SKALD: Against the Black Priory News

Hi there!

It’s time for another devlog update for “Skald: Against the Black Priory”!

These are busy and very exciting days. A lot of very important development is being done on the game and tools and we’re having a lot of very interesting talks regarding the long term perspective of the Skald brand both internally and with external partners. I can’t really say much yet but hopefully it will be worth the wait.

In terms of the game itself, the current priority has been on tool-development (the level editor), preparing content for the upcoming teaser and working on the redux version of the prologue (to be released this summer).

[h2]New Media Content[/h2]
We’ve also been looking into more ways of communicating with the community and I’ve made a vlog update as well as a stream with Fiona Martin of Raw Fury. I’m still finding my footing on the technical side and I’ll be working on improving audio so sorry if the quality is a bit low for these two.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We’ll be doing more video content as we go and streams in particular are something we’ll be digging deeper on as they are easy to make and provide a way for you to communicate with us directly.

For upcoming streams we’ll be talking to some of the awesome people at my publisher, Raw Fury, to learn more about what they do and how the collaboration between developers and publishers look. I can guarantee you it’ll be worthwhile if you’re interested in the indiegame industry.

If you have suggestions for topics for either the stream or the video-blog, be sure to leave them in the Youtube comments of the vids above. I read everything.

[h2]Community Created Content[/h2]
If you’ve been following my social media or the Discord, you know that I’ve become enamored with my new level editor (I talked about it in my first devlog of 2022).



The short of it, is that it’s turning out better than I hoped and I’m now super pumped to be able to offer it to the community so you can make content for Skald yourself.

And let me be clear here: The editor I’ll be releasing will be the exact same tools I’ve been using myself to make this game. You’ll be able to create (or edit) any asset in the game from maps to objects (items, characters and props), factions, quests, difficulty settings and on and on. EVERY aspect of the game.

A test I did with the Ultima 5 tileset. This took about 2 minutes to make, from importing the art asset to making the map.

Personally I think the true power of this isn’t creating more Skald content; it’s making your own awesome fan-projects. Ultima 5.5 fan-project anyone?

[h2]A Editor Road-Map[/h2]
Our tentative plan for the editor, is to get it out there soon (meaning before the main game launches). I also don’t want the commitment of having to maintain another piece of commercial software so likely what we’ll do is release is as a free beta for the community to play around with.

Ideally this will allow for a community to grow up around it that could sustain itself while I’ll provide tech support, beginning tutorials and take feedback for updates.

Needs more trolls!

It certainly wouldn’t hurt if, by the launch of the main game, we could point to a vital modding community that already had a stack of awesome fan-made content ready for consumption.

[h2]Getting Yourself Involved[/h2]
If you’re interested in this aspect of the project, I’d love to hear from you! I’m setting up a discord sub-channel (FAN CONTENT on our Discord) for this discussion and I’d love for you to head on over and offer me your feedback on the following:

1. What are some case studies of INDIE games that have strong modding and fan-content communities? What are they doing right?
   
2. If a community springs up, where should it live? What platform works best for both providing a way to offer tech-support, asset sharing, project collaboration and perhaps even hosting of projects?
   
3. How can I support the community whilst still making is as independent and standalone as possible?
   
4. What are some cool projects you’d like to do? Share them in the #my_dream_projects channel!
   
5. See you there!
   

[hr][/hr]
I hope to hear from as many of you as possible. Till then, have a fantastic weekend!

Keep following this devlog, my Twitter and the Skald Discord to stay posted on our awesome quest to bring you more retro-RPG awesomeness!

Cheers,

AL

Anders and Fiona will be live Thursday, March 17th at 12pm EST / 5pm CET over on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/rawfurygames).

We'll be showing off the Prologue whilst taking questions from chat and discussing the current development of SKALD!

See y'all Thursday!

Hi folks! Fiona here to bring you the first of many Developer Video Blogs from Skald developer Anders Lauridsen!

You can watch the video in full below and I've also included some excerpts and screenshots in this post going over the biggest points in the video.

So let's begin, Skald Video Blog 1: Say "hi" to the Skald Editor!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Originally posted by Anders

Hey RPG fans, welcome to the first Skald video devlog. My name is Anders Lauridsen. I am the developer for Skald: The Black Priory, which is an upcoming indie RPG. The game is kinda an old school retro style RPG similar to games like Ultima 5 and The Magic Candle series. It's slated for release later in 2022 and will be published by Swedish game publisher Raw Fury.

So the last couple of weeks has been busy. All of February has been busy, but unfortunately, I've been down for the last week with COVID, which sucks. I lost a week of work, and I hate that but fortunately, I feel much better now, and I'm back on the horse, which is good as there's a lot to do.

In terms of development, the last month--probably the last three weeks if you subtract the week with COVID, I've been working on the level editor for Skald. I've had many iterations of it already but the way it used to be didn't really work the way I wanted it to, so I remade it from scratch. That might sound excessive, but a level editor is a tool that you use a lot as a game developer so having a good tool is extremely important. Basically, what made me reconsider the tool I was currently using; first of all it wasn't really a good tool, but it worked for me as I was the only one using it, but then I saw tiled, which is an open-source free level editor tool that you can use to make games that look pretty much like Skald.

It's a fantastic tool and I was really impressed by it. I decided I could use tiled or make my own tool that emulates tiled and the functionality of that tool. So to make sure that I had a tool that I could control 100%, I didn't really want a third party in this project in any way, even though it's open-source, I opted to make my own tool, my own version of tiled. That's what I've been working on for the past 3 weeks, and it's been going really good.

So what I'd thought I'd do is just spend a couple of minutes playing around with the tool and showing it to you guys so you can see what it looks like today. Both because it's nice for me to show off the work I've done but also the tool is something we'll release to the public at some point in the project. We might release an alpha version either to the public or the community before launch so you guys can play around with it a little bit and we will definitely be releasing it at some form post-launch, maybe at DLC or part of a DLC package; we'll just have to see but modding and having the community be able to create their own content for Skald has always been a pretty big pillar for the project for me even though it's not my first priority. My first priority is to make a good single player experience out of the box. but it's also pretty low effort for me to just give you the tools that I used to make the game and nothing would make me happier to see you guys use it down the line so, so I think it's well worth the effort to spend a little bit of time working on stuff like the level editor.



Okay, so let's do a short tour of the editor. If you're familiar with tiled, then basically, this is what this is; it's tabbed based so you can have different maps up at the same time, and you can swap between them. This is the main draw area, and you can obviously of course, zoom in and pan around, just as you would expect. But you couldn't zoom in on my old editor, so you couldn't zoom out and edit large areas at once, so this is already hugely helpful.



So let's just say we want to draw some wall down here, we'll just do it like that, easy peasy lemon squeezy. Let's zoom in a little bit. What we can also do is we can use the draw random function, which allows you to select multiple tiles and select one of them at random. It's great for letting you visual variation like so. You could also use another super handy tool called draw pattern, which allows you to select several tiles and draw them all at once. So, for instance, here we draw this arch, select these tiles, press the button and it comes on screen. So pretty easy, nothing revolutionary but hugely, very functional, and it works the way I need it to.



You can basically also add any object that's in the game using this editor. Let's say why not add a cat, a couple of cats? We could add a dog as well and just hope they don't kill each other; you get the idea.





The maps in Skald are also layered on top of each other inside the game so usually, if you see a building like this, the ground floor is drawn on one map, and the upper floor is drawn on another map, and this is also supported in the game.



So let's say we wanted more dogs-oh crap, I put a wall in there instead- let's just leave it for now. See if we can put a dog in, there we go, now we can have the dog pee on the wall, which is super nice.

I think you all get the gist; it's nothing revolutionary, but it's hugely helpful for me, and it's really, really fast to make content in. I'm super happy with it so far, and I can't wait to just continue using and developing it and polishing all the rough edges so it can be easy for you to use and make content with.

So, with that being said I don't think there's much more for me to say today besides have a fantastic day, stay safe and healthy and keep following the project on skaldrpg.com or on twitter (or our Discord).

Have a good one everyone, bye bye!

-Anders

Small note from Raw Fury before we continue. Hello! My name is Fiona and I'm a Community Manager here at Raw Fury. I'll be posting on behalf of AL and you'll see me lurking around the steam forums. Thank you!



Wait, what? Is it February already? All I can say is time flies when you’re having fun. This update is a bit overdue but as always, if I’m a bit tardy in posting on the devlog it’s because I’m making our dream game.

The new year has been a torrent of making cool plans, have Covid wreck it all and instead write awesome code!

Our big carrot of Q1 2022 was that Raw Fury and I were going to GDC in San Francisco to promote Skald. We always knew it was a risky prospect and as Omicron ramped up over Christmas we reconsidered and canceled the trip. And let me tell you: I’m almost glad we did!

It’s given me time to dig deep on a few areas that I always wanted to improve in the game. I’ll try to summarize some of the latest developments:

[h2]The GUI System[/h2]
I’ve rewritten the GUI system. Yes, pretty much all of it. It was pretty much one of the last components of the game where I used Unity’s built in system but it was a bit of a mess. I’m sure someone who’s better at Unity could pull it off, but I really just want Unity to compile my game and leave me alone beyond that.

Thankfully, the Skald engine is really good at drawing pixels on screen with perfect precision and so I was able to use my engine to do stuff like draw fonts, UI-elements and handle transitions and mouse interactions.

One of the first big advantages is that I can now have the game scale perfectly to the screen so it gets pixel perfect resolution.



If you zoomed in on the game in full-screen mode, it used looked like the left image. Now everything scales perfectly and it all looks like the right image. Crisp enough to make your eyes bleed.

For a pixel-purist like me, another advantage of the new system is that we can swap Unity’s vectorized fonts for home-made “real” pixel fonts.



I also added the ability to insert big illuminated first letters at the start of the script. I need to polish the graphic design a little bit but all in all I think it’s going to look amazing.

But there’s more: The new system allows for highlighting of keywords in the text that you can mouse over to get helpful info. Naturally this will also be possible on menus like the character sheets where you can mouse over attributes to get a description or on the map where mousing over objects will allow you to get info in pop-up boxes.



Finally, note how the menu above slides on and off the screen for a bit of a smoother transition.

With all the UI stuff, the technical stuff is now done but there’s still work to be done to really take advantage of its full potential. Stay posted for more updates!

[h2]The Animation System[/h2]
The moment I signed with Raw Fury, one of the first features I knew I wanted to expand upon a bit was the animation system.

Building an animation system that cycles through frames of animation is easy enough. The trouble is scaling it. There are basically three types of models in Skald:

• Simple Models: These are models like the rats in the demo. They have few animation frames and very few customization options. This works because for the most part, you won’t see them doing anything outside of combat so all you need is a few idle frames and some combat frames.
  
• Custom Models: These models have more complex animations so we can have it perform more complex actions. A great example of that is the big monster below. These are very cool and expressive but costly to make since each frame needs to be hand drawn. The upside is that there isn’t a ton of them in the game.
  
• Humanoid models: This is the tricky part and where the Skald engine shines. The humanoid models in Skald are “paper-dolls”. That means you can swap costumes, items, skin-color, hair etc and have it show up on the model. They also need dozens of animation frames (and perhaps hundreds by the end). This means hundreds of thousands of different frames to account for all possible permutations of costumes and animations.
  

Fear not! The Skald engine solves this by doing humanoid animation in a semi-procedural way. Basically each model consists of a dozen components drawn using a kind of animation skeleton. Legs, torsos, arms, heads, hair, items etc are drawn in relation to each other and colored according to specifications. This means that for each new behavior we want to animate, we’ll only ever have to add a very few frames.

As an example, look at the image above again. The character falling to his knees is not a unique animation. Any of the characters on-screen would perform the same animation if given the command.

The awesome part is that adding that particular animation strip to ALL HUMANOID MODELS in the game took only about 20 minutes.

Anyways, you’ll be seeing a lot more of this system as we go. Here is an example of me experimenting with adding some animation frames to the player’s attack animation:



Trust me; the system works – it’s just that I’m not a very good animator 🙂

[h2]The Level Editor[/h2]
This one is the Golden Goose for me. My level editor has been a pretty big bottleneck so far. I just couldn’t get it right and I lacked a clear vision for what a great tool would even look like for Skald. Then I saw the amazing “Tiled” editor and I was saved.

“Tiled” had a simple suit of features that were all I had ever asked for and I knew I needed something like that for Skald. I had two options:

1) adopt “Tiled” (it’s free) and use it for Skald or 2) try to write my own version of it? Well, I just told you I rewrote my whole GUI system to get nicer fonts so I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear I made my own in-house version of Tiled.



This may seem excessive, but a good level editor is critical and this way I get one that is seamlessly integrated with my other tools. I also don’t have to depend on external software. Most importantly though: All the Skald tools will now be collected in a single application so the Skald community can eventually get to mod and create their own application using the exact same tools I used to make this game.

I still have some development to do on the editor before it’s fully functional but as soon as it is, I’ll be doing some streaming of me making levels in style!

[h2]Next Steps[/h2]
So in broad terms, the next big step is doing a major overhaul of the demo to be released in spring / summer. This is primarily to show off and test the new features and it’s also a hugely important tool to get Skald on the radar of press and content creators.

To that end, we’re also going to redo the Steam pages, the website and make a new trailer.

We will be doing more Beta testing before then as well but I’m waiting till things are a bit more stable so I don’t get swamped in reports of issues that are already known. Testers are a limited resource and we need to save it until it really counts.

[hr][/hr]
That’s what I had time for today! I hope it was somewhat informative. To stay posted, follow us on Twitter and join our Discord!

Cheers,

AL

Hello, Raw Fury here!

Today we are incredibly happy to announce that we have teamed up with Anders to bring SKALD: Against the Black Priory to life. When we first laid our eyes on the game earlier this year, we not only fell in love with the game and its richly illustrated grim-dark fantasy and Lovecraftian horror setting, but we also fell in love with Anders and his passion for resurrecting the genre and building a game which brings the past into the future.

We can’t wait to show you more of this gem throughout 2022, but if you need to scratch that Skald-itch already today, we have gathered a couple of goodies for you to enjoy while you wait for all the awesomeness to come:

• SKALD: Against the Black Priory - Partnership Announcement
• Developer interview with Anders Lauridsen on the Raw Fury YouTube channel
• Skald developer blog post
• Raw Fury blog post