Grimshade Update #30 – New Gameplay

The developers behind Grimshade, a turn-based JRPG-inspired role-playing game, have been fairly quiet over the past few months, but now this new Kickstarter update shows off some fresh gameplay and lets us know what’s been going on with this project. In short, due to some publisher-related complications, Grimshade is now set to launch sometime in spring 2019, with a closed beta build coming soon.

You can check out a fresh gameplay trailer below:

And here’s the update itself:

Hello everyone!

We’re here with the long-awaited update, and we’re eager to tell you about the current state of Grimshade.

In short:

• We had some negotiations with a publisher, but it didn’t work out well. Grimshade’s destiny is in our own hands.
• Grimshade will see the light in spring, 2019. We’ll announce the exact release date later.
• Closed beta build is coming soon.
• Brand new gameplay trailer is ready. Check our Youtube channel!

In more detail.

Speaking about all this story with a publisher, it didn’t work. Business is business. But this six months of deafening silence allowed us to delve deeper into the development, reuniting the team around the game. It was enough time for us to believe in ourselves and be ready to put everything on the line now. And on the release day, we’ll be sure that we did our best for Grimshade. How did we end up like this?

First, even with the outsource boost, we didn’t have time to finish the game till November. The game wasn’t ready — still unpolished, buggy and messy it didn’t suit our final vision as Grimshade should be. So, there were two ways: to go in Early Access in November or to postpone the release to improve the quality.

In the course of history, there have been precedents of great RPGs successfully existing in the EA stage and after (we double-checked this), but we didn’t want to walk this path. The story that is told by Grimshade deserves to be perceived entirely, from the first playthrough, not overshadowed by any imperfections. Also, we’ve already got some improvements and commitments, deferred to the Enhanced edition and consoles. Cutting the game for EA purposes would be a crime.

Choosing the quality side, we decided to postpone the release until 2019 and got some extra time. And then the fun began.

Somewhere after the end of the Kickstarter campaign, a long period of decay and despair started — illness of crucial employees, general fatigue, some dismissals and the smashing success of the board game Deus lo Vult, a Kickstarter campaign we were strictly involved. Numerous events captured our minds and madeGrimshade feel like an unloved child. Needless to say, the work was not going so smoothly as it should.

By the autumn there was a radical change of mood — rejecting all the past difficulties the whole studio reunited around our main idea to bring it to an end. Finally, make a great game of our dreams. Which was, by the way, almost finished.

First, we analysed the game from the game design perspective… and remade it completely. Characters have changed beyond the recognition, losing part of their abilities and acquiring new ones. The army of monsters become more diverse, brutal and savage. And in general, the combat part of the game has become much more demanding to the level of your tactical skill.

Time has shown that our artists are the most diligent division in the studio. With a little rest on vacation, they plunged on the improvement of everything they met on their way. Some locations which were designed a long time ago were brought to the overall style of the game — dark Umbrage Weald became even darker.

As for the 3D part, we can say only one thing — we adore our new 3D-lead, who’ve joined our company in early autumn. That’s the fact. Without his help, we could barely achieve half of today’s progress.

After the new year holidays, there was some respite. Each person in our team played Grimshade and gave their feedback. Do you know what the best part is? Although the list of bugs and edits took our QA a week to analyse (in addition to ongoing fixes), everyone loved the game!

Then we’ve faced the big deal — narrative and localisation components. During the reconstruction of the plot and the whole history of Grimshade’s world, we managed to come up with some pretty good DLCs (hope we will be able to bring them to life). Then, ceasing to be distracted, we collected all the places and cutscenes from the game which requires immediate intervention and half of the studio became writers. For today:Grimshade lives in Russian and English versions. The next localisation for implementation is German.

Now it’s the marketing time, where we had our hands tied to the utmost.[…]

And only the untested tutorial part withholds us from the completion of Closed Beta build. At first, we’ll send it to you, our backers and use it in playtests.

Yeah, and we totally forgot about the release date. Two things stop us from setting the exact date: an insufficient number of wishlists and the need to show the game to outside players and to hear their opinion. As soon as we get the first significant results, we will think about it. However, we won’t postpone it further than the spring of 2019.

Two years of game development taught us that things aren’t always going according to a plan. Well, at least we have this. Even if the plan looks well-developed. But despite everything, the quality of the game is our top priority, and we keep working in this direction. Thank you for supporting us!

Unfortunately, we don’t have a universal recipe or any “Preparing the indie game’s release in a month for dummies” books, so we are counting on your help. Tell your friends about Grimshade in social networks, add the game to the wishlist (although we will send you the key anyway) and don’t hesitate to leave us a couple of valuable tips and your feedback — together we could make Grimshade better!