games in our genre made with a similar budget. It is a burden and it is really hard to find high quality VO talents with small budget.
These are all some nice topics to discuss further on but the time will come for that.


For now, just know that development is in process. Demo is underway. We are far from dead. Just stumbled couple of times down the road but all is good.
We are certainly in a better shape than the roadkills Dahmer collected back in the days.

Hope life is treating all you great people well. Don't miss the arena fights in the weekends. They are pretty fun.

Cheers
Semih