Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch News

In the world of Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch, there are 9 playable characters, each with a unique class. As the game progresses, players can promote their characters twice into more powerful roles.

The 9 character-specific starting classes are Hermit, Initiate, Librarian, Mercenary, Wanderer, Swordsman, Outcast, and Oracle. In this post, we'll take a closer look at one character, Evie, and explore how the weapon system, classes, and skills have evolved in Veil of the Witch.

[h3]Evie’s Party Role[/h3]


Evie starts as an Initiate, capable of fulfilling the roles of a healer and combat support, with some supplementary offensive options. She wields a Tome as her main weapon (our new name for light magic spellbooks), and primarily serves as a healer, using spells to restore allies’ health or dispel harmful status effects.

However, she is not limited to healing alone. Evie can also enhance attacks using Light Magic or utilize her secondary set of arms, a sword and shield, to help in combat. As her passive skills progress, she gains new ways to damage enemies and heal allies simultaneously. Upon obtaining the required materials in combat and promoting her at the party’s base camp, she can advance from Initiate to Priestess, and eventually to Lightbringer. Each promotion unlocks three new skills, granting additional options in battle.

Though skills are acquired on a run-by-run basis, classes are persistent. One you unlock a new class, it stays unlocked, and the skills that go with it join the rotation of skills you can choose from any time you level up.

[h3]Acquiring Class Skills[/h3]


Our current plan is for each character to have a total of around 20 class skills. At the start of the game, each character has two basic skills. As players undertake battles, characters gain experience with every action, and level up right in the middle of battle, whereupon the player will be offered a randomized selection of upgrades. This includes 12 additional skills, as well as higher-tier versions of skills the player has already gained via class promotion.

At various specific levels, players will also be given the option to choose from a randomized selection of stat boost cards. As with many roguelites, if you don’t like the skills offered, you can spend a resource to reroll. This process allows the player to shape the character’s growth and build within a defined spectrum, for each new run.

In Evie’s case, for example, players can choose whether to build her as a highly powerful and specialized healer, or more of a generalized support that can also mix it up with enemies.

[h3]Class Skills[/h3]

Here’s a look at the skills a character like Evie will be using over the course of the game, and upgrades that can be unlocked for those skills.

Healing Magic:

• Healing Touch: Uses the power of Light to heal an ally.
  
• Hymn of Healing: Encompasses one ally in an aura of Light, greatly healing them.
  
• Binding Healing: Heals an ally with the power of light, while also restoring the caster for 70% of the total.
  ○ Can be upgraded to 100%.
  
• Healing Surge: At the start of the turn, if there is at least one ally adjacent, this unit regains up to 20% of max Health (caps at +20).
  ○ Can be upgraded to 30% with a healing cap of +30 HP.
  

Offensive Magic:

• Radiant Arrow: Fires a holy arrow, inflicting Light damage on a single target.
  
• Holy Ward: Calls down the heavens, inflicting Light damage on a single foe. If the target is defeated by this ability, target tile and adjacent tiles become Sanctified ground for 2 turns. All allies standing within a Sanctuary regain +20 Health at the start of the turn.
  ○ Can be upgraded to a 3x3 area.
  
• Wrath Divine: Unleashes a burst of radiant power, inflicting Light damage on an enemy. If the target is a Fallen unit, it has a 50% chance of being destroyed instantly (excluding bosses and monsters).
  ○ Can be upgraded to a 75% chance.
  

Support Skills:

• Purification: Channels the power of Light to cleanse all status effects on an ally, granting +15 Health for each effect removed.
  ○ Can be upgraded to +20.
  
• Tree of Life: Summons the Tree of Life for 2 turns. At the end of the Allied Turn, the Tree inflicts 10 damage on enemies in a 3x3 area. If an ally interacts with the tree, they recover 40 Health, and are cleansed of all harmful status effects.
  ○ Can be upgraded to a version with a 3-turn duration, 15 damage, a 5x5 area, and a +60 heal.
  
• Sacred Prayer: Channels the power of light to cleanse all status effects on the target and allies in a 1 tile radius, granting +15 Health for each effect removed.
  ○ Can be upgraded to a 2-tile radius and a +20 heal.
  
• Heaven's Call: Teleports a distant ally to an adjacent tile, and gives them +1 Movement for 1 turn.
  ○ Can be upgraded to +2 Movement.
  
• Divine Protection: Surrounds an ally with light, granting Divine Protection for 2 turns. When an incoming attack would reduce a unit with Divine Protection to 0 Health, the damage is negated, and they instead regain 30% of max Health. Effect only triggers once.
  ○ Can be upgraded to a 3-turn duration and a 50% heal.
  

Other Passive Skills:

• Healing Aura: At the start of the turn, if there is at least one ally adjacent, this unit regains up to 20% of max Health (caps at +20).
  ○ Can be upgraded to +30% Health with a cap of +30 HP.
  
• Tranquility: When receiving a critical hit, reduces the final damage taken by 20% and doubles the healing amount of 'Healing Touch,' 'Hymn of Healing,' 'Bonded Healing,' and 'Wind of Healing' on the next use.
  ○ Can be upgraded to a 30% damage reduction.
  
• Radiance: When the amount recovered from a healing spell exceeds this unit's max Health, 50% of the surplus is converted to a Shield as temp HP.
  ○ Can be upgraded to 75%.
  
• Lightfooted: Decreases likelihood of being targeted by the enemy.
  
• Radiant Rage: Holy spells restore 50% of damage inflicted as Health.
  ○ Can be upgraded to 75%.
  ○ As a fun side note, this ability also triggers in response to Tree of Life’s damage-over-time effect, producing a very strong synergy.
  
• Divine Weapon: Imbues an equipped weapon with holy light, increasing physical attack Power by +5. If the target is a Fallen unit, Critical Hit is increased by +20.
  ○ Can be upgraded to a +8 boost and +30 Critical Hit.
  
• Second Wind: Dealing Physical Damage restores 50% of the total to all allies as Health.
  ○ Can be upgraded to 75%.
  
• Decisive Strike: Whenever this unit lands a Critical Hit on an enemy, their next Combat Skill or Spell does not trigger a cooldown.
  

Anyone who played Lost Eidolons will probably notice immediately that these skills are a lot stronger than they were in the first game, and the upgraded versions are pretty substantial, offering huge boosts in range, utility, and power. This is in line with our general goal in VotW, to make combat faster, more fun, and more dynamic.

Oh, and one more thing to mention: in addition to upgrades mid-combat, skills can also be upgraded by training at campsites throughout the journey. Unlike the first game, which had some dry spots in the character progression, here a substantial stat boost or skill upgrade is always just around the corner.



[h3]Enhancement of Equipment and Acquisition of Powerful Equipment Skills[/h3]

In Veil of the Witch, characters equip main weapons, secondary weapons, and armor.

As mentioned, Evie uses a tome as her main weapon, a sword and shield as secondary weapons, and wears cloth armor. These items can be upgraded to better versions in the course of gameplay.

During battle, defeating enemies yields special items, including Enhancing Stones of various grades. After the battle, players can attach up to three Enhancing Stones to a specific piece of equipment for party characters, boosting their stats and sometimes unlocking unique skills. Combining these enhancements with class skills allows players to gain a significant advantage over enemies in battles.



Today we discussed two sources of character progression – skills and upgrades. However, there are other progression systems we haven’t even shared yet, including Relics and the Altar of Fire. Our hope is that with all of these richly interlocking systems, players can look forward to a game that’s sleek and streamlined, while still maintaining a high degree of customization and strategic depth.

Jin Sang Kim, Creative Director

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530490/Lost_Eidolons_Veil_of_the_Witch/

Hello Tacticians,

I'm ODS Roy, Localization Manager at Ocean Drive. Today, I want to talk to you a bit of the Localization Team's role here at our studio. I'll give you a brief look into what localization is, how it affects the game, and discuss how our contributions helped to shape Artemesia, the world of Lost Eidolons. Specifically, the names of characters and locations.


What is Localization?

Let’s say you’re on an epic quest to save the world from tyranny. You might not get very far if none of your allies can speak the same language! That’s where localization comes in. Localization is the magic spell that transforms our game from an experience designed for a specific audience, to an experience accessible to players worldwide.



When most people hear the word localization, if they even know what it means, they tend to just think of translation. And it's true, that's a big part of what we do — but it's also more complicated than that. Localization is about capturing the essence and culture of a game for new audiences, and language is only one piece of that. It's one thing to translate the content of a joke from Korean to English; it's another to make that joke actually land effectively and get a laugh.

In many cases, a team developing a game doesn't fully consider how the choices they make for their own audience will be received by someone who speaks a different language or has a completely different cultural background. Maybe they want a strict character limit on a text box, but haven't thought about the fact that German tends to be much longer than Japanese. Maybe they haven't considered how a particular word or name might carry different connotations in their own region than somewhere else, or vice versa.

That’s where localization steps in. We focus on the style and tone of translation, and strive to ensure that the final effect will be the same on a player no matter where they're from. In an ideal world, when we do our job right, no one can tell the game the game was translated at all. That’s our goal: avoid becoming somebody else's meme.



How Localization Shaped Artemesia

By the time our team first got involved with the original Lost Eidolons, the game had already been in development for over a year. As a result, most of the early high-level concept work was done by Korean developers, with characters and places named based on a Korean team's judgment of what a fantasy name should sound like in English. As a result, there were a few rough edges. The story was rich and the world had amazing potential, but we felt some aspects of the presentation might detract from the intended tone and experience.

Early on, we had endless questions. Why was this character named this way? Why were these cities named like that? And behind them all, the biggest question: As a player, would this approach make self-evident sense to me? We had characters named things like Ethan, Rancis, Teo, Gary, and even Boromir. We had locations with names like Brendale, Centel, and Loftale. None of these were horrifyingly bad on their own, but we felt that to properly immerse our players into the game's world, it needed a stronger sense of cohesion. The developers had provided a framework and foundation, and now it was our job to build on it.

One of the first things we looked at was the naming conventions of the world map itself.



We knew fairly early on that we wanted all the voiceovers to use a pretty neutral American English accent across the board, diverging only if it felt right for an individual character. So we knew we wanted to avoid rooting any of Artemesia's provinces in a 1:1 approximation of real-world cultures (or even worse, stereotypes).

But when it comes to place-names, you sort of can't avoid linguistics creeping in. A reader's brain looks for patterns of spelling they recognize. If they don't find them, or if you mix them too much, everything just sounds slightly off and fake, even if the audience can't articulate why.

So we went to work.



A lot of our efforts focused on nailing down the feel of each region, choosing a linguistic reference base that matched, and then selecting names from that base that had the right feel for the region’s role in the setting.

"Brendale", the homeland of our hero, inspired by the Italian countryside, became "Benerio".

"Centel", the walled capital of the empire, became the more French-sounding "Floriant".

The Germanic grassland "Grasbia" became "Lamprecht".

The mediterranean coastal region "Kallion" became "Corsarinda". And so on.



Building of the World

With the geography itself nailed down, we now had a solid footing to approach the rest of the world.

Like Westeros, Artemesia is a land full of noble houses, each with their own rich history and character. The developers already had a few ideas for these (banners, animal heraldry, etc), so it was up to the Localization Team to combine that info with our new naming conventions and find a happy medium.

For the noble family of Benerio, whose standard was a phoenix and whose role in the story was a fiery rebellion, their original name was House Fenix. We felt that was a little on-the-nose, and also a little too close to Gears of War’s Marcus Fenix. So we opted for “House Feniche” (from the Italian for phoenix, “fenice”, but with a slight spelling tweak to fantasy it up).

For the noble family of Lamprecht, represented by a wolf, we nixed “House Adolph” (a bit weak, and has some unfortunate connotations) and opted for the more regal-sounding "House Sigewulf" (a contracted version of the German for “victorious wolf”).

And so on, and so forth.

Once the family names were in place, we were better positioned to start revisiting character names, ensuring the sound lined up with the developers’ intended impact.

“Ethan” became the more heroic and less anachronistic “Eden”.

“Michelle” became “Marchelle”, to match the French feel of her homeland, Floriant.

“Karen” became “Karin” (because what kind of fantasy world has somebody named Karen running around)?

“Boromir” became “Balastar”, because we thought it sounded cooler, and so we wouldn’t get a letter from the Tolkien estate. (And, funnily enough, led to some problems down the road, because it turns out the hangul for “Balastar” and “ballista” are really similar.)

I could go on for a while.



We have many, many tables and lists of these. While it might sound tedious to some, these kinds of finicky, granular considerations about spelling and language are what localization is all about.
Some of our changes were pretty minor, while others were fairly significant and required a lot of discussion. But in the end, we were able to align on a world we felt was cohesive and made sense.

That gave us a good starting point when it came time for the thousand other decisions that go into localizing dialogue. Is this character an educated noble or a hardscrabble commoner? Outgoing or shy? Respectful or cocky? And once those decisions were made for the English translation, we were better equipped to aid localization partners working on the game's other languages, to ensure that no matter where a player was from, their experience of the game was the same.

How Players Can Help the Localization

There are lots of things to consider when localizing a game, and many different approaches to take. Our team's philosophy prioritizes inclusivity as the #1 goal. We believe everyone deserves to experience the joys of this hobby, and we strive to make our games available, cohesive, and immersive for anyone who wants to play them.

But at the end of the day, we're only human, and we depend on player feedback, both to gauge interest and to do our work better in the future.

Want one of our games in a language not yet supported? Speak up!

See an issue with a translation? Shoot us a message on Discord!

Our studio welcomes players into the development process with open arms, and the Localization Team is no exception to that.

On behalf of everyone on the Localization team,
ODS_Roy

DISCORD | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE | TWITCH

Hello everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving! 2023 went so fast and I can’t believe it’s already November.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
2023 was exciting for everyone at Ocean Drive Studio! We started Early Access for Blackout Protocol, released Lost Eidolons on PS5 and Xbox Series, dropped the Dropkick Navvy demo, and of course, we announced Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch.

All of us working on these various projects are grateful for the ongoing support from everyone and hope to deliver something even more meaningful to our community in the upcoming months.

To share our plans going forward:

[h2]Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch[/h2]

As Lost Eidolons is a very important franchise for us, we are going to keep investing in the genre and IP. For Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch, our plan is to share regular updates via our Dev Logs, and plan to stream and showcase development progress. We are hoping to share the demo build with everyone early 2024—that is, unless we find critical issues during internal playtests! Please follow our social channels and Steam community hubs for more updates. All links below.

[h2]Blackout Protocol[/h2]

It was busy 4 months after we released Early Access in July! We learned a lot from the community feedback and have been working to improve the foundation of the game, pivoting from the content roadmap we announced at release. As we hope to have addressed most of the improvement points of the core gameplay, we think we can start adding new content again. If you haven’t tried out the game yet, now is the perfect time to give it a go since you will see the much-improved version of Blackout Protocol thanks to our community feedback. And it’s on Autumn Sale!

[h2]Dropkick Navvy and Unannounced Title[/h2]

Right after PAX West, we released an early demo entitled Dropkick Navvy: First Step! We are collecting feedback and reading the reviews for the game to better plan the development roadmap for the full game—Dropkick Navvy. If you haven’t tried the demo yet, please give it a try especially if you love physics based, sandbox games!

We have also been working on an unannounced title for quite a while! This unannounced title is one of the biggest development projects which we plan to officially announce in late 2024. So keep an eye out for future announcements.

Again, thank you so much for all the support you have given us and have a fantastic Thanksgiving Weekend!

Best,

Jungsoo Lee

When we started designing the gameplay experience for Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch, one of the very first things we knew we wanted was a faster pace to combat. If you play Lost Eidolons on harder difficulties or with permadeath on , some battles can take almost an hour. To create a turn-based SRPG with a lot of replayability, while providing a new experience each time, I felt shorter battles must be treated as a core pillar.

Today we’ll be taking a look at several new ways we’re speeding things up in Veil of the Witch, including:

1. Reducing the party size.
2. Shortening the prep time between battles.
3. Shortening combat animations.
4. Scaling down the size of combat maps.

Reducing the Party Size
Lost Eidolons has a massive cast of party members to choose from: you can recruit 25+ characters, and deploy up to 10 of them at a time (or 20, if you include those you set as Aides). That offers its own sort of fun, but comes at a cost: it tends to make battles quite time-consuming.
So for Veil of the Witch, we wanted to try something different. Initially, we set out with the idea of a party size ranging between 3 and 6 characters. Eventually, we settled on 5.



To put it another way: 5 was the minimum amount we felt we could get away with, without reducing what makes an SRPG fun.
The biggest challenge with reducing the party-size was how hard it became to utilize the monster weak point system, a battle mechanic in Lost Eidolons that I love. It’s a system that I think encourages the player to fully engage with all of the game’s mechanics, using smart positioning and a variety of weapons and abilities to maximize synergy as efficiently as possible. I felt that if the party size was too small, monster battles would lose that spark (and also just become too hard).
We tried out various options, and eventually found a party size of 5 to be the sweet spot.



Reducing the Time Spent Between Battles
Lost Eidolons has a fairly long preparation phase between battles. You have to manage equipment, classes, skills, and various other little details for at least 10 characters, and sometimes more. For Veil of the Witch, I wanted to cut that down dramatically, so players spend less time staring at menus and more time playing the game.
To reduce the time spent managing characters, we decided each character should have a fixed class, and advance within their own predefined perk tree. We also decided that each class should have a specific set of fixed equipment, to let us design their kit with a more cohesive, intentional feel.
Our goal is to give the player a balanced party of characters with distinct roles that feel unique (rather than basically interchangeable, as they were in Lost Eidolons), while still allowing for some variance in builds and abilities. We then layer additional depth on top of this, with the addition of the new roguelite elements, like unlocking new skills and upgrade cards right there in a middle of a battle.
It’s a direction I’m quite pleased with, as it results in a lot of exciting moments and really interesting synergies between characters. I look forward to sharing more about each individual character and class in future updates.



Shortening Animations
In addition to reducing the time between battles, we also did our best to reduce unnecessary downtime during battles.
Lost Eidolons featured frequent cinematic finisher animations, where the camera zooms in as a character delivers a particular spell or attack. While fun, these also slow down the pace of the game, and no matter how cool they are, they inevitably lose some charm after the 300th time you see them.
While the first game already provides options for 2x animation speed and skipping enemy turns (both of which will still be available in VotW), those are optional settings, not core changes. We wanted to take things further this time around, and design animations to play out quickly and snappily on the grid map itself.
We still use cinematic shots and effects for specific high-level skills. We’re just doing so more sparingly now – both to speed up the game, and so that when they do show up, they feel all the more exciting.



Scaling Down the Maps
Finally, a major departure from the first game is that the maps in this one are generally a lot smaller.
In Lost Eidolons, the sprawling battlefields were a necessity, because there were so many units running around on both sides, so we needed the ability to space out squads and skirmishes. With this game’s smaller party size, it’s just natural to shrink the levels, so players spend less time on those tedious in-between turns, where all you’re doing is trying to move a parade of party members across a huge empty section of the map.
We’re also reducing enemy numbers and density within each map — opting for shorter, more frequent battles, rather than long multistage ones with a huge number of enemy squads.



I hope fans will approach these new changes with an open mind. Rest assured, we’re not just removing features or reducing complexity for the sake of it. Our goal is to build on what worked in the first game, while streamlining parts where we think we can do better, to create a battle system that feels faster, more dynamic, strategically deeper, and just overall way more fun.
I look forward to sharing more in future updates!

Jin Sang Kim, Creative Director

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530490/Lost_Eidolons_Veil_of_the_Witch/

Howdy friends! I'm Brandon, Lead Narrative Designer at Ocean Drive, and a writer/designer on Veil of the Witch. The Communications team, in their infinite wisdom and mercy, have decided to give Jin Sang a reprieve from writing blog posts so he can focus on actually making the game, which means it's ya boy's turn to work a shift in the content mines.

In our last dev log, Jin Sang talked a bit about how the concept for VotW came about, from a studio and business perspective. In this post, I'd like to follow up on that, and talk a bit more about the game’s story — specifically, what relation it has to the previous title, and why we made some of the choices we did when setting out on this project.

Fair warning: if you haven't finished Lost Eidolons yet, this post will contain major spoilers for that game. So read it at your own peril, cuz I’m writing this on a Friday afternoon, feeling pretty spicy, and I’m sick of being coy.

Here we go!

SPOILER STUFF STARTS HERE, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

To talk about the premise of VotW's story, we should start with a quick recap of the first game, and how this one arises from it.

The first Lost Eidolons is, in my view, structurally a tragedy. It's a classic tale about a small-town guy with a good heart, who finds himself drawn into a war that sparks a struggle within his own heart.

In the game's opening hours, the set-up seems pretty straightforward: it's a righteous struggle for freedom between an underdog (the once-great House Feniche of Benerio) and a brutal imperialist regime (the Ludivictan Empire).

But when the bad guys go down unexpectedly early, the game's real conflict comes into focus: a chaotic civil war between former allies, with just a whiff of class struggle. And once ancient gods come into the mix, it becomes a battle for one man’s soul that decides the fate of a continent.



I think it's fair to say that there are a lot of things about Lost Eidolons that the team might do differently today, with the benefit of hindsight. But as a writer who came onto that project a few years into development, this is one of my favorite aspects of the original, and I think one of its most successful elements: it zigs when you expect it to zag, and fully embraces the moral complexities of low fantasy.

So when we decided to embark on Veil of the Witch, one of the first questions we had to settle was: how far after the first game is it set, how connected are the two, and what does the world of Artemesia look like now? Because really, so much of the setting’s future is decided by a single question: Does Eden go on to become a good ruler, or a bad one? Does he break the cycle of morally compromised leaders, and turn Artemesia into a better place? Or does he fall prey to that same cycle, his principles falling by the wayside as he pursues the power to uphold them, in an endless self-destructive spiral?



Tough question! Especially because the original game has multiple endings. It’s no wonder so many RPG series just sidestep the whole issue and time-jump 200 years between games.

I’m a pretty firm believer that every game in a franchise like this needs to be able to stand on its own two legs and tell a satisfying self-contained story, or all that great worldbuilding ceases to be an asset, and instead becomes a weighted blanket that smothers creativity. But you also want to build on previous entries, honoring the experience of existing players, or you run the risk of the world and franchise losing any kind of consistent identity.

This is a bull I expect we’ll have to wrestle for every new game in the series. But for this particular title, we decided to set the story 5 years out from the first: a span of time that lets us play in the same space (and share some characters), while granting enough distance to let us see how the world has changed as a result of Eden and the player's efforts.

Five years on, Artemesia is a land in the midst of healing and rebuilding. In the capital, Eden and his allies have set up a transitional government with two priorities: getting the continent back on its feet after a devastating war, and establishing safeguards against the kind of corruption that led to that war in the first place. The result is that they’re doing a pretty decent job, but they’re slow to respond to threats, because they’ve got their hands full with a million other things.

So that’s the backdrop we’re playing against.

From there, Veil of the Witch’s story kind of emerges naturally.



There’s a slowly growing antagonistic faction, on the edges of the world. Specifically, a neo-fascist Imperial cult secretly amassing on Anareios, a remote island off the coast, where dire developments can be mistaken for distant rumors. The bad guys are dabbling in dark magic and necromancy. People are going missing. The locals are starting to whisper about shambling figures in the misty countryside, and how dangerous it is to travel certain roads alone.



Our new protagonist (whose name and gender are customizable, but we call Ashe by default) is an unlucky outsider traveling to Anareios on a personal quest. Then their ship hits the rocks, and suddenly they’re stranded on a zombie-infested island where the only way out is through. They’re joined by fellow survivors, some of whom are new faces, and some of whom are returning characters from Lost Eidolons. (And for those who enjoyed the first game, we take some of these characters in wildly new directions that I think you’ll really, really enjoy.)



Most of the game’s plot is still shifting ice, but here’s the stuff I can tell you that’s not likely to change.

The hero isn’t quite so earnest this time around. Eden’s sort of a typical fantasy hero; Ashe is more of a cunning antihero, here to do a job, and doing it for their own reasons.

The Eidolons are, let us say, not so lost anymore. As in, you will meet one in the game’s first few hours.

While the setting is still generally low fantasy, we’re playing with the boundaries of that, and infusing a hefty dose of dark fantasy (one of my favorite genres). Lost Eidolons will probably never be the kind of world where heroes teleport between nations or ride dragons into battle. But it might be a world where a traveler willing to venture far enough off the map’s edge can find strange entities in shadowy places to cut fell pacts with. (If you’re a fan of Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, or Ursula Le Guin, I think you’ll feel right at home here.)

It’s a roguelite where you die and restart a lot, and those things aren’t just hand-waved as gameplay contrivances; they’re incorporated directly into the story.



Because of this, the narrative structure borrows from games like Hades, and incorporates a lot of looping elements. Much of the story is told through unlockable flashbacks, random events, and repeating encounters that iteratively offer new dialogue.

We’ve said in a few previous posts that this game won’t be as story-heavy as the first. But I’d like to clarify that point, for bookish dorks like me whose hackles go up when they hear stuff like that.

Veil of the Witch is NOT a story-free zone. It will have plenty of story. Our goal is just to tell that story with a lighter touch, more modern narrative design, and a core loop that’s a little more organically gameplay-driven. Instead of an hour-long battle followed by an hour of cutscenes, now it’s ten minutes of combat followed by a few minutes of talking.

Brisk. Exciting. Dark. Mysterious. Doing more with less.

These are the story and narrative design goals for Veil of the Witch.

At least, if it all works out as planned. But who knows? We’re still pretty early-days on this project, so it could still turn out disastrously! Game development is hard.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530490/Lost_Eidolons_Veil_of_the_Witch/