February Devblog - Steam Page Release!

Depicted Above: Belliente looks at a mural of The Lord —his god— in the dark underground of the catacombs of Cervinae. It has been here for a millennium, but was lost during the Civil War. Something tells him that this may be the next step forward in his journey. His horn glows red as he places his golden mask upon his face to see beyond the immediate material. Then from his sidebags, he retrieves scrolls. A small smile creeps onto his face as he becomes one step closer towards understanding The Lord…

Hello and welcome to this month's Devblog! I’m Kai, the director of Schism, and we're just gonna hop into the big news!

STEAM PAGE HAS BEEN RELEASED! 

>>>https://store.steampowered.com/app/2616570/Schism/<<<

Wishlist the game today! That is the best way you can support the theological unicorn deer political intrigue game! 

This is a huge milestone for us as we can finally get our name out there. Not everyone has a Kickstarter account, but we can safely say everyone has a Steam account. Which means that you can now wishlist our game! 

This summer, we will have a playable demo ready for you, including two levels of our game! There is going to be plenty of content to give you a sampling of what our final game will be like! 

We will be at AwesomeCon!

But if you want to get your hands (or hooves if you’re a Cervinian) on an early build, we will be debuting a one-level build of Schism that you can play at Awesomecon from March 13th-15th. We will be located in the gaming hall within the indie section! Look for the big banners and posters that say “Schism!” I’ll be there, and I can’t wait to chat with you all to share more about our game!

Status of the game's development

Now, with the most exciting parts of this month done. Let’s talk about the state of development on Schism. We have the first-level content feature complete, and the core gameplay code is in a very stable state. With many of the fatal bugs that are causing crashes and softlocks to be busted. 

One of the most exciting parts of our development is that Gonderlane, the other narrative designer, and I are currently working on the second act of the game. This act is planned to be the longest one of the game, spanning multiple missions, rife with escalating tensions between the two factions of the game. We’re not going to be spoiling details about it right now, but I will say that it is quite revelatory. 

One of the key challenges that we have been facing is consistent 3D talent. As a volunteer team right now, we have to balance between our full-time responsibilities, our loved ones, and more, yet we remain disciplined towards developing this game. 3D visuals are one of our weaker areas right now, and we’re already addressing the issue by bringing on new talent. We have the narrative done for the levels, we have the basic models, and more. Let me show you what I mean by this with the content in the second level:

This is meant to be an interactive book that you are supposed to mess around with to find something within it. But as you can see, this is the “dev art” stage of development for the second level. But luckily, we have found another talented individual to join the team and start creating prop art. In next month's devblog, we’ll definitely have this book fully rendered and ready to go. 

But compared to where we were this time last year during pre-production, it’s safe to say we have made a huge amount of progress as you can see with the pen alone:

Before:

Now:

We’ve also crushed a lot of bugs riddling our game in the first level in the last month. Along with polishing our build to get it ready for Awesomecon. In total, we’ve squashed 30+ large-scale bugs within the game and made 10+ polishing items on the core game itself, along with overhauling our saving and loading system within the game. I’d say that we’ve made very good progress in improving the stability of the game over the last month, so that we can deliver a kick ass demo for AwesomeCon! 

Final Thoughts

If you’ve read this far, thank you very much! Please be sure to wishlist Schism on Steam! It’s been one hell of a month, and it’s only going to get crazier and crazier as time goes on! With the release of our Steam Page, this marks a new chapter in Schism's development. Be on the lookout in the future for future content, devblogs, and more! 

Until then, ciao!

~Kai, Director of Schism, Founder of Far Owl Studios