Ho-ho-ho, happy New Year, Kindred!

2015 comes to an end and this was a difficult year for our team. In this update, we will reminisce about everything that happened to us in this year and share our plans for the next one; and we have many…

2015

2015 was the year that tested our capabilities. 2014 was more of a preparatory phase, when we were figuring out what we could do, choosing the necessary tools to achieve our goals, and basically planned the game on paper only. This year, however, the team was not only brainstorming, but applying those ideas and putting things into motion.

It will take us a long time to list everything we did; stable game client, combat system, movement system, interactions, server OS, and we linked the game client with the server. All of this works as part of the prototype but these are still separate bits and bobs that will need to be assembled into one whole thing, while also adding missing elements and fixing bugs.

We started 2015 with frequent publications about the game world, factions and the vampire society, while at the same time sharing prototype videos and demos. Of course, it was difficult for us to create a project on this grand of a scale without having any prior experience. Lack of financing also made things more challenging, since we use our own funds, with various team members having to get extra jobs (which does not help with the speed of the development).

To fix the situation we turned to crowdfunding and in March we launched our first campaign on the Russian Boomstarter. We ended up getting twice the initial amount and the team began working on the Kickstarter campaign. This path ended up being thornier than we first expected – launching the project as Russian developers lead to some difficulties and we had to postpone the campaign until November.

And even though this gave us time to create better prototypes, improve the graphics and even almost re-build the previous game version, we did not succeed. Nevertheless, during our Kickstarter campaign, we sent hundreds of press releases to gaming websites all over the world; numerous articles were written about the project, and the number of our community members was growing with each passing day. Therefore, we can’t say that the campaign was a failure, since you are still with us and the team continues to work hard on the game.

Furthermore, we published lots of interesting updates on the project. If you missed any of them, here’s a list of the most notable ones:

Update #2: Day 2 and Society of Night Update #3: Targeting System Update #5: Cyber Monday and Character Archetype Update #6: Cathedral Short Demo Update #8: Cities And Megalopolises Update #9: MMORPG Business Models Update #10: Music and Soundtrack Update #11: User Interface Update #12: Roleplaying and character traits Update #13: Character Creator Update #14: Abilities Update #15: 3 Days To Go

2016

Next year promises to be even more interesting: the team will be launching first testing stages, which will require all of our time and effort. Some of the developers will try to work on the game full-time, regardless of circumstances. This will allow us to construct new builds as soon as possible and improve other components.

To accomplish this task, we decided to continue crowdfunding right here on our website. Each community member can now support the project by buying one of the preorder sets. We will also create unique content for the backers further down the line. As with Kickstarter, we will set numerous stretch goals and the first one will be the replacement of all animation using motion capture with the help of the Xsens equipment and a special studio. If you want to read more about our crowdfunding, click here.

In 2016 the team will be more frequent with our updates; we can’t promise you weekly reports, but we will try and tell you about our progress as much as possible. For example, by reaching the first stretch goal that we mentioned above, we will share videos of us creating new animations and we are full of other ideas too

Finally, here’s a new demo-video, consider this our New Year’s present! A lot of you were discussing the possibility of wandering through the city sewers, and we decided to include this into the game. We promise exciting adventures, random events and unforgettable creatures. Just be patient and stay with us.

Happy New Year, Kindred, may your nights be long and dark!

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