Ash of Gods Update #23

The latest Ash of Gods Kickstarter update leads us to a Developer Diary for this Banner Saga-styled RPG that talks about the game’s visual and audio effects, AurumDust’s creative process, the game’s localization progress, and more. We also learn that the game is almost ready to be released and unless some unexpected issues arise in the nearest future, Ash of Gods should hit its expected March 2018 launch window. An excerpt:

Why is there so much text in the game

Now the game has 230,050 Russian (249,355 English words). 1/4 of this amount is in the main story. In the storylines of the three protagonists, there are a little less than three and a half hundred events which happen to them on the road and about a hundred possible battles.

In one playthrough you will encounter about 25-35 fights and about a hundred events. Most of the events will allow you to avoid fighting if you want. And we tried to ensure that every game dialogue allowed you to “cut” through the dialogs, omitting the lore, if you are not interested in it.

The game is a large interactive book and if you want a visual novel. Probably you have played something similar in your childhood? Yes, this is a niche story and now, after the first wave of press reviews, I get nervous every time. Nobody had complained so far and that is worrying – when there are complains – it is clear what you need to work on. What to do when the game is prased is not clear. I still can not believe that we did it right. You see, even the characters in the profile turned away and are nervous?

We have promised 12-14 hours for one playthrough – in fact, according to the first tests, the full playthrough will take you about 18 – 24 hours. The spread depends on the route that you will choose the map – the slowest way will take about 31 hours. Most of the time – in battles. About 50% of this time is spent on battles, 15% on management of the routes on the map and 35% on reading dialogs and quests. However, if you do not want to go deep into the lore – every lower variant of answers in dialogs allows them to be reduced to the minimum, receiving only a fraction of it. And in the story hubs, you can choose only the “red” (important) icons – this will reduce the text part by 2/3.

Instead of an afterword

Dmitry Erokhin and Sergey Malitsky completed the last set of events for all the protagonists on the map. The last set is 104 events that can happen to our heroes on the road. This is the last batch of text to be translated. We drew, assembled and tuned all the scenes of Feng – this week we will begin to include them in the main stream of the game and test. It looks like a small feat, when the war is almost over – now everything needs to be done “yesterday” and the guys outdid themselves with this part of the work.

Now the game is assembled and running on PC, Mac, Linux (Ubuntu, SteamOS) and takes 2.7 GB of space on the disk. We are doing our best to complete the multiplayer – we add levelling up, prizes, clans, ratings. PvP part should be ready in March.