Tainted Grail: Conquest – Early Access Recap

Last month, Awaken Realms Digital released their “roguelike” Arthurian deckbuilding RPG Tainted Grail: Conquest. And now, they bring us this Steam announcement that takes a look back at the game’s early access journey and shares the team’s future plans. Check it out:

Hey everyone! As it turns out, today is the anniversary of the game’s first appearance in Early Access! Looking back, it feels really crazy how the game’s changed since that time – and that we’ve been able to finally release it and hear so many positive things from you about it! So thank you for being with us back then – and if you weren’t, today we have a quick ride down the memory lane to the early state of Conquest – and an amazing wrap-up written by lMaltel on our Wiki page.

But before we get to memories and more details about our plans for the future, here’s a VERY SHORT tl;dr of what’s currently happening with Conquest:

• Soon: a big patch with fixes, changes, balancing, and first translations. It’s available NOW on the BETA branch of the game for members of our Discord server.
• Within the next few months: a big update containing optimization (making the game run better/smoother), new content (cards, passives, enemies, etc.), and game modes.

For more info about what’s coming: check the section for “plans for the future” below.

BUT getting back to the retrospective…

So, originally, Tainted Grail PC was announced as a bonus for backers of the Kickstarter for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon in 2018. It started slowly – with one programmer, one artist, working on the core of it all – and the game was slowly growing in scope because Awaken Realms didn’t want to make a simple board game conversion. By April 2019 the team kept growing and so in December 2019 we’ve released a 2-3 hour long pre-alpha demo of the digital game’s story campaign. It was available to Kickstarter backers and we wanted to share it mostly to hear what they think – and it was generally received very, very well.

After receiving literally thousands of comments about the campaign and reevaluating what we can and what we should do, we were going home for the Holidays to think about how to approach the development of the game in the new year. However, before the year was over, we came up with a new idea: to make a separate game mode, something similar to a boss rush, which will contain only the battles and release it in order to get as much feedback as possible and balance the combat systems.

The only change we wanted to make was to move the entire combat into 3D. And so, in January 2020 we’ve started working on the game’s campaign AND what eventually became Conquest. We knew there’s a lot we want to change and fix in the way that the game plays and feels, so, essentially, we’ve started rebuilding the entire game from scratch.

We’ve moved from a sculpted map into a generated tile-based map. We’ve changed the scale of the world. We started our shift to 3D combat. And so on… And as we were fixing and changing, well, the “game balancing mode” kept growing.

By April we’ve had “some” things already “working”. Here’s the first version of our 3D combat – damn, this brings memories! 😀

But we knew that the work on the game’s campaign will still take a long, long, looooong time – and that our tools weren’t ready to handle this task. We wanted to release the balancing mode, though, and this brings us to June 18th 2020 – exactly a year before today when we released Conquest to the public.

Conquest kept growing. And when it was growing it kept breaking the game’s campaign. We’ve been rebuilding and fixing the same campaign demo a couple of times – and at some point we decided to just let it go. We couldn’t maintain it and we had no plans to expand it in its state – and since Conquest was getting really big, we felt at some point that it truly deserves to stand on its own. And so, late last year, we decided to split the products into two different things on Steam.

We’ve learned a lot, we’ve grown, and now we know what we’re able to do. It’s been an amazing ride and we have YOU to thank for being here with us, and supporting us on that journey.

And, as promised, I’ll redirect y’all to our Wiki for more detailed info and a lot of cool stuff compiled by lMaltel.

Check it out HERE!

Seriously! It’s full of amazing data, memories, anecdotes and some really old screenshots 😀

Plans for the Future

And here’s a quick breakdown of what’s happening with Conquest right now.

• First translations are available as a beta to folks on our Discord server – we’ve given access to a beta branch containing German, French, and Polish translations to the members of our Discord server. The translations are almost done (still missing around 200 texts in German/French) but they still requires some polishing.
• We’re hard at work on making the game run smoother – we finally had some time to sit down and look back at things we’ve been doing in order to find mistakes in our approaches to certain things. I’d have to throw here a lot of technical jargon in order to explain this, but all in all, we’re currently in the process of making the game run smoother and being less taxing on various PCs. This means that we’re tweaking pretty much every model we have in the game – so this will take a while, but we’re already seeing a lot of improvements performance-wise.
• We’re fixing and polishing various things – there are some things in the game which we aren’t happy about and we’re currently in the process of fixing or improving on them. These can be rather small (we’re differetiating summon models between Moonring classes so you’ll get a skeletal wyrm for your Necromancer soon!) or quite big, as in “rewriting a part of the codebase to work with [something that programmers understand & will be crucial in the future].
• We’ve started thinking about some new content – we want to add new cards, passives, and enemies to the game – but it’s going to take a while!
• We’ve started working on small events – in the coming months we want to add very simple events to the game – simple rule changes that will make it surprising and challenging for players who’ve maxed it out already!
• We’ve started working on a new game mode – but I’m not going to spoil it just yet, but what we can say right now is that it will be tailored to the needs of people who couldn’t care less about the game’s storyline and aren’t all that much interested in map exploration.
• We’ve started work on the SOUNDTRACK – based on the popular demand we’ve already started thinking about releasing the game’s soundtrack. HOWEVER this will take A LONG WHILE because our in-game tracks need to be adapted to the “soundtrack format”, and we don’t want to rush it. And our sound designer is taking some well-deserved time off soon, so, you know. But it is coming, eventually! And, since we can, we want to release quite a lot of music, not something like “5 tracks and we’re done”, but – for example – also an “ambient-like” album for y’all tabletop RPG folks who need some background music and were asking us about ambients from Tainted Grail 🙂
• We’ve started researching what needs to be done in order to make the game available on different platforms – for now, we’re waiting for GeForce Now to accept us into their service (hopefully soon!), and we’re researching what needs to be done in order to run the game natively on Mac and Linux. We’ve also started chatting about possible console ports but please note that this WILL take a LONG while so we’re not promising anything yet! (It’s not entirely up to us.)

And we still have some more things to talk about, but we’re going to wait a little while before writing about them 🙂

So, once again, thank you all for being here with us and for your patience! Remember to join our Discord server if you want to check out the BETA branch or just chat with us & all the amazing people in our community who are there!