Forged of Blood Kickstarter Progress

The Kickstarter campaign for Forged of Blood doesn’t appear to be doing too well. After roughly a month, with another one to go, the campaign has so far managed to gather only $17,866 of the required $150,000. What’s important to note here is that the game was in production long before Kickstarter and is quite likely to get finished regardless.

Here’s a Developer Talk video that describes the game’s setting.

And this one, talks about creating a new world.

And in case you prefer your information text-based, here’s an excerpt from an article on worldbuilding in Forged of Blood:

So this post is one that is long overdue, and one that is a little out of the intended order, but here nonetheless.

A couple weeks before the studio officially formed, Joe had approached me to see if I would be interested in creating a fantasy world for a game – one of my choosing, with magic, weird creatures, the works – and naturally I said “oh sweet lord almighty yes.”

World building the world of Attiras for Forged of Blood was perhaps one of the most fun aspects of the development phase so far – to me anyway – and I went in with a ton of ideas as to the world I wanted to make – some grandiose, some totally weird, and some that actually went into the world. My biggest challenge for the world, was balancing my desires as a writer with the limitations that will come with translating this imaginary world into a game we can actually produce within our modest budget, but let’s start from the beginning.

First, I outlined the broad goals that I wanted to have in the world – knowing from the start that I wanted the player character to be something other than human and to explore the intricacies of a multi species society. That means creating or borrowing from the other traditional fantasy races like elves and dwarves, and extrapolating where the big points of contention might be in a world where these races lived together. I also knew that I wanted to set the game at a point in time after some sort of world shattering event that had created a new balance of power. Whether through a natural disaster, orchestrated genocide, or great war, I wanted this event to be a defining moment in the history of this world where an entire race is supplanted by another.

With the goals set, I went back to the team and discussed how we want to approach the characters and combat. Are we playing heroes or soldiers? Do we want the player to feel powerful, weak, or on par with the enemies? And on what scale do we want the player’s actions to impact? After some back and forth, we ultimately decided on the idea of powerful heroes: characters who exhibit physical and other powers beyond that of a human being and in doing so allow the player to feel powerful. We also loved the idea of “kingmaking” but wanted the setting to be more a struggle to power over just kingdom management.

Back at the drawing board (well Google Doc actually), I went with making the future player’s character race one a hybrid humanoid who shares some of the natural enhancements of an ancient race and highly superior physical attributes. This inherently led to me conceptualizing a new race with unique physical characteristics, which I called the the Volgisi as a baseline and an exploration what the rules of “magic” might be in this setting.