Hi Explorers!
Welcome to the Zarktor's Realm Dev Diary. We'll be providing you regular updates to keep you informed of what's happening behind the scenes to bring you this fantastic game.
In this post, we'd like to give you an overview of where we are at in the development cycle and introduce you to the game world, main characters and goal of the game.
Zarktor's Realm is a 3rd-Person-perspective Action Adventure role playing game set in Medieval England, Scotland and Wales during the 6th Century AD. You start out selecting a player character from twelve unique heroes. Each have their own skills, attributes and back story and may be customised and equipped as you progress. You can choose from:
Templars
The religious fanatics. There are those who follow the doctrines to the letter and those who have since fallen from grace. Nevertheless, they continue to wield great power through their divine connection.
Knights
The Mainstay of battle. The resolute soldier, trusted by those in power to help defend what matters most and do their bidding. They wield all manner of weapons and armour and train hard for combat.
Warriors
Fierce and powerful. They come from a long line of battle leaders of the Dumnonii and Iceni tribes and are direct decendents of Boudicea.
Assassins
A master of the night, striking quietly and leaving no trace. They are despised by many for their cruel poisons, adept theivery and dark secrets.
Mages
Wizards specialising in various forms of magic. Sometimes, they turn away from the sacred texts and pursue their own interests in the arcane arts, experimenting with natural and unnatural forces.
Hunter
Seeks to banish any and all demonic forces, regardless of the consequences. They are rarely trusted by townsfolk for fear they too will also be hunted. They have an affinity with many animals.
Necromancer
They have been to the other side and returned with sacred knowledge to resurrect corpses, control decay and draw spiritual energy from the environment. They are hated and feared because of it.
Following an orientation tutorial, you'll be thrown into a maelstrom of world-changing events that actually occurred in the 6th Century including the Volcanic Winter of 536 AD (also referred to as Fimbulwinter - the precursor to Ragnarök), the resulting famines and the bubonic Plague of Justinian - arguably one of the worst periods in history to be alive. Along the way you'll meet interesting NPCs and be given complex quests to solve real world problems with real consequences to the people around you. You will explore the world on horseback and battle hordes of the undead, necromantic cults and demons of the underworld.
Your main guide, counsel and the game's narrator is none other than Gildas the wise - an educated monk who chronicles your progress and guides you when you need it most. Gildas was there at the battle of Badon decades before, knew of King Arthur's exploits and sets your main quest line into motion. From here on, it is up to you how you play the game, what you uncover and achieve.
Progress Thus Far
Now that we've given you a brief taste of the backstory and characters, we'd like to provide an overview of where we are at in development.
- Prototyping / Proof-of-Concept - we've spent about a year working up prototypes and de-risking the technical components of the game. Development is now largely assembling components into coherent scenes.
- Player Controller - The player controller is arguably the most important component in the game as it involves character controls, combat, dialogue, movement, animations, horseriding, etc. We've spent hundreds of hours working on these aspects to make the controls responsive and most of all, fun to play.
- Customised controls - We have implemented a third-party component called Rewired that allows the player to configure their own gamepad, mouse or keyboard controls across platforms.
- Platforms - We have settled on the Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and Steamdeck platforms for our initial releases. It is possible these may be staggered, but these are the ones we're testing with.
- Explored 3rd-Person vs. First-Person vs. VR modes of Play - During the prototyping stage, we explored different avenues to implement mode switching between 3rd Person Perspective, First Person Perspective and Virtual Reality. However, whilst we were able to get this functionality limping along - it was taking far too long. We made the decision to focus on 3rd Person only for the initial release of the game so as to control the scope and move forward. We still have the prototypes we can go back to re-introduce FPS and VR modes of play at some later date.
- Assets - We've procured virtually all 3d assets we need for Zarktor's Realm including characters, non-player characters, animals, enemies, nature and weather assets, buildings, props, weapons, armour and items. We've also now got our sound effects and visual/special effects assets ready to be integrated. We're very excited to be in a position now where we can focus on building exciting levels with these assets, implementing the storyline, and writing quests and dialogue for NPCs.
- Custom Artwork - Aidan (our very talented artist and close friend) has been working on turnaround sheets for character bosses and maps for boss-levels. He has a penchant for horror and an amazing imagination, so is ideally placed to come up with some awesome looking demonic bosses (and their unique combat abilities to boot). Here is a brief sample of his work - If you like it, please visit and follow him at https://www.artstation.com/aidancleary
- Story and World - We've been working for at least a last year and half on the story to make sure it is compelling and interesting. This has involved a TON of historical research into medieval celtic society, the roman occupation of the UK, the tribes, the legends of King Arthur, locations of hill forts and battles, religion, necromancy and the dark arts includes sigils and seals of demons, and of course real historical events occuring in 6th Century AD. Zarktor's Realm has real history and real locations so you'll be able to look them up on good ol' Wikipedia. We didn't make this stuff up!
- Realism - We have tested quite a number of weather systems, water and nature shaders to arrive at a set that provide beautiful scenary and realistic world environments. This includes a wave system and underwater caustics for those scenes where you're out at sea and have to swim down to retrieve items, realistic lakes and rivers (and lava flows in demonic cave chambers of course) and an amazing full weather system called Enviro. This provides day/night cycles, volumetric clouds, sun and moon animations, lighting changes, and dynamic rain, snow, thunderstorms and of course, fog.
- Pets and Mounts - It wouldn't be complete without Pets and Mounts. We have now completed procuring a large variety of animals. There's different horses you'll be able to collect and ride throughout the game world. Some animals will be wild and can be hunted, but there will also be other animals you can obtain as pet companions including cats, dogs, wolves and even a talking cockatiel! (He may even give you quest advice).
Where to from here?
We're shifting our focus on to implementing the level designs for the various locations throughout the game that are tied in with the core story line. Our priority is to include locations that will be in a playable demo and include the quest lines and dialogue with NPCs for these parts of the story (without giving too much away). The modularity of the game is such that we can introduce new areas systematically, add NPCs with their own questlines and dialogue and interleave them with the primary and secondary story lines. In this way, the game development is now shifting to "factory mode" to assemble larger components of the game world.
At the same time, we're focussed on continuous testing of the game play.
We hope this article has been interesting for you. We'd love to hear from you, so please drop into our Discord Server or follow us on social media.
Stay tuned for the next Dev Diary update!
Thanks for visiting.
Cheers,
Martyn
Founder, Zarktor Studios