What a journey, my fellow adventurers! I know you guys saw the most part of it, but I wanted to share some of our concepts that never saw the light before showing how Acolyte’s been sounding lately!
To see the progress a year-long development, considering all processes of conceptualizing, implementing, refining finally coming to an end… is to let out a proud sigh of our work. Specially when you have ideas that an entire community support and cheer for. Thank you for getting along with us throughout this process. Hell, thank you for being here for us! 💕
But let’s talk about Acolyte, shall we?
It was around March 2025 when our team started the Acolyte’s concept. First, our team gathered to discuss which would be the next class. It wasn’t much for a debate, since we all felt that, after adding Weaver to the game, we all knew what was missing for a classic RPG experience.
But there’s nothing classic about Chroma Tower. So how could we translate to our world?
Our very first idea of a 4th class. This was the base for what you guys play nowadays!
You can see that we were already very fond with the idea of making this support more robust, combining physical strength with some holy (and unholy) magic that brings a new layer of combat dynamics to the game.
The 2nd skill towards the Inquisitor’s path was a must. We love the “GET OVER HERE” effect on gameplay too much to set it aside.
These were some of the concepts that Jandê made for the Tow skill at the time! Our team needed to think about how a mechanism like this would work in a medieval world – is it a watch-like kind of gear? Is it an iron hand made for launching? We thought the most reasonable version would be the second one here.
And we couldn’t be more grateful for having a community like you, guys. Because when we needed help with it, you showed up! At least 52 sacred players answered our last Community Forms, by the time the poor fella didn’t even have their own skill tree.
We had to go through it all with Wes, our sound designer. Between hits, kicks, active and passive skills, the work around the Blessed One was intense, but a beautiful one.
The greatest challenge here was to unify the world of sound design – and here I’m talking about the functionality of it, how it informs you the things you need – with the world of Shadows of Chroma Tower.
⭐ There’s lore behind everything! ⭐
The Chroma Tower is the source of all magic in Goldwheat.The Acolyte’s holy magic became real thanks to the Chroma Tower. Whether they want to keep their magic and control the Tower or use their powers to fight the Archmage’s dark forces.
And that’s one of the many mini-miracles SFX, Sound Design, Music & Score have in common: the miracle to translate into sound. A forest: is it peaceful? A single note defines it. But is it a somber forest? It needs a whole different note. This rule goes for everything, if you want it to.
Now, Acolyte’s power is all about faith. We have to play with familiarity here when we talk about religiosity, keeping in mind what kind of religiosity Acolyte brings (more medieval, DnD-like).
So Wes played a lot with sound effects that could bring us directly to this kind of enviroment: if you pay attention to some of the new sounds, you can hear almost a choir effect in some of them. Really subtle, but the right amount of spice to make it special. With that same sense, you can even hear a little bit of the Tower’s magic itself when casting a Moaning Harmony, with its dissonants shocks against the enemies.
That’s only thinking about Acolyte’s magic. But there’s also a physical aspect in sound that Wes needed to cover to make this class more consistent inside our game.
We know Acolyte is a tank support. He’s heavy-duty, combining strenght with faith. So he should sound bigger, heavier. Now you can feel the chains unravelling even heavier when you execute Tow, and the hit sounds from Acolyte should impact a little bit in your ears – in a good way. Promise there ain’t no jumpscares.
This work represents the closure of another chapter on Shadows of Chroma Tower: we can finally say that we finished with Acolyte’s base, and now it’s on the same spot we’ve put the other classes. Now, we just need to keep an eye on how it works and make sure to refine any detail needed along the way!