With the Christmas festivities behind us, we decided to take this time to reminisce. Shards of Order has been in development since around December last year, after a rather unspectacular launch of our previous game - Dragon Eclipse. This post will be a bit different and quite a bit longer, as we’re going to show you all the progress we made over this year, and the different interactions of the game we went through as we developed Shards Of Order. Strap in and let's travel back!
Initially, Shards of Order or what we called it internally “Project Bell”, had a different combat system. We never intended on having an energy system, but each of our characters had their own stamina pool, each card cost a certain amount of stamina, and some of them regenerated the stamina pool, there was a rest action too which was the most reliable way to recover stamina. Which now in retrospect was basically like the energy system but each of the characters had their own energy pool, the only difference being that the stamina was supposed to be very dynamic, with it constantly going up and down.
The thing we stayed true to though is the artistic vision and the difficulty of the game. We looked for inspiration in games like Fear & Hunger, the Dark Souls series, Darkest Dungeon and Kingdom Death. We really liked the idea of a difficult, dark themed card game.
But one thing we were sick of was the roguelike genre. Every next fest, new card roguelike deckbuilders flooded the market, leaving not much room for innovation and keeping things interesting, we wanted to flip this upside down, and create a full fledged RPG with card mechanics, and so we created. Toll Eternal!
Yes, that was the first name we came up with. Some of our team members argue that it's simple and catches the tongue and still wish that it was still the running name, but I respectfully disagree. What do you think?
At the early stages of development we were very excited about the concept of permadeath, our heroes were supposed to be entirely replaceable and only a means for us - the player, to control and lead towards a better future by engaging on expeditions and bringing back resources to our main hub. Sounds familiar? The big difference between our game and the game we very clearly referenced, was that our heroes' strengths were entirely decided by the equipment they wore and some random base stats.
This was ultimately scrapped because we decided that having memorable characters with personal stories, internal drama and conflicts of interests, makes for a better RPG, which was also our goal from the start. We didn't want to create another roguelike. Nuh uh.
With the basic concept out of the way, it was time for our artists to cook up some concept art. This allowed us to better understand what we’re building and to gather our initial thoughts about what the finished product would look like.
We then decided to go ahead and create some fake screenshots to help initially advertise our game, and pass internal reviews. This was a long and complicated process, we experimented with various styles inspired by the artworks of Gustav Klimt, Jean Giraud, Alphonse Mucha and H.R. Giger. Every artstyle we analysed had their own charm but all of them felt too stylised and specific, they closed the visuals in a certain vibe and didn't leave much room for cool stuff and variation. We ended up deciding to keep it simple and not going for any specific stylized art style.
We were more or less happy with these screenshots so we moved on and polished them even further. Adding detail, and fiddling around with animations, attacks, particles and such.
As you can see, we really experimented with colour at this stage, we explored the idea of strong colors like bright pink and neon green, but we ultimately decided that these colors were way too overused in the genre lately, and decided to go with a more tame, grounded palette we have today.
At this point the screenshots are starting to look more like the game we have today. This was also around the time we finally decided on naming our game Shards of Order, and started creating a story around our game.
Screenshots and concepts were nice and all, but it was about time to build a playable prototype, and so we created the first version of Toll Eternal. Here it is, in all of its magnificence.
With the first version of the prototype it became awfully clear that the stamina mechanics was nothing worth exploring. It wasn't as original as we thought, it added a lot of complexity, didn't provide much fun, and so to the bin it goes. Shortly after, our designers brainstormed for a bit and ended up settling for the cooldown mechanics we all love so much. It was simple, elegant and gave us the ability to stand out from the crowd.
Another thing was the original permadeath mechanics, this was when we decided that we’d rather have cool impressionable characters than soulless minions with nothing interesting about them, other than their stats. That's when our quest to create cool character designs began, and a quest it was. We shuffled through a dozen different designs for each of our characters. Here’s how warriors look evolved over time:
With basic mechanics down, and an art style we were happy with, we started polishing the game, and ended up creating the demo we know today.
The rest is history. Hope you enjoyed this little throwback, or maybe y'all learned something about the development process behind such games. The next time we see each other will be during a new year, so don't go too crazy with the partying and we’ll see you next year!
Stay safe!
Fardust team
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