Dear backers,

the good news is Sacred Fire has been supported using public funding by our local Slovak Art Council. One of the key factors for the committee judging our application was, that we had a build play-tested by our community. So thank you everyone who played the Early build and provided feedback and bug reports, it made a real difference. We wouldn’t be able to go this far without you.

So now we have the funds to keep the lights on and this finally clarifies the development time frame too – we will have the beta (story and art complete version of the game) at the end of June 2020 and release Sacred Fire till the end of year 2020 on Steam, GoG and itch.io.

We apologize for the delay. Besides the development challenge of our new design last year, the fundraising for an innovative game this year proved to be very time consuming too.

On the bright side, we are happy with how the game is turning out. The reactivity of the story feels to us like a true role-playing experience. We are currently testing internally the new beginning scenes injected before the current begining and will share them with our backers with Early Access next month.

And now as foreshadowed in the title of this update, here is the origin story of our game.

You can hear me talk about what inspired the Sacred Fire design in this talk I gave at a local event called Game Days Trnava. More broadly the 1 hour talk’s is about re-inventing role-playing in video games. I recommend to set up the playback speed to 1.25x. Spoiler alert: the talk uses specific examples of scenes from the first chapter of the game, but no major surprises, twists or turns are revealed.

Here are the extended slides in a 73 pages pdf.

Please let me know what you think and let me know about your favorite role-playing games – what you liked and what you disliked about their mechanics, their story and the way those two interacted.

Also if you’d like to know for yourself what your Gamer Motivation Profile looks like (I talk about it in the talk), please feel free to take the Quantic Foundry survey here. I find this stuff fascinating both from a game design and a psychological perspective. Feel free to share it with us here in the comments or reach out to us via the e-mail at the end of the talk/pdf. If you are curious, you can see my Game Motivation profile in the talk right at the beginning. Hint: it leans heavily towards Immersion.

Thank you for your continuous support.

Andrej