The public health measures related to Coronavirus have caused numerous delays and setbacks to our small indie team. Seattle and China, where our developers and artists are based, were both impacted early by the Coronavirus and Seattle remains under a stay at home order. With cancellations of GDC and E3, it's a lot harder for indie developers like ourselves to get the word out about our game. Social distancing measures mean it is impossible to do in person play tests anymore.
However we still successfully launched our first teaser trailer, and we would like to thank UploadVR, RoadToVR and everyone else who shared our articles and trailer. We really appreciate the community's continued support of our development in this trying time.
First and foremost we are still working day and night to start play testing later this summer and launch this game in Early Access later this year during the holiday season. Here is an update for all of you Isekai lovers, and please follow us on Facebook, Twitter and join our Discord to support us.
Currently we are improving our combat system to bring our players a fun interactive combat system that feels dynamic and challenging.We iterated on the AI behavior, including better blocking and dodging, and experimented with different physics options. We continue to look at games like Gorn and Blade and Sorcery, but are also taking inspiration from newer titles such as Ironlights and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. Sword Reverie isn’t limited to sword combat like the typical arena styled VR fighting games, but sword fighting is still a core experience that we absolutely must nail. Therefore we will continue to work on combat for the next weeks and even months until we can provide a unique and rewarding sword & sorcery experience for our players.
In addition, we are beginning to design and implement a UI system for our in game combat and menu system. Currently we have two interaction designers Leon Zhang and Shang Lu iterating and designing the best user experience for players. We have looked at games such as Until You Fall and Asgard’s Wrath as reference.
Lastly, we are continuing to flesh out our level design. We have redesigned the tutorial experience and rewrote certain parts of the story to be more interactive and engaging. Magnus will now guide you through the tutorial, providing you with story exposition. Tooltips have replaced signage and 3D character animations have replaced 2D gifs.
What's next?
With the pandemic still heavily impacting the world around us, we hope to stay connected with our community online by posting more updates. We hope to start running online play tests for our community soon so you can try out our game for the first time, and maybe even host our first Live Q&A to answer any questions you may have. We hope we can build a community here with Sword Reverie for us to endure these difficult times together!
Thanks for reading, please join our Discord or reach out to us on social media, we would love to hear more from you.