SKALD: Against the Black Priory Update – Soundtrack, Twitch Streams and Level Design

The latest development update for Scape-IT’s old-school RPG SKALD: Against the Black Priory invites us to purchase the game’s soundtrack, directs us to the studio’s official Twitch channel, and briefly talks level design. Here are the text bits:

Ahoy there Skald fans! The last weeks have been exciting in the Skald universe: The soundtrack has dropped, I’ve started streaming, gotten some new Skald tools, celebrated my wife’s birthday, gotten my second COVID shot and ran my first marathon!

The Skald Soundtrack is Out

Created by Skald composer and deranged genius Romanus Surt, the Skald soundtrack is now live on Steam!

The music for the game has gotten a lot of attention with it’s dark, unsettling ambience and I highly recommend checking it out. All proceeds from the sale go to Romanus Surt himself and as a great guy and fantastic artist, he truly deserves your patronage and attention.

If you backed Skald on Indiegogo or Kickstarter at “Knight” tier or higher you should have gotten a message from your platform with the Steam key for the album.

Twitch Streams

I’ve recently dipped my toes into streaming Skald development on Twitch and I have to say, so far I really like it. I’ve been coding and doing level design so far on the stream and I really enjoy the company as well as discussing my work process. I’d also love to have you guys tag along for some of my favourite RPGs every once in a while.

It seems like a very low effort way of keeping in touch with the community via video content since it doesn’t require any editing. If you enjoy watching streams, have questions about the Skald or just want to hang out, be sure to follow me on Twitch. I’ll be looking into finding times that work for both me and you guys, but in general I think the idea will be that if I’m working, I’ll consider streaming if what I’m doing might be interesting to follow in any way.

My account name is “Gallian_the_Great” and I’d be super pumped to see if we could get over 50 follows this week!

New Level Tools

I’ve been doing a lot of work on level-design tools and actual level designing this week. In particular I’ve been working on elements of the Horryn village, keep and sewers using my newest level editor tools.

One of the big changes in the new workflow, is the ability to create prefabs of map components and then cut and paste them into new maps. The great thing is that the system works such that if I go back and change the “mother” prefab, the change will cascade to all its children automatically and it makes is a dream to maintain and reuse components.

As an example, the sewer above is made out of prefab corridors and the tunnels above took about six mouse-presses to lay out. The time-savings for areas with a lot of repeating components (such as dungeons) will be huge.

In other words: Beta-testers should start getting ready to explore Horryn and its environs!

Want to see more of the level design process and the Skald tools? Make sure to follow my next Twitch stream for a deep dive!

Until then, have a fantastic day!

AL