A 2017 Update

Hello everyone, it has been a little over a year since Alexander's heart first started having trouble. Earlier this year he underwent a heart procedure to correct the issue, but it seems that the procedure only partially worked and may need to go through it again in the future. Unfortunately I lost my job, (which provided our health insurance) so until I find a new insurance providing job, a second procedure will have to wait.

As a fun side note, we now know that Alexander doesn't understand English while he is under anesthesia and only responds to Russian. I had a feeling it would happen and I warned the anesthesiologist beforehand. My crappy Russian pronunciation skills and Google translate for the win.

In the meantime Alexander has been working at his contract job, but this means that game development is still on hold. This is not a project that will be forgotten. Our world developer Chris has eagerly been building new dungeons in the background.

It is a shame that the hiatus has lasted this long but as John Lennon said: Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.

Radio Silent? What has been happening?

Hey Guys, 

I know it has been quite awhile since you have all heard from us. I wanted to give everyone an update. So after Gameacon, we traveled down to Maryland to stay with Alexander's parents for a few days. On Halloween night, Alexander started having chest pains and I drove him to the nearest hospital where he spent the night in the emergency room. They wanted to admit him in Maryland but he just wanted to get back to Boston. A week later, back in Massachusetts, at the request of his doctor he was in the hospital again. Long story short, he is going to be "ok" but it has affected his health and therefore game development the last few months. We hope to get him healthy enough to return very soon. Until then I am working on our next trailer.

I'm a firm believer in the "Photo or it didn't happen" mentality.

Gameacon

We had an amazing 3 days at Gameacon, in Atlantic City we met a lot of new players who loved the combat mechanics and enjoyed our new combat demo. 

We also made some new friends. Alexander (Alex) and Alexander (Alek) from Schism Worldwide with our own Alexander (Sasha) prove just how many Slavs there are in gaming (and just how common the name Alexander is in those former Soviet countries.)

Like in Boston, we also ran our Legacy of Svarog Arena, at one point we had the top 3 scores battling head to head to get another one of our latex swords from Epic Armoury. We took a few pictures while we were there that you can check out on our Facebook page. I will say though these guys at Gameacon blew away the high scores we got in Boston, maybe it was because Gameacon also hosted a Smash Bros Competition so it brought out a particular type of gamer.




In the end, a latecomer named Mason finished the Legacy of Svarog Arena in the fastest time with 1:25. Mason took home a noble sword by. Vasilisa's daggers were the clear speed winner this round. 

Mason came and not only beat our all time fastest score but also the all time high score over at Schism Worldwide and their game Red Barton and the Sky Pirates.

But probably the most exciting part of the weekend for us was being nominated for not one, not two, but THREE Gameacon awards! Including a Game of the Year nomination.

Boston FIG Recap

Well pretty late a far between when it comes to updates. But better late than never. We came to Boston FIG with a whole new combat demo. Previously we had Yaroslav with sword and Vasilisa with dual daggers as their only weapon choices and you fought in the very first combat section of the story. At Boston FIG we came with all 8 weapon types to try in our new and challenging arena.

While many players said the intro combat was too easy last year (we were of course showing off the very first combat section) with our arena we brought something much more challenging, so challenging in fact that out of hundreds of players that tried to just complete the arena without being defeated was few and far between. Only about 10 players completed the demo. 

But there was a prize to be won. The player who completed the arena in the fastest time walked away with a latex Noble great sword by Epic Armory, That went to Chris P. with the fastest time of 2:01 while using the rapier. 

But talking about our time at Boston FIG wouldn't be complete without mentioning one particular player. Dressed as Kirito from Sword Art Online, This 11 year old young lady desperately played our demo well over 50 times to try and win our sword, and got a very impressive second place at 2:10. We didn't let her leave empty handed. She still received 1 free week of sword fighting classes for her and a friend at Guard Up! in Burlington, MA (which is also where we purchased the sword.) She played until Boston FIG closed the convention and forced her off (we would have let her keep playing)

We did a few Live Feeds through our Facebook page while at Boston FIG. Check them out here. If you want to see more images from Boston FIG and find out where we are showing up next you can check our our festivals page here.

Guard Up! Gets first look after giving the Legacy of Svarog dev team some lessons.

A few months ago we took a private lesson with Jacob at Guard Up who was very knowledgeable in fighting with many types of weapons of that era. After a one hour class Alexander was armed with new knowledge with how to make the weapon fighting as realistic as possible for Legacy of Svarog.

Yesterday we had the pleasure of returning to Guard Up! in Burlington, MA to show them what their Medieval sword fighting lesson has done for Legacy of Svarog. While the school was closed for upgrades we brought the Arena build we are bringing to Boston FIG this weekend and they were the first to give it a try. Needless to say they were quite happy with the realism that most games ignore in their combat.

While there we also purchased a Noble Sword by Epic Armory. A latex and foam LARP sword, hand made in Denmark. The sword will be given away as a prize at Boston FIG to the player who completes our demo in the fastest time.

Guard Up! was also very generous to give us 40 passes for a free week of sword fighting classes as well as some buddy night passes for a player a friend to give away to players who complete the demo or are just all around awesome at Boston FIG.

Hope to see you there!

Dev Diary #5 Quick and Dirty Gameplay video and updated character outfits.

Hey guys, this is Coralee. I created a quick 3 minute gameplay video for our IndieMega Booth submission to Pax East (hope they pick us!). It is a quick explainer video as trailers or fancy fluffy stuff wasn't allowed in the submission. I also figured out what was going on in our last video and why everything wasn't looking as nice as it should have in the end. It was being recorded at 320 px, the default for the new program we were using (Action!) This new one was recorded at 1020px so it is much clearer and doesn't look so pixelated. Chalk it up to using a new program. I edit our videos in Adobe Premier.

Alexander has been working on updating the character model's outfits, you can see his work in progress above in the video. I'll be editing their textures before release. Yaroslav is the only character whose textures are complete. He plans on working on the castle upgrading system next. It will be where you can upgrade your castle walls from wood to stone for example and pay for town services to open up like a dock and smithy. The castle you see in our trailer is the final iteration, when you arrive, you will have very little in ways of a castle for Kazakrom. 

This is Kazkrom's end result minus the services.

He will also be doing the halberd animations soon. It is what almost everyone in the demo wants to pick when we are at shows. Go big or go home.

Gameacon, Atlantic City Recap, New Demo now available

We had a great time in Atlantic City for the first ever Gameacon. We had a brand new demo to show off with a new audience though we had some people come by who saw us at Boston FIG and said that they loved how much the game had changed and improved since they last saw it.

There were quite a few characters in New Jersey. We had uploaded to our facebook page a player of the day for each of the 3 days of the show. Ms. Curtis was our player of the day for day 1. Her run and scream method worked really well for her, she beat the demo.

Run, Scream, Repeat = win

We found out something interesting about the New Jersey players vs the Boston players we didn't expect. The people in NJ were nicer to the prince. Most of the players in Boston told Prince Volga to "Sod off" in our demo and only 2  dissed the prince in New Jersey. 

Boston has no love for the monarchy.

Check us out on Indie DB, follow us and give our new demo a try, you can submit suggestions and bug find in our IndieDB forum, If you like what you see consider voting for us for Indie Game of the year on Indie DB. We would be eternally grateful and love to hear everyone's feedback.

Now for some more pictures from Gameacon, more can be found on our site.

Our friend from SWDTech games checking out Legacy of Svarog.