Hello most excellent backers!

Is it update #20 already? We've got a ton of stuff to talk about, so let's just jump in.

Prizes

As always we'll start with the Kickstarter prize updates. In the last video you saw all the most popular prizes littering my house and at this point I'm pleased to say we've now dropped off more than half to be mailed and we'll have the rest done within a week. As for other prizes like landscapes or animation cels, we'll be doing our best to have those ready to go by their delivery date. And again, we'll be asking for the crests later this year, you haven't missed it yet.

A first release is fast approaching

As a lot of the mundane but time-consuming aspects of running a business settle down (changing banks and setting up quickbooks... ugh), we've now entered a very critical period of development. As we've mentioned before, we're working exclusively on the combat system for the full game now, and we'll be releasing this combat as a free standalone called Factions, in the near future. A free demo with both single player and multiplayer content, if you will. We're just now transitioning from alpha to beta on this combat release, which means going from playable to polished and balanced. This is a pretty critical part of the process and we're all buckling down for an intense couple of months.

Entering beta not only lets us test final, fully functional combat but it also allows our sound developers and composer to start implementing their work and we can finally get all the animations and particles tied up to each action.

Big progress so far this month:
• We've dedicated a lot of time to playtesting the combat and balancing the 18 unique classes we'll be shipping with. They're as finished as they're going to get until beta.
• We've designed and created almost every UI (user interface) screen in the game where you can buy new units, upgrade them, build your party and enter different combat scenarios, in addition to creating all the UI for the combat itself which is a bigger task than one might think.
• We've now completed a first pass on almost every design document we'll need for the game, including the quest system, combat spreadsheets, achievements, item system, history and lore guides, along with a final timeline through the entire game. As most developers can tell you, these sort of design docs are never really complete but continue to get updated and tweaked throughout production.
• We've laid the foundation for most of the toolsets we need to build the content; including a world building tool, class editor, ability editor, and are continuing to work on the item creator and the battle map editor.
• We've gotten every contractor we need ready to go, signed and accounted for.
• We're officially set up with accounting.
• Powerhouse Animation has delivered 90% of the character animations for our first release and are now at work on special abilities and advanced class variations.
• Our hand-animated 2D cinematic is well under way. Having nearly finished the blocking and rough pass, Powerhouse has just begun work on the cleanup. Austin Wintory has already laid down a preliminary track for this and it sounds fantastic.
• We've just now wrapped up the main "hub" for our first release, which has allowed us to produce a ton of art content for the full game that we'll be able to use to populate the world. This hub is the sprawling merchant city of Strand. Check out the small version below and our forums for a full-sized version, which should be up later today.



What's next?

In the next several weeks we'll be producing a ton of content: roughly 20 combat boards, our intro cinematic, full-sized portraits for each class, tons of icons, and of course continue to playtest and balance the combat up to the last minute. On the tech side, we'll be focused almost exclusively on making sure the combat runs smoothly. We'll keep you up to date as we go.

Kickstarter is getting crazy!

There's a lot going on with Kickstarter right now. We wanted to point out a couple of our favorite projects. As always, we're not saying we don't like projects that we don't mention, we just want to point out a few we think you might be interested in.

Click the name to check out their page.

OUYA
Chances are you've heard of this one, but we've gotten a lot of messages about it asking what we thought. We love the idea of an indie-centric console and we've reserved a box ourselves. We'd love to have The Banner Saga on it someday. Is it going to live up to all that potential? We have no idea, but we're willing to find out. Should you support it? We don't know! There are a lot of articles about the OUYA, so do the research and decide if putting down $100 is right for you.

Boxer Story
Our good friend and ex-Biowarian Lance Myers has just started a campaign for an animated movie called Boxer Story. This guy is a world-class 2D animator (you know how we feel about that) and our only regret is that we couldn't get him to help on The Banner Saga. Check out his video and keep in mind everything you see is done by one person. Amazing stuff!

Bad Planet
Our friends and local Austin devs Red Fly Studio just started a campaign for their game BAD PLANET, in conjunction with Thomas Jane and Tim Bradstreet. The game already has a ton of great content available in comic format, so go check out their campaign and if you like what you see help them achieve their goal!

Skål!
Alex, Arnie and John

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FACE said:

Eurogamer Review: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-01-14-the-banner-saga-review

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