Over the next 14 days, help us add the final touches to this fully voiced pause-for-tactics RPG, where magical masks & deception rule.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Evolution of Enemy Design Vol. 1: "Rockthulu"
almost 8 years ago
– Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 11:54:46 PM
Hey everyone!
Brian here. It's worth mentioning that the working titles for our enemies come in all flavours of pop culture. Just today, we've heard the artists mouth off about "Jabba" and "No-Face"... so let's talk about the guy once known as "Rockthulu"!
Those of you who've been paying attention know the foes faced by your party in Masquerada come in two varieties: humans and fey. The fey are creatures that possess an organic form, like that of an animal or humanoid, but its form is composed of nearby elements from the environment.
In designing the fey, our concept artists endeavored to pick creature forms that would make sense given the environment. The first dungeon we designed was a subterranean area known as the “Cleaver”.
Entrance to the Cleaver. Do you guys remember this from the reveal trailer?
So, the player would find rock fey occupying the depths of the Cleaver.
This design sheet shows our lead artist Peter's very first pass at a few varieties of the rock fey. We aimed for an unsettling blend of proto-human bodies with primary shapes and a simple, animalistic stare.
Adorable? Scary? Leave? Remain?
With the guy on the far right, we christened him “rock Cthulu” or Rockthulu because of the beard. We pegged him to be in a boss battle. So our modeller Shaun took Rockthulu and jazzed him up a bit for the pre-viz of the 3D model.
The green stuff on his arm is the same iridescent moss found all over Ombre.
We found out early on that Rockthulu didn’t test so well when set up on the battlefield. There were problems with telegraphing his movements and attacks. He also lacked a clear silhouette that made him pop off the more gray/blue backgrounds of the Cleaver. So we tried tweaking him some more.
He's kinda looking more like dad-Kratos in the new God of War...
We tried shaving off some fat, giving Rockthulu a more well defined and svelte torso. Shaun also tried shaving off his beard, and in the process practically shaved off Rockthulu’s face while adding some diagonal lines to draw the viewer's eye up.
The diagonal lines had a pretty profound effect that gave Shaun some inspiration to re-jigger this guy from the ground up!
Paging Judas Priest; you left your pet golem at the counter.
When Shaun spun off and strongly incorporated the diagonality motif into Rockthulu, we got a new, spikier direction. The reincarnated one-armed Rockthulu now carries a much bigger, badder club. The viewer's eyes focused where needed: on his footwork, the telegraphing of the main body, and of course, the bloody giant clubbing arm.
There's a Mega Man joke hiding here, I know it.
Inspired by Shaun’s new thrust, Peter cooked up a concept for New Rockthulu to refine the idea further and make him more cohesive. (We also adjusted the other enemies in the Cleaver based on the motifs set by New Rockthulu.) This allowed Shaun to go straight to refining the model below:
The bare Rockthulu model before it got painted.
This isn't even my final-- oh wait
Behold, there's "Rockthulu" as will be seen in the final game! Quite a trek from early concept to final model, eh? Now repeat this for not just every boss, but every single enemy that we’ve put in the game, big and small!
---
These design articles will be a bi-weekly affair, so in two weeks we'll be back to highlight some critters from a certain sewer you may be familiar with, plus some brand new content. Stay tuned - and if you like what you learned here, please share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter!
Some closing words from Ian!
Heya all, Ian here. Busy getting stuff done as promised, but I wanted to take a quick break and talk about another Kickstarter project started by some friends of ours. Allan and Chris from Boomzap have been dear friends and given us amazing support and advice over the last few years. They're recently started a campaign for an expansion of their cult strategy hit Legends of Callasia. The game is fantastic and has a veteran team developing its expansion. It would mean a lot to me if you guys could take a gander and hopefully support them if you like what you see!
Release month news! BackerKit surveys!
almost 8 years ago
– Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 06:19:22 PM
Hey everyone,
Brian here, I am very apologetic for the weeks-long delay in updates; a stomach infection tends to do that! Let's get straight to the big news:
We are pushing the Steam release of Masquerada: Songs and Shadows to early September 2016.
It's July now and a couple of backers have wondered if the game's coming out soon. Unfortunately, good things do need time, and we would rather delay the release a little more to ensure that the quality we desire becomes reality! We've not set in stone a final release date yet, but the game WILL come out in September. That, we will promise.
Kalden feels just as awful reading this news as you do.
As the famous saying by Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo goes: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." As an example of what we're doing with the additional time, we're rebuilding from scratch an entire boss battle whose assets (artwork, characters etc) were completed. The design of the boss made things tedious and it just wasn't fun, no matter how we tried to balance out the fight!
---
About BackerKit
In other news, this week we'll be sending out surveys via BackerKit! We'll be taking tallies on how many people want Steam keys or PS4 codes, and also grabbing shipping addresses.
As a backer, the survey will allow you to add on those sought-after items, such as Cicero's Mascherine or the physical poster. Also, those of you whose pledges lapsed should be able to complete your payments again through the BackerKit survey. If you have any trouble with this, don't hesitate to message us privately!
Lastly, we have opened a pre-order section for DIGITAL-ONLY items, featuring the game itself in addition to digital editions of the Masquerada soundtrack, the Kickstarter poster and the artbook. The pre-order link's right here at https://masquerada.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders - please share this on Facebook, Twitter and other social media with your friends and family, if you'd like them to get a piece of the Masquerada pie!
(Please do note that the pre-order store's prices are not discounted, unlike with the Kickstarter!)
---
Alright, that's all from me this update. Come Friday, we'll have that article I promised on evolution of enemy design!
Oh, one more heads-up! In mid-August, we'll be showing Masquerada at Gamescom with our publisher Ysbryd, so if any folks here in the EU are headed in the direction of Cologne, come look us up in Hall 10.1. Help us tip off any EU-based press if you know any, we'd LOVE to talk to them too!
- Brian
MUSIC LORE! + E3 wrap-up!
almost 8 years ago
– Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 09:48:26 PM
Hey everyone!
Brian here, again. Today we're sharing a behind the scenes video from our composer Josh, who walks us through his preparation process for vocals and lyrics in his music. And these are no ordinary lyrics - Josh integrated the language of the Dimenticate, an ancient civilization hinted at within the game!
Also, Josh wears a nifty mask as he opens the video. Points for style, dude. If you're a music nerd, you'll definitely want a closer look at this - and there's more to come!
In other news, we wrapped up E3 last week! Couple more photos from things that went down:
It's hiiiiigh no-- IT'S CICERO, DAMMIT! We welcomed Matt Mercer, voice of Cicero (and also a certain gunslinger in a popular team FPS game), to join us...
...and Matt was super awesome about helping us field some interviews!
We also snagged a Choice Award from LevelCamp. Thanks, guys!
And if you're interested in digging into some of those interviews we took, have a gander at these:
We'll be back next week (hopefully!) with that writeup about the evolution of enemy design!
- Brian
Masquerada x PlayStation @ E3!
almost 8 years ago
– Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 12:23:23 AM
We just concluded Day One of E3, where we enjoyed the hospitality and very comfy (if a little crowded) booth under the banner of House PlayStation! We wanna share some highlights from our day.
Our setup with PlayStation!
It runs!! Nothing is exploding!!
They printed a nifty control guide so people don't keep hitting R3 for help!
Genius mechanic that he is, Ratchet still has problems working a DualShock.
The ever-lovely Cat Taber, who plays Amadea, dropped by to help out with our kiosk!
Bonus round! Have a gander at the almightily adorable Fat Chocobo.
We will be grabbing more photos and things of interest as we actually walk around the convention in the next two days, so stay tuned!
- Brian
A quick update!
almost 8 years ago
– Tue, Jun 07, 2016 at 10:23:20 PM
Hey folks,
Brian here! Sorry we've been a bit quiet here - the team has been knuckling down to create, create, create!
For the backers whose pledges didn't go through for one reason or another, we mentioned that we've been exploring solutions and weighing pros and cons - and ultimately we've decided that we're going with BackerKit to help resolve these issues.
For the rest of you, we are thinking of allowing add-on items to your pledges! Want to pick up Cicero's Mascherine or an extra poster, but don't want all the other stuff that's in the Regenti tier box set? You can order to your heart's content! (We're not saying it'll be cheap though...)
If you know any cool industry people or journalists headed to Los Angeles (or are one yourself), come by and chat with us. We're trying to arrange for Cat Taber (the voice of Amadea) to come hang out with us at the booth for a bit as well!
And for the rest of our backers, we recommend tuning in to any one of Sony's numerous channels offering live feeds from E3, particularly the PlayStation press conference on Monday at 5:30pm PST! No promises, but we think there might be a slice or two of Masquerada footage up on that big screen... :D
Please look forward to our next update: we'll be pulling in some content on enemy designs, plus some more juicy notes on the music process from both Josh and iNCH!
