Update from Stephane
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Jun 12, 2024 at 05:41:58 PM

Wow, has it really been 5 months!? Sorry to those of you who solely rely on Kickstarter for updates, but the truth is, I have been pretty quiet on Discord as well. The silence has been a combination of workload, studio struggles and stress management. It’s been a very busy and challenging 5 months to say the least, but we’ve come out of it stronger than before and we continue to make great progress on World of Anterra. The recent comments and criticism about our communications here has me re-evaluating my approach to Kickstarter updates. As you all know, I am the founder and game director at 81monkeys, and that means all marketing and communications falls on my shoulders along with all the other work that comes with running a studio and leading a development team. It can be easy at times to push off things that seem less important while focusing on keeping the team funded and busy making World of Anterra… but this has definitely been left for far too long! As for re-evaluating my approach. I have been working on another large update, but it’s clear that this isn’t working for some community members, so I’ve decided to break it up into 3 smaller updates and stagger their releases. And going forward, I will be working on much smaller updates.

My sister Sasha has recently taken over our comment section, so please be nice to her! She will make sure that all your feedback is shared with the team. I will continue replying to things myself as well and we will start signing off on our comments and DMs so you know who you’re talking to. Also, Sasha will help me with some of the smaller updates.

So why so long between updates? Well, it turns out that keeping us on track has become quite the fight... In fact, it has become the fight of my life! A fight that requires creativity, sacrifice, and sheer grit. A fight that takes a toll on my mental health. I could write a book about all the challenges we have overcome to get to this point, but the biggest challenge has been keeping us funded while also growing the team to help get WoA out sooner than later. Thankfully I have been able to find investors who will fund us on our terms, but that hasn't been enough… So I had to get creative! Last year, we started negotiating for a large work-for-hire contract and it took way longer than expected, about 5 months to be exact. It took a lot of effort and time, and almost caused us to run out of money… but we signed the deal! This project is the perfect side gig for us! It only requires about half our team and gives us the funds to grow as we push towards completing WoA. I wish I could share more about this project, but we’re under very strict contracts that prevent us from saying anything about it. All I can say is that it’s expected to be done before the end of the year. As you can guess it has slowed down WoA a bit, but thankfully the rest of the team has picked up the slack!

Now, let’s talk World of Anterra updates! Here’s the first of a three part series of catch up updates.

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Continued bug fixing and polish 🪳🐜

Bugs may not be the most glamorous topic, but it’s very important to us and we know it’s important to you as well. We work hard to keep the bug list as short as possible because bugs are like game development debt, and you’re going to have to deal with it sooner or later. This is a trap that many studios fall into, especially when you have strict deadlines. But it’s even more important as we work towards releasing our backer demo. We have a few methods for tackling our bug list, but the most important is our gameplay “smoke test”. A smoke test is a list of gameplay moments lined up with how a typical gameplay session would look, while touching upon all the core features and UI in the game. It’s essentially the ideal way that we think you will play the game. As the tester works the gameplay session they track all the bugs they find and turn them into tickets for the team, and the bugs seem to never stop coming… but just a few weeks ago, we had our first bug free smoke test! This is a huge milestone for the team.

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Hunger, rations and edibles 🍗🍖

This system requires some strong design elements in order for it to work with the rest of the game. We knew that we didn’t want hunger and rations to become its own micro-management system that adds friction to the game. And we also know that it is an important part of the open-world gameplay loop that we’ve designed.

Each party member has their own rations pack, that they will automatically consume food from.

Like everything in WoA, it’s not as simple as it may seem. Integrating hunger and edible items into the game comes with its own unique challenges. For example, we want ration consumption to be an automated process, so party members just eat when they need to and the player only has to worry about keeping the party's rations topped up. 
 

And we also want the player to control what each party member is able to consume. There are a few reasons for this. Let’s say you had a quest to feed 5 apples to a pet pig, but then your drunken bard eats them before you get to the pig… or maybe you’re in a dungeon and start to run out of food and want to control who gets any hunger debuffs so that you can increase your odds of surviving combat on your way out. Our solution to all this was to design a rations pouch for each party member that the player can keep stocked with food while also being able to easily distribute food among the party. So items like meals that give buffs or quest items can be left in the inventory and manually eaten while items in each party member’s ration pack will be automatically eaten.

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Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for part 2. 

Here’s a sneak peek from our next update! 👀

Thanks again for your continued support. ❤️

 

Steam Page Update
about 2 years ago – Fri, Jan 26, 2024 at 02:29:12 PM

Get your wishlist clicking finger ready!

This may seem like just another milestone on our road to bringing World of Anterra to the world, but it’s a big one for us. We’re so proud of the work our team is doing, and you should be proud of your support in helping us get here… So, get your wishlist clicking finger ready, because our Steam page is now LIVE!!
We would love to hear your feedback on the page, but also know that we plan to continue updating it with new exciting content and mechanics.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2402470/World_of_Anterra/

Developer Fireside - Steam Page Discussion and Q&A

Join us for our next live Developer Fireside on Monday the 29th, at 10:30 PT. Follow this link to RSVP to the event. But if you can't make it, you will be able to find the recording on our Discord after the event.

https://discord.gg/tuwENmyVt4?event=1199745898197032961

BackerKit store is open!

We have officially launched our BackerKit Store page! (well, a few weeks ago we did) This is a great opportunity for new people to join our growing community of backers and help make World of Anterra a reality. Make sure to share this link with your friends and online groups!
https://world-of-anterra.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

All new backers will get access to the Backer Demo when it becomes available later this year.

Some BackerKit stats:

• 88% of Kickstarter backers have completed their surveys.
• 291 new orders have been added.
• 1832 backers have shared our project via BackerKit.
• 1651 add-ons have been sold.
• 37,836 individual items and rewards sold!
• Backed by 72 countries.
   

New feature preview!

No update would be complete without sharing a new feature!

Horseback riding

After a lot of tweaking and polish, we have finally completed horseback riding! As with many of WoA's mechanics, there’s more to riding than meets the eye, but you’ll have to discover that on your own. One of the challenges that we had to overcome when designing this is we didn't want it to be annoying to hop off and on. So, if you're out riding and see a resource you need, you can hop off, grad it and hop back on without missing a beat!

BackerKit Store launching soon!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 11:40:33 AM

We are thrilled to announce the 🎈 grand opening🎈 of our BackerKit store! Late backers can now pre-order the game with exciting rewards and become part of our fantastic community. Existing backers will be able to manage their tiers and add-ons.

In the coming days, we'll be sending out a small batch of surveys to conduct a thorough smoke test of our platform and ensure we haven't missed anything crucial, so keep your eyes on your inbox. As long as there are no issues with our test group, we'll promptly roll out the BackerKit surveys for all Kickstarter backers.

A huge thank you for your patience and understanding. (Except for you, Bruce 😄) We can't wait to continue this amazing journey with you.

Sincerely,

The 81monkeys Team

Feature and QA update!
over 2 years ago – Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 12:54:49 PM

Enhancing our environments

As shared in previous updates, an important aspect of how we approach game development is making sure we don’t go too far, too early, with regards to polishing UI, UX and assets. We just want to get things to a workable state so the team can better understand the game before putting time and resources into polish. This is because we will discover so many little things about your processes and the player experience during development that will change how we see the game and even how we make the game. The less polish we put in before making these discoveries the easier it is to improve things. Here’s an example of our “Grasslands Paths” environment before and after our polish phase. Let us know what you think! 

(Apparently someone couldn't be bothered to find him clothing for the new screenshot...)

Question of the week!

We know we don’t update weekly, but we want to start highlighting questions from our community and couldn’t think of a better name (all our brain cells are focused on the game!) We receive a lot of questions and love answering them, but sometimes a written explanation is just not enough. Here’s our question of the week.

How big is our Anterra?

It’s not a simple answer although it may seem like it. Sure, we could share the virtual square kms/miles but that wouldn’t do it justice. So instead, we made a little GIF to highlight the scale of our world.

Here’s our world map superimposed on the game's overworld. It’s worth pointing out a few things though. The whole overworld is currently in the game. The zoomed in area shown is one 32x32 pixel space of the overworld, which also happens to be the height of the player character. This means that every square of the overworld is a unique location that can be traversed and explored. Although you never have to leave the zoomed in view, the overworld is an important part of the game and serves multiple purposes; It’s the primary way to fast travel. It allows the player to find areas of interest and quest locations easier. And from a game experience standpoint, it helps maintain the grandeur and epic scale of the world.

Upcoming Fireside

We have scheduled an upcoming Fireside and special announcement for this Friday at 3pm PT. To help those that do have time to listen to our Firesides, we are going to be trying out a new tool, AI transcription! Once the Fireside is complete and uploaded, we share a link here along with an AI generated summary. Hopefully it does a good job.

You can RSVP the event here - Discord/💬-fireside-chat 

Speaking of fires, check out our new fire lighting mechanic. It’s missing a few animations and bits of polish, but you can light things in WoA now!

Some new features!
over 2 years ago – Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 04:49:52 PM

So much of our work goes into things that can’t be easily shown. Stuff like tools and systems that enable a small team like ours to make such an ambitious game. But that’s definitely not the only stuff we work on, we’re making a game after all! That being said, we also don’t want to show everything. Surprise can be a very powerful part of experiencing a new game...

Archery!

Building on our combat and quick-time systems we have now fully integrated our archery and sling mechanics. There are a few things that make archery a unique challenge in WoA. We needed it to function in a streamlined way with our combat systems, while also working outside of combat for things like puzzles, minigames or hunting. Like most things in WoA, this posed quite the design challenge! Archery had to be both quick and snappy and simple to use, while also requiring some timing and skill to execute effectively. Well, we’re happy to share with you what we’ve come up with. There are still a few bits of polish that we plan to add, but we’re very proud of where it’s at. You'd be amazing at all the technical challenges that come with a feature like this; most of which comes from trying to make a 2D world act like a 3D one.

These GIFs show the archery ability at a lower tier, and there are lots of skills and talents that will make archery far more powerful and effective as the player progresses.

Here’s a little target practice.

You can shoot anything in the game like buildings, just be careful not to launch one through a window!

In combat, you don’t have to aim with our auto-targeting system, but you can still buff your attack with a well-timed shot. We also have a cover system, that makes objects in WoA provide varying amounts of cover from ranged attacks.

We have so many other new features in the game, but here’s something that our community has asked about. You can now see what you picked up, or interacted with in our new activity log.

 Activity Log

The activity log also works in combat. And we plan to let players control different aspects of the activity log, like what parts of that game use it or how much information it shows.

Stay tuned for more!