End of year roundup and the road ahead
END OF YEAR ROUNDUP AND THE ROAD AHEAD
Greetings adventurers!
Wow, 2019 is nearly behind us and a new decade is about to begin!
Over the last 12 months both Redemption's Guild and Unlit Games have undergone massive changes. We bought our first office space, located in Cary, NC. We have added some amazing team members to the Redemption's Guild team and also started to build new teams for our two unannounced projects which may be launching in 2020 as well!
2019
Completed Base Astral Shard System
We completed our base Astral Shard System (which I just realized is abbreviated as A.S.S. oh goodness...) What is the Astral Shard System? If you weren't aware one of the many ways that Redemption's Guild is unique is we have chosen to separate gear aesthetics from gear stats right off the bat. If you've played any MMOs you know that typically after the game launches the highest requested feature is some form of aesthetic changing for gear. Example: I just got the gear with stats I want but I hate how it looks and I want to go back to my last piece.
So what we've done is completed cut out the middle man and instead of spending any form of currency in game to switch aesthetics you can do so endlessly (and for free) at the wardrobe/mirror found in the Tilnu Tavern bedrooms. This now leaves the questions of, how do stats work? Over the course of your adventures through the continent of Stellaria you will loot or find merchants who you can purchase astral shards from. These little shards have their own individual stat assigned to them with varying degrees of rarity; common, uncommon, rare, and epic.
Once you have an Astral Shard you'd like to equip simply go back to the tavern and in the command center you will find a unique looking altar with a large astral shard chained down to it. Once you're within proximity the chained astral shard will rise up at your presence, and you can begin to place Astral Shards from your inventory into the 5 shard slots found around the altar. As of pre-alpha these shards are account based, but either prior to early access (currently scheduled for Q1 '20) or soon after, we plan on making these astral shard loadouts class based instead. This would allow you to focus on having a healing loadout for Cleric and a DPS loadout for Rogue without needing to change out shards during each class switch.
Changes To A.I. and Arena
We've done another large overhaul to enemies to make them feel more dynamic and challenging. Enemies will now dodge and duck and if in danger enemies may run away to save their lives or may even trick players into thinking they are running away just to lead them into an ambush.
We've also finished adding in the Areda Arena. This will be your first arena challenge that you'll be able to experience when first playing Redemption's Guild. You will face various enemies that constantly change each play through, and will be followed by bosses after each set of rounds. The arena will scale in difficult each round and also for each player in your party. To help you remain an egomaniac we've also added in a "Highest Round" tracker so you can show off to your friends!
And Much More...
We've done so much work over 2019 that there is no way we could even scratch the surface in explaining all we've done, but here we go. We've also:
- Nearly completed all the Voice Acting for early access
- Added in tons of new spells and enemy spells
- Notebook is almost 100% complete with all it's various systems, including ability buying, account rank passives, and class ability loadouts
- New stat system
- Stat balancing
- First live Twitch stream
- More networking tweaks
ROAD AHEAD - 2020
Unlit Games has some big things planned for 2020. First, we have more Twitch streams planned, be sure to follow us on Twitch!
Our first Ambassador Demo is planned for January of this year as well! If you're a content streamer be sure to apply for the program on our website!
We are still planning for a Q1 '20 Early Access release for Redemption's Guild, of course this means that full launch will be arriving in the months to follow. Which will include great features like: PvP, more maps, a larger hub where you can interact with more players, and much more!
Our purple tier founders will have access to PC VR beta demos in the following months as well. If you haven't picked up your founder tiers be sure to grab them while you can here!
New Projects
We won't go into many details at this point but we do have 2 new unannounced projects we are currently working on which may fall into a 2020 release date as well! All we can currently share at this moment is one of them is a VR sci-fi shooter with a unique game mode we have never seen in VR before. The other is a mature 2D platformer that revolves around over the top violent action and strong mature humor. I do want to note though that these games DO NOT interfere with Redemption's Guild progress as they have their own small teams allocated to them.
Photo below is concept art of sci-fi vr shooter and 2d platformer.