Hey everyone! I'm Joe the Producer/Engineer at Creoterra, an indie studio in Toronto. I posted about our upcoming turn-based tactical strategy RPG last week but we have renamed the title so I wanted to show our work, some new screens, and explain some features and gameplay. Empyrios is our upcoming tactical strategy RPG set in a fantasy world that we have lovingly crafted. The core focus is on combat between two squads, which takes place on a hex grid in turn based fashion. There are over 50 uniquely designed environments full of obstacles and varying terrain, each requiring a completely different strategy to defeat your enemies. The world of Borealis is divided into two warring factions, each comprised of four unique races. Each race has five distinct character units such as magic users, hardened warriors, assassins, support and healing classes, and hybrids with a mix of skills. Each unit has three unique abilities such as melee attacks, area of effect magic spells, resurrection spells, setting traps, buffs and debuffs, and many others. This gives you a total of 120 distinct abilities with which to command your squad’s tactics in battle. When a unit is selected you are shown the available tiles on the grid that it is able to move to (white), or use an ability (red for attack/debuffs, blue for healing/buffs), depending on what you have selected on the action bar. Between battles you can customize your units in order to fit your play style and build new strategies. These can range from small bonuses to damage and healing, boosting health and power, reducing power costs on abilities, or adding additional effects such as stuns and life drains. This allows you to have two or more of the same unit on the battlefield, each with slightly varied stats and skills. There are a variety of game modes including two full campaigns (one per faction), local multiplayer, and online multiplayer where you can play unranked matches against friends or compete in ranked matches in various leagues while tracking your progress on the leaderboards. There is also a practice mode that plays like local multiplayer but against bots, where you either customize the team your playing against, select a default, or have it choose randomly. You will also find a vast amount of unlockables including profile backgrounds and emblems, team colours, and of course achievements. The game is cross platform so your campaign progress, custom squads, and unlockables will be available whether you are playing on an iPad or a computer as long as you’re connected online. You can check out more on our site: Creoterra Visit us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter And of course some screenshots below:
Yes online multiplayer is played asynchronous Although on that note we have a second online mode in development that we may have in addition to purely asynchronous, but as it's still deep in development and testing it may not be something we want to include.
The game looks smashingly stunning, by the way! The ideal async implementation is nearly always to allow players to remain in-game after submitting turns, and only have the async mechanics kick in when a players closes the client/logs out/etc (instead of forcing them out to a lobby/menu after every turn, something very few async titles do these days, luckily). In this way, players can effectively enjoy the game as a realtime title if they wish. (See Carcassonne and Playdek titles for these mechanics in motion. And see Carcassonne for inspiration in nearly all things async in general ) Coupled with an option for realtime only matches (or async games with really short turns lengths) for the impatient, you CAN actually accomodate just about everyone
Thanks for the complements The async mechanic you mentioned is actually the exact way we have it implemented in online multiplayer. Also if you just submitted your turn and you're waiting for your opponent, if a turn from one of your other active games is ready you'll receive a notification in game so that you can jump into that one while you wait. The other mode I mentioned that we're testing is realistically exactly like our current async implementation, but with a turn timer (i.e. think chess tournament). Although as I mentioned that is still in heavy dev/testing and we may decide not to include that mode. Also as noted it would be a secondary mode strictly to complement the main async multiplayer. Also I definitely agree with you on Carcassonne really nailing async quite well!
yUlek this is something we're looking at, and we do actually have a working build on Nexus tablets, but we haven't made any concrete plans/dates/announcements regarding Android at this time. Right now we're concentrating on our main platforms (iPad/PC/Mac) for release and after that we'll start looking at other things. I apologize that I can't really give you a better answer. Thanks for the comment!
I was actually surprised to see such polished graphics in an indie product (though the graphics is not all that looks goods about the game). I was looking at screenshots of Divinity: Original Sin just before, and to my eye the difference is not enough to justify the great mobile-desktop hardware divide Yes, this is another one of my favourite async features. Together with push notifications that open up matches directly instead of bringing the player to a lobby (something you'd think every single async title would have, but some high-profile releases like Starbase Orion still do not, and the upcoming and otherwise extremely exciting Star Realms also don't), this is about all the player needs for taking turns quickly, conveniently and comfortably. As a complement to the main mode, I think it would be a great asset for competitive online multiplayer. This is all I need to hear from a dev to know that the multiplayer part follows my kind of design philosophy. I look forward to telling other devs that Empyrios is one of the titles to go to for inspiration
Thanks again for the comments! We've actually been working on this title longer than I'll ever admit. We started out with a very high standard of quality that we set and wouldn't dream of releasing until we hit that. Also note that in regards to graphics I actually test the game on an original iPad daily as my main test device to make sure that it runs smooth on all device versions. This was actually our exact reason for starting to build and test that mode. We set up an in-house tournament while testing and it was just something we thought would be a benefit in tournaments and more competitive play. Thanks again for the kind words
Wow! It seems superb! You have earned my interest. Any estimated release date? I like very much turn based strategy games but ALL the games that I'm waiting in ios, are not yet out: 1) Swords of Anima 2) Battle Worlds: Kronos 3) Warbits Is there any chance that you may bring this game near these days? I believe iphone version is out of the question due to lots of information and it would require lots of scrolling.. So can you please confirm if it will a premium title and not a useless freemium? Single player campaign will not require online connectivity, am I right? Thank you !!!!
Right now our target is Q3/Q4 of this year but we don't have an exact date nailed down because we are extremely picky with quality. The game is fully playable in all modes and we are actually 95% art complete. All 40 characters with 12 animations each, spell effects, 52 environments, HUD/icons are all art complete as of last week, but there is still a lot of work we're doing gameplay-wise balancing units, revising and polishing the two single player campaigns, tuning the AI, some code features/fixes, and polishing the interface. This is actually something that we've spent time looking at, and will continue to look at in the future, but as of this moment there is no iPhone version. The sad thing is that the game runs perfectly fine on iPhone4 and higher, but as you can see from the pics the usability and gameplay just doesn't fit with the smaller screen. In the future we'll continue to play around with the usability, UI, and gameplay to see if we can bring the game to the iPhone, but if we can't hit the same high level of quality that we have on the iPad than we will have to skip that platform. Yes this is a premium title, and there is absolutely no IAP whatsoever. You can play both single player campaigns, local multiplayer, and practice mode (basically multiplayer but against AI bots instead) with zero online connectivity. The only features that require online connectivity are of course online multiplayer, Game Centre achievements, and syncing your progress so you can play on other devices with the same unlocks and saves. Now although there will be no IAP I do want to ensure you that the game will consistently be updated with new units, environments, modes, etc. With this title we wanted all of the units to be quite unique and we balance the factions against each other, and so we wanted to make sure that all players have access to every unit and map. For example as I mentioned earlier we are 95% art complete but still have work to do with game design, polishing, writing, and some feature coding. Due to this time gap we actually have part of our first update 1.1 planned out and our artist is working on 8 new units (one per race) that we will be adding to the game some time post-release, and along with that we have a game mode we want to add and some structured tournament features. Of course once we release we'll be watching for player feedback to see what people want most and we'll go from there. I hope that answers your questions, and thanks for your encouraging words!
Absolutely positive feedback! This is what I wanted to read (except that it eventually will not be released soon as I was hoping for but it's ok). As for the iphone version, please mind that Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes that it was firstly in two screens in Nintendo DS, later on, on monitor / TV - PC, consoles it got squished fine in one screen in the iphone version. The port wasn't that bad but unfortunately ubisoft or the developers behind Ubisoft abandoned very early the support with still some problems, like for example the way to delete a character which is awkward, save data got lost / corrupted, etc. So, despite some issues, the game was just fine in the small screen. Also, Kingdom Rush (and Frontiers) which the ipad version is surely superior to iphone's, the small screen is alright too! You have only some scrolling up and down and that's it. The good thing with these types of games that it's one static screen only, is that you don't have to do acrobatics, many finger moves, fast scrolling, etc. Maybe you can manage to develop an iphone or later on an android version that really works. Please mind also that iphone 6 is coming and judging from the rumors, it's screen will be bigger than iphone5 and it will be like Samsung Galaxy's. So, even for these screens it would be fitting. Keep up the good work guys !!!
I wanted to post a link with some excerpts from the Empyrios soundtrack, if you have a chance to listen I'd love to hear what you think. https://soundcloud.com/deadlyredcube/sets/excerpts-from-empyrios-prophecy-of-flame Also wanted to add a few screens:
The audio samples are very very good!! Especially the second track is fantastic. It reminded me kinda of Trine 1,2 which have a great soundtrack too.
A new screenshot from our latest completed map, where a band of Aduro and Dvergar press on into a cavern inhabited by Shade.
Nice. I hope this quality will remain to ipad's retina screen as it is and will not be downgraded with lower resolution or graphics.
@nkarafo: Actually on the iPad it is higher quality than the screens you have seen here, as these are compressed JPG for size/bandwidth reasons. @Meridian99: Thanks for the kind words!
