Forged of Blood Progress Update

Two years ago, Critical Forge was a newly founded game dev studio that consisted of six people with some neat ideas. Since then, they’ve almost doubled their employee count, refined and implemented those ideas, and are now just a few months away from releasing their debut project – Forged of Blood, a tactical turn-based RPG. You can read a bit about the studio’s two year journey and the current state of their game in this developer blog post. An excerpt:

Happy Lunar New Year!

Interestingly enough, this year’s date nicely aligns with the studio’s two year anniversary. Two years ago to the day, six of us started this journey in a dusty office space with hand-me-down furniture and a few dozen boxes of electronics. In those first few days we didn’t have a studio name, a game title, or even an internet connection. All we had was a common dream to make something cool, something tactical, and something we can call our own. Yeah, that was cheesy, but honestly it’s hard not to get a little cheesy over something we’ve put our savings and a couple years (so far) of our lives into.

Now, we’re just months away from launching Forged of Blood and the last couple years has been an absolute blur. In that time we’ve built out the team to a studio peak of eleven and have said goodbye to some incredibly talented people as they moved on to other projects. At the end of the day, the game we will launch is a testament to their talent and I could not have been any more grateful to have had the chance to work with them so far.

So while the studio is closed for the Lunar New Year celebrations, I thought it would be nice to see just how far we’ve come. Thing is, while I’ve had this post planned for about a month now… the toughest thing about all this, is the sad fact that we don’t have a lot of “good” photos to look back through – a side effect, no doubt; of crappy office lighting, an old camera phone, and being a bunch of camera shy nerds, but I digress.

As we close on the second year of production, we’re starting to see the intended vision of Forged of Blood take shape. The programmers are busy chasing down our feature list and making sure our layers of mechanical systems are working, while the art side is getting ready to wrap up their side of production and have been looking to potential future content. Our quest lines are being written and rewritten as fast as humanly possible, and little by little we’re seeing the layers upon layers of mechanics come together into something that we’re actually enjoying.

Where once there was chicken scratchings on a whiteboard, we know have realized mechanics tied into multiple layers of gameplay.

[…]

So where are we now?

Well, the programming side is in implementation and clean up mode. It’s tedious, time consuming and often frustrating, but we’re inching our way through. On the art side of things, all of our 3D assets and special visual effects are done – and I’m very happy to say that we’ve exceeded our intended map-count by a comfortable margin. Our solo animator is busy putting together the final few cinematics with 2D assets coming in from the awesome folks over at Caravan Studios. Our music tracks are being finalized, and our custom creature sound effects are in production – leaving only the generic sound effects for us to deal with in the pipeline (one thing at a time…). On the narrative front, we are admittedly lagging – mostly due to the breadth of things pulling me away from it at any given point of the day. However we are making a ton of progress and I’m very relieved to have some solid friends helping me smooth things along there.

Forged of Blood, has been and continues to be one of the greatest challenges in my creative career. I’d like to think that I’ve grown over the last two years of mistakes and daily challenges, and I truly believe that the studio will have something we can be very proud to call our own when it is all said and done. Nevertheless, the coming months will be hard and they will be stressful, I have no doubt of that; but I really hope that collectively we take a moment and look back on where we were just two short years ago. The progress we’ve made is tremendous, and the work we are putting out has been worthy of the very high bar we’ve set for ourselves.

With that, I’d like to close with my sincerest gratitude for every member of our studio – past, present, and future. We’ve done amazing things together and we’ve forged one hell of a game so far. We’re almost there, and I cannot wait to show the world what we’ve done.

To our fans, friends, and families who have cheered us on from the very beginning, seen us through our Kickstarter campaign and the aftermath, and helped us deal with the very real and very challenging stresses of game development – “thank you” is just not enough. We wouldn’t be here without you and we hope to make you all proud with the game we will launch this year, and seriously: thank you.

Finally, to those of you who are just joining us on this journey. Take a moment, have a look, and we hope you like what you see.

Here’s wishing everyone a happy and prosperous new year, and here’s to another year of adventures at Critical Forge.

– Igor