It is 30 years after the world ended. The World Empire has vanished. Monsters and plagues roam the lands. Government structures have crumbled. The world is all but lost.

And in this chaos, a young noble lady from the cursed lands of Lower Lessia has brought something back into this world. Sacrificing her half-sister, she used her heart in an ancient ritual. And that ritual brought HER back into the world.

Or, to speak more in game terms, she brought YOU into the world.

Finding yourself in this godless world, you quickly decide to fill the gap. Now, quickly, while the lands are still fractured and confused.

But you are not the only one who had this idea.

Mechanically, the game is mostly there. The screenshots you see on the Steam page are not mocks. They are the actual working game. BUT the content itself as in "the missions", "story" etc are still in the super early stages. I barely began writing anything other than a few test missions and the tutorial.

The art is still very much not there yet. There are a billion things I still have to draw. Including tens of relics, 20 more followers, mission banners and the whole UI.

The UI especially is eating a lot of time. Because I just learned how to draw, I can barely manage to balance the level of detail in a single drawing. But the UI is tens of drawings all next to each other. I did not include any of the actual UI in the Steam page screenshots, but I will give you a hint here:

It will be something like this. It is still very much work in progress. But you get the idea. What I struggle with now is that it looks a bit busy. Maybe because of the big frame decorations.

This page is the only one I was able to get fully drawn. The rest still look like the Steam page.

But I was also working on the dialogue box. And here's a mock of that:

Again, very much work in progress.

Sadly, I am working on all these 100% alone and I am still learning to draw. My skills are pretty sloppy. So I have to redo stuff multiple times. For example, I drew Een and Miriam first. Rati, the one above was among the last followers I made. And I am happy to see how much my skills have improved by drawing for at least 8 hours every single day for the past month or so. But I am not happy that I now have to redraw my earlier pieces.
You can clearly see how my ability to pick colors, compose a piece and make believable perspective clearly went up. But this now makes Miriam look bad in comparison. So yeah, I'll need to redraw her. Especially since she is the second most important character.

While looking at these pieces, especially UI you might think it looks familiar. Even more so if you've played Hades. You might even think that some dude who likes Anime decided it would be faster to adapt an existing style than to develop his own from scratch. And you'd be pretty much spot on with that assessment.

If you haven't read any of my previous devlogs, you probably don't know that two years ago I was incapable of drawing a straight line. And even making a stickman was a level 1000 challenge. But I really really really wanted to make a game. So I made Blood in the Panopticon in a way that required as little art as possible. But during that time, I kept working on my drawing skills. I did not really draw much for myself, I just studied and studied and then studied again. I'd have a small sketchbook with me on the subway, I would draw during every little break I had, even if it was just a pile of three cubes. A lot of people kept telling me to give up and just use AI "like everyone else", but alas, I persevered. And now I can finally make the art myself with no one and no AI involved.

Now back to Hades. As my entire art learning process was on 100% fast-forward, I decided that it would take too long to develop my own rendering style from scratch. So I started looking long and hard for a style I could take as a starting point. A style that relied on big shadows, simple details and bold colors. I am not a huge Hades fan (I did enjoy the first game though), but their artstyle really fit the bill for what I needed. So I used it as a reference for the early pieces I made and then I kept building myself on top of that. I am still super far off quality-wise. Like, I constantly feel like I am actively disgracing all their amazing work with my poor attempt at copying them. But the alternative was waiting one more year to make the game. And I didn't really want to do that.

Some other inspirations I had for the game were Paradox games. Especially Crusader Kings. For the menus and the map mainly.

Speaking of Crusader Kings, what I really loved in that game was the role play aspect and the scheming. So I tried borrowing A LOT from that into Awaken. The way you progress in the game is by extending your influence in nearby provinces. Then, taking control of them through a series of missions. Expect to have to bribe, assassinate, embezzle, manipulate and more.

The UI is also heavily inspired by Paradox games. I "borrowed" a lot of principles from their map design, unit movement and other systems. As well as a lot of UI ideas. Stuff like nested tooltips:

This mock UI you are seeing in these screenshots is also inspired by their more modern designs. But this will be replaced with the illustrated stuff I showed earlier. Back to influence. Once you get to 25% influence in a province, you gain a "Foothold" there. This basically means that your cult has a direct operations network in the province. And you can now start taking Control of the province.

But there will be opposition.

And I think this is going to be the coolest part of the game. As you influence provinces and attempt to infiltrate their leadership structures, factions owning those provinces will become suspicious. And they will start investigating you. When you start the game, you are unknown. So you gain the element of surprise. But if you fail to keep this advantage, you will have to face a whole lot of trouble. Other factions will not wait idly for you to snatch their provinces. They will come at you with everything they have. And they will even come FOR YOU! That is an easy way to get a game over. So try not to get assassinated.

I spoke a lot about doing this or that. But how do you do those things?

Well, you have this system inspired by the Garrison from Warlord of Draenor. Where you select a mission, chose which followers to send, review your chances then wait a certain amount of real world time for the expedition to complete.

But the outcomes are super D&D-like. All your followers have stats and traits. And those influence how the party tackles certain challenges.

What does this mean?

It means that outcomes like "The bard charmed the Dragon and they are now in love" are entirely possible.

Lately I've been playing a lot of Fire Emblem whenever I have a bit of spare time. And I really really like the combat there. So I decided to put that into the game as well. I know it is a huuuuugse case of feature creep, but it will really spice up the gameplay. So I'd say it's worth it.

I did not include this part in the Steam page yet for one reason I am going to mention now before going into details about how the combat works. The three friendly characters are AI generated based on the portraits I made. The three enemies, ground and misc assets (stones and trees) are 100% AI generated. These are all mockups I used to help me decide on zoom levels, chose the intensity of shaders, design the interactive elements etc. NONE OF THESE ASSETS WILL BE PRESENT IN THE FULL GAME.

Ok, that out of the way, what is this combat and how does it work?

If you played Fire Emblem, especially the new one... that's it, more or less. You choose characters, give them orders and once you exhaust your action points, it's the enemy's turn. I am still thinking about ways to add some spice to this system. But as you can see above, it is still in the prototype phase.

Not all missions will have a combat encounter like this. Most of them will be just your characters throwing skill check rolls. But some quests will either have a climactic fight fight at the end or will have a surprise fight that came about because one of your followers did something stupid. Or something too smart for their own good.

The combat will be punishing!

Characters can become wounded for multiple days following a fight, they can get captured, requiring a subsequent mission to free them and might even defect to the enemy side.

To increase your influence you will need cultists to spread it for you. But those cultists need to be recruited from the lands you control. So the more your influence spreads, the more cultists you can recruit and the more influence you can spread. Followers sent on Expeditions will aid this process too.

So you will be building your dominions, spreading them across the map and then reaping the rewards. These dominions will have synergies so the way you place them will help increase your cultist output. But more on that another times as this system is still int he prototype phase and the assets are still super basic placeholders.

The game takes place 30 years after the Great Calamity that ended both the Thousand-Year War, the World Empire and Lyfrith's Rebellion.

Some info that will make no sense now but is super important for a future title I have planned: This is around 30 years before the Emelrith "Eris" is found. Leto de Frias Emir is still in Scynthia and Seville de Castillo, the future Lady of Light, is not yet born.

Lessia

The continent the story takes place on is called Lessia, the easternmost land. And your goal is to take over Lower Lessia, the Southern half of the continent.

During the Great War, this area saw incredible devastation as it was mostly abandoned by the Empire's forces which pulled North to protect the Arch. In current times, the Arch became the Holly See of the Church of the Light. And the city of Villiera became the Holly Capital.

The Church of the Light

They are aiming to rebuild the world and reinstall the Golden Law of the World Empire in a new form. Much of their structure and the way they present themselves is borrowed from the World Empire. So many see them as a return to order.

The Monsters

During the war, Lyfrith's power came from his ability to twist and reform life. After his death, these creations remained without a master and now roam the lands for their own destructive wishes.

Scynthia

At the other end of the world lies a vast continent full of peoples and cultures... and undead warlords fighting over every bit of land. To escape the indiscriminate destruction the masterless Deathlords are unleashing, Scynthians have been fleeing in droves to Lessia. Most of them end up on Merry's Approach Peninsula. And then they remain stuck before the great walls of Saint Seviniero Cathedral which stand like a wall between two mountains.

Many of the followers you will be able to recruit will be Scynthian refugees.

This is an older map I made for a D&D campaign happening about 3-4 thousand years after the events of this game. On the Left is Lessia and the right is Scynthia. None of the names on the map are relevant as those nations do not exist yet. The area in the middle is where Midland and The Seat of Power used to be. But it sank during the Calamity, leaving only a bunch of scattered islands.

I will not go into more detail here. This was just a little taste. I am planning on making more posts on the lore and the characters you will meet. I will not spoil anything. I want you to discover the world's secrets as you play and investigate it yourself.

This info might have been a bit incoherent, I know. But I just wanted to get these details out. I will keep updating the Steam page as more features start taking shape.