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More_Badass · Apr 18, 2016

Just discovered this today

http://siegeandsandfox.com/-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tV-NxBPf5U

PC, potential PS4/Xbox versions. Slated for late 2016

A shining city lies besieged in the heart of a vast desert. As the moon rises over the royal palace, a notorious thief watches the king die at a traitors hand. Discovered, falsely accused, and thrown into the labyrinthine dungeons, the thief must escape to tell the tale, else the city will fall.

Master dynamic acrobatic abilities to traverse the cavernous depths of an ancient underground prison, evading detection and avoiding certain death at the hands of a sand-borne evil. Fight for your city foil the enemys attempt to strike at the heart of the kingdom.

The Siege and the Sandfox is what we like to call a Stealthvania. By infusing stealth into the typical Metroidvania experience were creating a unique twist on the ever-popular genre. Lovingly realised in an evocative 2D art style, with great attention to audio and presentation, we are building a beautiful world for our players to enjoy from the shadows

Rei_Toei · Oct 7, 2016

Stealthvania, there's a new one. Could also argue there's some Oddworld influences (platformer + vulnerable protagonist avoiding detection) I guess. Looks stellar though, character sprites remind me a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics too. Hope they can get it on consoles!

Rei_Toei · Oct 25, 2016

Saw this interview posted on another forum, one of the devs talks a bit more about their inspirations: http://www.pcgamesn.com/the-siege-and-the-sandfox/the-siege-and-the-sandfox-interview

On Unreal:

There is a prevailing assumption that UE4 is unsuitable for 2D development, but after starting the project with Unreal we found this to be false, says Bennett. Many of the tools, like Blueprints or the existing lighting, worked practically straight out of the box to produce many of the results you can already see in our game.

On story:

The studio are now working with Talespinners, an outsource writing outfit who contributed to SOMA and Frozen Synapse Prime, on a story and informal quest structure for their sprawling dungeon. Beyond that, theyre looking for a publisher.

Interesting that they're sorta outsourcing the storyline. Didn't even know there were companies like Talespinners out there.

Draft · Oct 25, 2016

Love the look and how it seems to play but that's a bad title!

Rei_Toei · Oct 25, 2016

Agreed, Siege of the Sandfox might be better (and thematically correct).

Still, what's in a name.

Draft · Oct 25, 2016

Rei_Toei said:
Agreed, Siege of the Sandfox might be better (and thematically correct).

Still, what's in a name.

I think a lot, especially for new games. A good name helps build the brand. The Siege and the Sandfox is a sentence, not a name. Call it Siege. Call it Sandfox. Don't call it both!

crwilso · Oct 26, 2016

Well, hey this is cool, our very own NeoGAF thread! Thanks for making it, More_Badass.

I'm Chris, the designer on this project.

Just thought I'd pop by with some more recent shots from the game:

Thought I may as well clear up a few things too:

Interesting that they're sorta outsourcing the storyline. Didn't even know there were companies like Talespinners out there.

Story is very important to us, and we knew we wanted someone dedicated to this task. At the same time, good friends of our were looking to setup a company doing exactly that. This is how Talespinners got involved. We worked with them from the very start of the project and it's been very much a collaborative effort.

Still, what's in a name.

We spent a long time thinking about the name, and I hope it'll make sense to you guys once we've revealed a bit more of the story. Always interesting to see what people read into it though

lightskintwin · Oct 26, 2016

First time seeing this. It looks nice so far.

Father_Brain · Oct 26, 2016

How many 2D UE4 games are there? Only other ones I know of are some card game I saw on Steam and that Flappy Bird clone Epic made as a tech demo.

StrawberryJam · Oct 26, 2016

I never knew Unreal 4 could do pixel art. Cool stuff.

Oneself · Oct 26, 2016

Welcome Crwilso! Can we still expect a 2016 release? On PS4?

It looks pretty amazing, I can't wait to play your game!
It reminds me of SNES Aladdin in a way, great memories.

Kalentan · Oct 26, 2016

crwilso said:
snip

Hey, I knew this game looked familiar! Haven't you posted in the GAF Indie Development thread?

Pejo · Oct 26, 2016

Watched the vid, can't get too into it at work. Looks pretty, but I hope the combat is good. That will make or break the game for me. Since it's stealth, I hope they use some good ideas from Mark of the Ninja or something of that nature.

2 of my favorite hidden gems from the past few years were Valdis City and Dust, both because they were excellent Metroidvanias with great combat.

CamHostage · Oct 26, 2016

Amongst other things, the co-founders of this development company was part of the best LittleBigPlanet campaign (LBP Vita,) so I'm in just on principle. But also, the concept video looks like a great start.

Excited to see UE4 2D work as well. Epic Games has an instructional video series where Alan Noon walks through making a 2D project in Unreal. It seems like there might be a good deal of overhead overkill to it, but if your 2D game can make use of Unreal features (and you're familiar with the UE4 development suite,) it seems like it could be very powerful and interesting to work with. Will be something to watch out for as to how UE4 2D compares over time to Unity and GameMaker and others.

SatelliteOfLove · Oct 26, 2016

crwilso said:
Well, hey this is cool, our very own NeoGAF thread! Thanks for making it, More_Badass.

I'm Chris, the designer on this project.

Just thought I'd pop by with some more recent shots from the game:

Thought I may as well clear up a few things too:

Story is very important to us, and we knew we wanted someone dedicated to this task. At the same time, good friends of our were looking to setup a company doing exactly that. This is how Talespinners got involved. We worked with them from the very start of the project and it's been very much a collaborative effort.

We spent a long time thinking about the name, and I hope it'll make sense to you guys once we've revealed a bit more of the story. Always interesting to see what people read into it though

You guys know how to draw eyes; that's a rare talent.

Rei_Toei · Oct 27, 2016

crwilso said:
snip)

Welcome and thanks for the input! Looking forward to seeing and hearing more about the game.

crwilso · Oct 27, 2016

Kalentan said:
Hey, I knew this game looked familiar! Haven't you posted in the GAF Indie Development thread?

Yup! I love seeing what everyone is up to in there, so have contributed a fair few WIP shots over the last few months.

Pejo said:
Looks pretty, but I hope the combat is good. That will make or break the game for me. Since it's stealth, I hope they use some good ideas from Mark of the Ninja or something of that nature.

Mark of the Ninja is a big inspiration for us, particularly how it's translated a lot of the nuance of a 3D stealth game into 2D.

While combat isn't the focus of our game, that isn't to say you won't have lots of options when encountering enemies. Where other Metroidvanias have depth in combat, our aim is to shift that depth towards our stealth and movement systems. Our influences here are things like Mirror's Edge and the classic Thief. That's why we like to refer to the game as a stealthvania

CamHostage said:
Excited to see UE4 2D work as well. Epic Games has an instructional video series where Alan Noon walks through making a 2D project in Unreal. It seems like there might be a good deal of overhead overkill to it, but if your 2D game can make use of Unreal features (and you're familiar with the UE4 development suite,) it seems like it could be very powerful and interesting to work with. Will be something to watch out for as to how UE4 2D compares over time to Unity and GameMaker and others.

We were lucky enough to show Alan a very early prototype of the game at GDC this year which seemed to go down well, which was a relief! His tutorials have been very useful helping us figure out some of the less well documented areas of their 2D stuff.

Unsurprisingly, we agree with your assessment of UE4 for 2D. The very first prototype of the game was actually made in GameMaker, but UE4 was a much better fit for us. If you're interested to know a little bit more about our thought process for selecting UE4, as well as some practical examples of Unreal features we're using, I did a talk about that - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2CXamVlSvM

SatelliteOfLove said:
You guys know how to draw eyes; that's a rare talent.

Our artists will be very pleased to hear this! A lot of work has gone into making them large enough to have readable emotions at a glance, but also not destroy that classic pixel look.

Oneself said:
Welcome Crwilso! Can we still expect a 2016 release? On PS4?

This will have to be one of the few times I take something from my AAA playbook and tell you 'We're not ready to talk about that'

I can tell you that we won't be releasing this year.

Dremorak · Oct 27, 2016

Looking really cool!

as a fan of both stealth and "vania" games, this pleases me greatly

Oneself · Oct 27, 2016

crwilso said:
This will have to be one of the few times I take something from my AAA playbook and tell you 'We're not ready to talk about that'

I can tell you that we won't be releasing this year.

Thanks

crwilso · Nov 10, 2016

Hi guys,

Hopefully this news is worth a bump?

We've partnered with Chucklefish! More information here:

http://blog.chucklefish.org/introducing-the-siege-and-the-sandfox-by-cardboard-sword/

Barrel Cannon · Nov 10, 2016

Digging the artstyle

Rei_Toei · Sep 1, 2017

Kinda forgot about this game, figured out the title again and saw some interesting lighting demos on their FB page: https://www.facebook.com/siegeandsandfox/

Curious to hear when this one will be done, after Momodora I'm craving more pixel Metroidvania.

theDeeDubs · Sep 1, 2017

Don't know how I missed this before now. It looks amazing and right up my alley. I need it.

Machina · Sep 1, 2017

crwilso said:
Well, hey this is cool, our very own NeoGAF thread! Thanks for making it, More_Badass.

I'm Chris, the designer on this project.

Just thought I'd pop by with some more recent shots from the game:

Thought I may as well clear up a few things too:

Story is very important to us, and we knew we wanted someone dedicated to this task. At the same time, good friends of our were looking to setup a company doing exactly that. This is how Talespinners got involved. We worked with them from the very start of the project and it's been very much a collaborative effort.

We spent a long time thinking about the name, and I hope it'll make sense to you guys once we've revealed a bit more of the story. Always interesting to see what people read into it though

Hello, great looking game.

Any chance of a Switch release?

Piscus · Sep 1, 2017

Machina said:
Hello, great looking game.

Any chance of a Switch release?

This is the first time I've seen this game. It looks really intriguing. I hate to port beg, but.... I'm wondering the same thing about a Switch release, haha.

OllyOllyBennett · Oct 27, 2017

Hi all,

We get a lot of questions about how we're making a 2D game in Unreal, and about our pixel art and making games in general. We've been trying as much as possible to answer those questions, and to feedback to those interested and the indie dev community.

We've been streaming for the last few weeks as we work towards a playtest build we've been making for some testing sessions at a few universities. You can catch up on these dev streams on our YouTube channel.

We also have an upcoming stream via Unreal's channel soon, specifically on using Paper2D in Unreal Engine 4. If you have any questions for us on this, or on anything else about our processes and project, please continue to post them here, or message me directly, and we'll try to get them answered here, on that stream, or on another stream of ours.

In the meantime, have some more up-to-date screenshots, and thanks for your interest in our game and for following us.

Machina said:
Hello, great looking game. Any chance of a Switch release?

Thanks. We're currently investigating our console options, but are not yet ready to announce specific platforms. The Switch is definitely one we're considering.

Lucent · Oct 27, 2017

This looks cool. Definitely gonna try to watch out for this one.

Atrus · Oct 27, 2017

First time I'm seeing this game but I'm definitely interested. I'll definitely check out the YouTube streams.

Douche McBaggins The 3rd · Oct 27, 2017

Looks like a 32 bit 2d game. Looks pretty decent. Are we finally leaving the 8-16 bit indie era graphics?

PantsuJo · Oct 27, 2017

Seems really cool!

OllyOllyBennett · Nov 20, 2017

For those that might want to consider, investigate, or try making their own 2D game in Unreal Engine 4, we did a live stream entitled: Getting Started with Paper2D.

You can watch it here.

Let me know if you have any further questions and I'll pass them on to the team.

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