Weekly Update: Slashin’ and Dashin’

Weekly Update: Slashin’ and Dashin’

Week of April 1, 2019

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Hey everyone,

This is Nick, producer at Mutant Studios, back with more about our work on Shadow of the Leviathan. Now that we’ve gotten our feet wet with an internal demo, we’ve nailed down a lot more about where we want this game to get to. This week involved a few pretty hefty studio discussion days that locked in a couple of exciting things for us, which I’ll talk about in the next section.

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SPINNING A YARN

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Something we wanted to dig into with this game was having more focus on the world and less focus on a lot of having a lot of written content. With games like Questr and Steamulator, we had spreadsheets with hundreds and thousands of unique lines of dialogue and interactions. That isn’t something we want to continue doing necessarily because it’s a bit exhausting and it meant that some of our mechanics relied heavily on jokes landing. We want this to be a world and a narrative that hooks you into it without a lot of dialogue.

To keep it brief (for now), you will be playing as a fisherman’s apprentice eager to learn about the world. Your mentor will play an important role in guiding your adventure. As you set out to learn about fishing, you’ll face new dangers to your island and uncover the mysteries of ancient legends and powerful new forces.

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LOOK MA, NEW TOYS

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Coming off of our demo, we all felt that we had a lot of room to really ramp up the intensity. The demo captured the scale we want to aim for, but we think we can throw more intricate challenges at you to really get the adrenaline pumpin’. So how did we want to do that? More Leviathan attacks and, of course, more tools for you!

Defeating certain encounters will give you access to new tools and weapons to use against the Leviathans, along with your fishing expertise. These weapons can then be upgraded at different shrines throughout the world to let you improve their utility in the coming battles…

We have plans to quickly implement these things, so we’ll be showing off how that will work in the coming weeks. Just know that you’re going to have to become skilled with your tools or you will fall victim to these mighty beasts.

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NEXT STEPS
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So we’ve been debating some options internally and after a lot of discussion, we’re setting our sights on KICKSTARTER. The campaign will be to expand our team a bit to match our scope and give us the resources to fully realize this ambitious game. We’ll be announcing and sharing that when we are fully prepared for that - probably in about two months or so. In the meantime, there is a LOT to keep doing.

Next Week

• Update the player controller
• Concept Art for a new Leviathan
• Playtesting
• Kickstarter Campaign planning/schedules
• Discord Loot Boxes!?!?

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STAY ON BOARD!

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More Shadow of the Leviathan updates will be coming steadily as we work, so follow us on Twitter to get different development updates or subscribe to the Mutant Studios newsletter to get updates there.

***We’ve also introduced a Mutant Entertainment Studios DISCORD channel, to keep you (yes you!) in touch with other Mutant players and as another platform for us to share things with you. Check it out with the Discord link at the top of this page!

We’ll also be reaching out for playtesters, general feedback, and doing other fun things on Twitter so be sure to follow us for all of that!

Mutant Studios: @MutantStudios

Thanks for joining us on this adventure. We can’t wait to get it into your hands!

Nick