First of all, I want to apologize for my radio silence this year. Originally, I intended to write development posts about The Negative on a monthly basis, but as you can see, that didn’t happen. I’ve decided to write a quick blog post to let everyone know what we’ve been working on, and what to expect from us in the future.

The Negative

We’re still hard at work on The Negative. It feels like I announced this game forever ago, but I still haven’t had the opportunity to show it off very much. The main reason for that is simply because the game is absolutely enormous. There are 13 different environments in the game, and just one of those environments has more assets than all of Siralim 3 combined. The Negative also requires an insane amount of sound effects – for example, when your character walks around in the world, you’ll hear different footstep sounds depending on what type of surface you’re walking on.

However, another reason for the delays is because at the start of this year, I decided to start over on development completely. Almost everything about the game will be different compared to when I first announced it. For example, the overworld will now be hand-crafted (rather than randomly generated), and it takes a lot more time to develop a massive world like that. In addition, I’ve designed a bunch of new systems to give the game more depth of gameplay, and also to increase its replay (and post-game) value. Even the main character that you’ll control looks completely different now.

With all of that in mind, I’m still very, very far off from having anything to show you, much less release an Early Access version for you to try out. The biggest roadblock is the sheer number of graphical assets that need to be created for a game of this scope. For that reason, there’s not much I can work on right now because most of the programming is already finished.

That’s the bad news. Now, let’s get to the good stuff.

Siralim CCG

Alongside The Negative, we’re working on a single player, digital, collectible card game that takes place in the Siralim world. It will be available on all the platforms you’ve come to expect from us, and it’s insanely fun. The gameplay is unique, so you don’t need to worry about it being yet another MTG/Hearthstone ripoff or anything like that. In addition, you’ll only need to pay a one-time fee to play the game – we’re not going to sell booster packs or anything predatory like that.

This is the first game we’ve ever created where I’m not the programmer; this time around, I’m working with a programmer named Jay. My role is simply to fund the project, work with Jay on the design process to make sure that everything fits with the Siralim theme, and to ensure that the game is as fun and deep as possible.

The Siralim CCG is pretty far into development at this point, and while we still don’t have a release date to share with you, it will come sooner than you probably think. In the coming months, we’ll show off some gameplay and discuss the game’s core features. We might even have a demo available some time before it hits Early Access on Steam.

Secret Project

So if I’m not programming The Negative or the Siralim CCG, what have I been doing this whole time? Well… working on another game, of course!

I can say with 100% confidence that if you’ve enjoyed the Siralim games, you’re going to adore this game as well. That’s all I can say for now, but I’m planning to announce it before the end of this year and release it some time in 2020. It’s going to be amazing.