Solstice Chronicles: MIA News

Solstice Chronicles: MIA is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

Battle for survival against waves of Martian mutants in this tactical twist on twin-stick shooters. Using the skills of your drone companion, make fight-or-flight decisions that drastically alter the threats you face. Will your choices lead you to freedom... or your doom?

*Offer ends August 2 at 10AM Pacific Time

Solstice Chronicles MIA
release date is July 26. Just one week away from now!

We are still focusing all of our effort into polishing the game for release, but it already looks and feels very good, so we decided to compile some material to give you the taste of what’s coming.
























Our backers who get Fluffy weapons will also be able to use one of these beauties:

Infected Martian colony? Check! Chatty drone companion? Check! Unending hoards of mutants with a singular purpose of consuming human flesh? Check! An arsenal of tools to make them sorry for trying? Check! An arsenal of even more bad ass tools just to make it all a bit more fun? Check! It looks like we're almost done!

It is our pleasure to announce that our newest title, Solstice Chronicles: MIA will be launching on Steam on July 26th!

Powered by Unreal Engine 4 and our dedication to gaming, Solstice chronicles: MIA represents what we believe is a perfect blend of instant fun fast paced twin-stick action and a long term replayability potential provided by a variety of skills, drone abilities, class based skill tree system and our unique adaptive spawn system.

Take a look at our release date teaser trailer and if you like what you see help us spread the word by sharing the news on social media! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBVftxrWW-M&feature=youtu.be

In the meantime you can satisfy your trigger-itch with our debut title, The Red Solstice, which will be on sale with 70% discount as part of Steam Summer Sale starting today.

Almost funded! Let's make it great :)

We're presenting you what we personally call "TRS mode" in Solstice Chronicles: MIA.

You don't like singleplayer? Well this will be right up your alley..Enjoy :)
https://www.fig.co/campaigns/solstice-chronicles-mia


In addition to the story mode we already talked about, Solstice Chronicles: MIA also features a survival mode. In this update we will be explaining what survival mode is and how it differs from the story mode. Also, since we are nearly funded, we will be introducing our first stretch goal, the improved survival mode.

• Defend against endless waves for features
  
• Overall difficulty increases over time
  
• Explore open map and gather new equipment and skills
  
• Upgrade character and equipment with each successful evac (EVAC appears every few min)
  
• Manage your resources
  
• Build your base(barricades, ammo stations, etc.)
  
• Random supplies, enemy spawns, evacs - replayability
  

Basic principle behind survival mode is quite simple. Survive as long as you can against increasingly challenging odds. A survival game starts with players dropping to a randomly selected starting position, solo or in local coop with a friend. From there on, he is on his own to explore, scavenge for supplies, construct defenses or just hunker down and survive.




Resources and exploration are a even more important in survival mode. Like in story mode, resources come either in easily visible crates that can be used by players, or as resources (ammo clips, medkits, pieces of weaponry etc.) that can be found scattered randomly throughout the map or be brought to the player by the drone. As only resources resources that actually exist and are accessible can be brought, finding and unlocking new areas will be of utmost importance.


While exploring the map, constructible objects can also be found. Those special items represent packaged constructions like barricades, turrets etc. Drone is able to pick them up and construct at the location of player's choosing.


Third important aspect of exploration are skill and weapon unlocks. First time player drops into survival mode, he comes armed with just a pistol and basic skills unlocked for his class. During game time he will find additional weapons and skill modules scattered at random locations throughout the map that will allow him to equip those elements at the start of subsequent games.


Survival mode is divided into cycles, lasting several minutes (may vary based upon difficulty and other factors). At the end of each cycle, player is given a choice: either try to survive longer for additional rewards or take what he earned so far and evacuate. If the player decides to evacuate, he will have to reach a randomly selected point on the map where his game ends.



Based upon his success, player is then awarded weapon and skill upgrade points and he gets to keep all the weapons and skills he has unlocked during the mission. If hedecides to stay, a number of additional supplies and upgrades get dropped, and a new cycle begins. With every cycle, monsters get tougher and more numerous,so a cycle 5 threat level 1 might be more difficult then cycle 1 threat level5. If at any point player dies, game ends and all the progress player made during that mission is lost.

As we are nearing our funding goal, it's time to start talking about stretch goals.

• Defend against endless waves for survival
  
• Explore open map and gather new equipment and skills
  
• Upgrade your character and equipment with each succesfull evac
  
• Manage your resources
  
• Build your base(barricades, ammo stations, etc.)
  
• Random supplies, enemy spawns, evacs - replayability
  

• NEW* select resource drop on each survival cycle
  
• NEW* missions that appear randomly
  
• NEW* unlock and fortify buildings
  
• NEW* build special objects like „Reaper Turret“
  
• NEW* more survival maps
  

Find out more about this at!
https://www.fig.co/campaigns/solstice-chronicles-mia



We really really really, want this stretch goal, help us and let's make it happen together :)

Spread the word, tell your friends, share on forums, imgur, reddit, twitter and let's do it!
Thank you all!

Dear friends, fans, customers and fellow gamers:


As many of you are aware, in July of 2015 we released our first game, The Red Solstice, following a successful Kickstarter campaign and a year of intense development under Steam Early Access. Fueled by ambition to survive in the industry we love so much, our small team managed to deliver on our main goal and promise, to release a final product we can be proud of.
During the development of The Red Solstice, we noticed that many of our customers were asking if we could allow more direct WASD + mouse aiming control scheme to be used. Unfortunately that was impossible to do without compromising the fundamental ideas The Red Solstice was based upon, but it did show us though that there was definitely an interest for such more action based shooter type games. After The Red Solstice was released and we expanded our team with two additional full time members, we started debating our next project. The idea of making another game as a perhaps more arcade, more directly controlled and action based approach to The Red Solstice universe was naturally one of our favorites. As we are witnessing a revolution in the area of commercial general purpose game engines, it became obvious that it was no longer reasonable to maintain our own in-house engine so a decision was made to switch to Epic's Unreal Engine 4. It allowed us to devote much more time to actual content development and enabled much more flexibility both during the quick prototyping and later development.

Our first twin stick shooter type prototype was shown at the Zagreb Reboot Infogamer exhibition and was well received by the public so we immediately knew we were on the right track, but we weren't satisfied with making just another twin stick shooter. We wanted something that was easy to pick up and play, but offered tactical depth and complexity to those who wanted it. We wanted a true The Red Solstice take on twin stick shooters.
After a lot of testing of different ideas, we came up with a combination of systems that would require the player to both control the immediate situation on the battlefield and keep track of the global mission status:

A number of special „Tactical Skills“ would allow the player to change the immediate situation on the battlefield, kill or greatly weaken monsters surrounding him, push a whole wave of monsters off a cliff, cause a large wave of monsters to spawn, or grant a large number of supplies immediately, but they also affect the type and number of monsters that would spawn for the rest of the mission, making the game much easier or more difficult later on.


A number of different skills, weapons and combat suit types player can choose and upgrade in a RPG like skill system would allow for a large variety of play styles and different ways the players can personalize the way they handle different challenges.

One of our long time friends and supporters who also happens to be a talented story writer got into our first game's atmosphere and came up with a story about a stranded marine, left for the dead in the epicenter of an alien mutant apocalypse, fighting for his life alongside a sentient but slightly broken insurgent drone. We decided it was a perfect mix of dark horror and slightly over the top humor we so much love in the old school action sci-fi movies. We believe that is what defines The Red Solstice universe, and thus a framework for Solstice Chronicles: MIA was born.

Now, more then a year into the project, things are starting to fit into their place and we are genuinely happy with what we are seeing. Unfortunately, making a game is an expensive endeavour, and during our final months of development we are more and more forced to weigh our options based not only upon what is the ideal fit for our project, but also upon what we can afford. As we are determined to deliver the best product we possibly can, we decided to ask you all once more to place your trust with us and help us fund our project in these final months of its development and allow us to make Solstice Chronicles into the best game we can. As always, in return we promise both direct rewards to our backers, ranging from the access to the finished game up to the chance to personally work with us in order to leave your own direct mark on the game, and additional work that will be made pre and post release depending on the final level of funding we receive.
This time we have decided to work with a dedicated game confounding platform Fig to make this campaign possible. You can find the campaign web page at the link: https://www.fig.co/campaigns/solstice-chronicles-mia

Please support us by backing our project and spreading the word about our campaign!


As always sincerely yours, Ironward team.