Huge Update on Lore, Survey Results & Stretch Goals
Mark Yohalem of Primordia Fame will be Creating Lore for That Which Sleeps!
Now this is exciting!
Co-founder of Wormwood Studios, Mark Yohalem has written stories for numerous computer games, most recently the award-winning adventure game
Primordia . In addition to writing and designing games, Yohalem has published dozens of short stories, poems, and articles on game design.
Mark will be working with us to help define some of the Lore and History present in the world and scenarios that occur in That Which Sleeps. We will look to Mark to bring his signature flair and story-telling depth while also maintaining the concise descriptive work necessary for a strategy game. Brevity, as they say, is the soul of wit - and Mark is one witty fellow.
He has already created a thematic phrasing of our first scenario, The North Burns, that we are eager to share with you all once we can give it the supporting assets it deserves.
You can follow Mark on
Twitter or check out his upcoming RPG,
Fallen Gods.
Survey Results
In what was probably the most poorly designed survey in the history of surveys, we asked our backers how they felt about us approaching stretch goals and add-ons. We had over 600+ responses (which is amazing) and I'll give a glimpse of the data below.
Please note that we read every single write in comment as well and they gave us some great ideas.
So we had a few major take-aways from this survey:
Our backers want more content - and there was a fair split of what type of content they wanted, but they were most interested in additional Agent types and an additional playable Old One.
Scenarios, minions / heroes, and the race pack were less desirable, though more than half of respondents were still interested in additional races.
Very few respondents were interested in a mobile release, the comments suggested they were more interested in a fully fleshed out experience on the PC.
Only 3 (!) respondents were not interested in stretch goals at all.
So it's pretty safe to assume we'll be adding some content related stretch goals very soon.
Add-Ons
The add-ons survey was much more cut and dry. Less than 10% of respondents were interested in add-ons and more than 30% said they would not be interested in any of the add-ons we suggested. We may consider revisiting this over the last couple days of the campaign depending on how well received our stretch goals are.
What's Next?
We'll be going into much further detail about procedural generation over this coming weekend, expect screenshots and an abundance of descriptive text explaining what we will be accomplishing with this stretch goal.
We will also be releasing the second part of our Modding Dev Log, followed shortly thereafter by an intense video of gameplay in order to hunt down our contest winner's event.
As for Stretch Goals, we had to do some soul searching to figure out if any of the other features that we had once envisioned as a part of That Which Sleeps should be re-introduced. We decided that with the amount of features already on our plate it would be best to put as much polish as possible on the fantastic goals we have already achieved.
What does that mean? It means that we will be setting stretch goals for greater Art and Animation Assets as well as additional content that the community decides on.
Expect to be voting in the near future on some of our Agents and Old Ones that we originally originally omitted when we cut the list to 16 (some of these are really fun).
In addition, each of these new stretch goal thresholds we surpass will bring the world increasingly to life, adding animated caravans and farmers to simulate the prosperous kingdoms going about their business or at the other extreme refugees fleeing the plundered ruins of their homes. We'll also be revealing some of our Tier 1 Rituals that have powerful and lasting in-game effects, and how these thresholds will take their representation to the next level.
As always, thanks for reading our giant wall of text and thank you for all the continued engagement we get here on the comments, via social, and on the message boards.
