Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch News

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/

Hello everyone!

In this dev log, I’d like to discuss the story behind how Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch came to be.
(Please note, this post will contain some spoilers for the first game.)

Fans of Lost Eidolons may recall a mission about halfway through the game. Eden and his friends are nearing the end of their fight against the Empire, and attack the capital city, Leroyaure. But when they arrive, they’re attacked by a strange undead knight, Gustave, under the command of the Prime Minister, Maurin – who later reveals to Eden that the Emperor is deathly ill, and secretly searching for a way to achieve immortality. But we don’t really come back to that in the first game, and there’s a reason why.
Before we began development of the first game, we put together a pretty ambitious history of the entire continent where the story takes place. This included everything from ancient lore, to what’s happening around the time of the game, to what might happen in the future, with lots of little plot-hooks for other games to explore.
One of those stories was about the Emperor’s true fate, and a secret research facility on an island off the coast.



While development on Lost Eidolons was going on, we actually had another project set in the same world. Internally, we called it Project UR: a crafting/survival game set on a zombie-infested island, which would pick up where some of these threads in Lost Eidolons left off.
Project UR was ultimately canceled to focus our resources on the main game, but the concept for the setting stuck around, as did a lot of big questions about the world that we knew we wanted to explore in some way. Questions like: What happened to the Emperor? What’s going on with all the zombie stuff? And even more broadly, what exactly are the Eidolons, and how are they shaping the fate of this world?



Eventually, these ideas and questions formed into a concept for a new game, which became Veil of the Witch. It’s a dark fantasy story about a new customizable protagonist, Ashe, who journeys to Anareios and becomes caught up in a conspiracy surrounding the remnants of the empire, the Emperor’s search for immortality, and the secrets of the Eidolons (which we get into a bit more directly this time around).




Like the first game, Veil of the Witch is a strategy RPG, but with even more focus on combat and gameplay. Hades and Slay the Spire were among our inspirations as we outlined the project. Slay the Spire because a few of us played it to hear Clark Aboud’s music, and fell in love with the looping structure and deckbuilding elements. And Hades because we loved the addictive experience of a hack-and-slash roguelite whose story is designed to unfold over time.

Inspired by these games, the core concept of Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch solidified into a strategy RPG with extremely fast battles, streamlined skilltree-style progression, and various elements borrowed from the roguelite/roguelike genre. (I want to be careful throwing that word around too much, as people tend to have a lot of different ideas and expectations when it comes to that genre. But we can get into details about that another time.)




As we got deeper into planning the game, a lot of other ideas have crept in – some from things we wanted to include in Lost Eidolons, others from different projects we’ve had ideas for. It’s been a lot of fun, and we’re very excited about how the game is shaping up.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this peek behind the scenes! We’ll be back in couple of weeks to talk a little more about the story and the world.

See you soon,
Jin Sang Kim, Creative Director

DISCORD | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE | TWITCH

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

Tacticians,

PAX West is near and dear to our hearts because it’s where we announced Lost Eidolons’ release date, our studio’s second title Blackout Protocol.
So it was only fitting that we unveil “Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch” at PAX West 2023.

This year, we were in the new Summit building with plenty of daylight showering down on us.
We were grateful the Seattle weather was accommodating and held its raindrops until after we were done hauling in our boxes on move-in day.



Our Ocean Drive Studio booth was divided into three sections. 6 demo stations for Veil of the Witch, 6 stations for Blackout Protocol, and a dedicated media area. And when the PAX gates opened, all the stations kicked into high gear.








Dropkick Navvy, another new title we announced at PAX>


Jin Sang, our Creative Director, was also on hand to answer questions and gather feedback from brand new players, fans of Lost Eidolons, and the media.




After our first day, we figured that the demo game was much too challenging. There were only a handful of players who succeeded in completing the map in victory. And to be fair, the demo did start at a pretty advanced map without a tutorial. So Jin Sang quickly leveled the playing field a bit by equipping the characters with better stats. It was still challenging, but we saw many more victors arise from the chairs.

And of course, per the tradition of gaming conventions, sweet sweet swag was given away to about a thousand people. Thankfully, game victory was not a giveaway condition and everybody who stopped by received a bag in either red or black.




After four busy days of introducing the new installment in the Lost Eidolons world, it was time for Veil of the Witch stations to power down.
As always, it was a little bittersweet to pack it in and leave the PAX floor for the year. But we will be back next year. And who knows what big news we will break next time?

One thing is for sure, you won’t have to wait until PAX West 2024 to hear from Veil of the Witch again! So keep your eyes on Steam by Following the page, and/or all our social pages.

DISCORD | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE | TWITCH

We will be back to see more smiling faces like this!


Until the next time we meet, with much gratitude,
ODS ThorThor

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