Announcing Solstice Chronicles Fig fundraising campaign

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.