Jun 9, 2022

Suzerain - claregoodwin94

Citizens of Sordland!

May was a month that went by very quickly on our side of things. Since the prototyping and mobile efforts at the beginning of the year, we rested a bit and are now back with the full team again.

A few weeks ago we attended A MAZE Berlin, an independent games festival in Berlin.

It was very inspiring to see old friends who visited from all over Europe and to explore the current experimental games landscape.

On the development side of things, we have been busy with different evaluations and iteration processes on top of the prototype.

These advances in game development are why we don't feel comfortable sharing details about what we are working on too early. We want to reach a certain quality standard for you all before taking further steps.

One of our key focus points was iterating on the core design elements of the prototype and fulfilling the vision, and reaching market standards and higher quality. Several iterations are happening simultaneously, and some will take longer than others.

We have also undergone a massive narrative design overhaul to craft a holistic, coherent and exciting experience. The keywords have been focus, consolidation and calculated iteration.

Suzerain is a straightforward game with a clear outline, and our aim is to reach the same level of clarity for any future projects.

Compared to where Torpor Games started, we are now attracting the top companies in the games industry to the table. There is a lot to do still, but the progress has been excellent, and we can't wait to take you through the journey in more detail.

Until then, keep a close eye on things!

Finally, we love to see the flag of Sordland waving at the Templin Institute Headquarters East.
A morgna her coren!

The flag and other items are available on our merch store.

There will be more news soon on the mobile update and other exciting developments, until then, stay tuned...

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

Vectern sis da!

May 5, 2022

LudoNarraCon: Suzerain is -50% off!

Suzerain - hopppi

Suzerain is participating at LudoNarracon with our biggest discount to date, -50% off!

The deal will start on the 5th of May and will run until the 11th of May:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1207650/Suzerain/

Check out the segment 'Trials of Narrative Gameplay Design' to see Torpor Games founder and Suzerain developer, Ata Sergey Nowak featured on the panel.

The panel will discuss pushing the boundaries in narrative design and finding fun and challenging gameplay in narrative-focused games.

To learn more about LudoNarraCon, the festival for narrative indie games organised by our publisher, visit the website.

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

May 2, 2022

April Broadcast

Suzerain - hopppi

Citizens of Sordland!

Welcome to the broadcast for this month.

We got some good news from the development team. Our unannounced project prototype has reached completion! The team in Berlin also had some fun doing some Sordish voice over recordings for environmental dialogues to display the richness of what we are building. It increased the quality of the prototype and was a nice break from the desk for those involved.

Torpor Games successfully established several new pipelines, iterated on them to achieve higher quality, and expanded the studio's vision further. We are now preparing our design documentation and other delivery documents to seek new partners for the future.

Since we are attempting a more ambitious product, we will need established partners to raise enough funds to make more of an impact. After the work-intense months of February, March and April, we will slow down after our deliveries in early May to rest and relax.

In May we will begin transitioning to the production of our vertical slice, in which we are going to establish several new game mechanics and further expand on what we achieved in the prototype.

In other news, we are happy to announce that the mobile version of Suzerain is finished!

For reasons beyond our control we can't share an official launch date yet, but we can confirm that the next release target will be the summer of 2022.

Watch this space for further news on this.

Thank you to everyone who has supported our merch store so far! It has been a big success so far and we are really happy with the initial results.

We love seeing the merch pics from the community, keep them coming.

A reminder that you can purchase Suzerain merchandise on our website.

An exciting reminder that LudoNarraCon (LNC) will be taking place from May 5th-9th. Be sure to tune in to the segment 'Trials of Narrative Gameplay Design' to see Torpor Games founder and Suzerain developer, Ata Sergey Nowak featured on the panel.

The panel will discuss pushing the boundaries in narrative design and finding fun and challenging gameplay in narrative-focused games.

We are looking forward to it.

Finally, we'd like to welcome our new Marketing Manager Clare Goodwin.

Originally from Brisbane, Australia, she studied a Bachelor of Entertainment Industries, majoring in Communication and Music. As a curious thinker, she loves to travel and lived in London before moving to Berlin about three and a half years ago.

Clare is passionate about storytelling and while this is her first role in the gaming industry, Suzerain was a game that intrigued her due to its in-depth pseudo-political nature. Her favourite games as a kid were The Sims, Age of Empires and Crash Bandicoot.

Welcome Clare!

See you all again in a month. Vectern sis da!

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

Vectern sis da!

Apr 5, 2022

March Broadcast

Suzerain - hopppi

Citizens of Sordland!

The fourth month of the year is already upon us, and with that comes the change of season and the beginning of spring!

Our team has made massive developments in all disciplines involved in our unannounced project prototype. We have closed most of the technical challenges and have moved to improve the existing codebase.

Content creation has peaked recently and we have finished a significant amount of the gameplay content we want to display. Now we are splitting our resources in two: improving the quality of what we added and creating the remaining content.

There is a particular push to make the technical flow work which has increased in complexity to what we are used to from Suzerain. Our visual pipelines have seen massive improvements and our locations for the sprint have been completed.

In this pipeline, we are moving forward to polishing what we have and adding some further eye candy.

Audio has finished its major technical challenges and moved on to adding music and sounds to the experience to finalise. In April we will be working on finishing the content of our gameplay mechanic and finalising the rest of the prototype.

We are excited for the future where we will feel confident to share more.

In other news, we are happy to have finalised the mobile port of Suzerain. A big thank you to Özgun Kilit, Daniel Emig and Juan Franco Lagar for all of the final efforts that were put into this.

The entire Suzerain experience functions well on both smartphones and tablets. The playtesting rounds have been fruitful and led us to discover a few issues which we are currently polishing and fixing to ensure a quality experience.

Thanks to our amazing community, we were able to find out about these rare issues sooner rather than later. More news on this soon

Here are some examples of how our mobile build is looking:

After delaying our initial launch, we have a new official launch date for our merch store: the 7th of April.

An email will be sent out to everyone subscribed to the newsletter on the day of the launch. We are excited for you to finally get your hands on these exclusive items.

A reminder of the items that will be available will be:
-Stickers
-Map of Sordland
-Flag of Sordland
-Torpor Games mug
-Suzerain art poster

Join our newsletter if you would like to be notified on the day of the launch.

In media news, we were featured in a video interview by the local initiative supporting Berlin indie developers games:net.

Watch the interview below:

We are really happy to welcome a new team member.

Ioannis Petridis has joined the team as a 3D Artist and will work closely with our other 3D artist Stijn. Ioannis comes from a background of architectural design. Before working at Torpor Games he studied architecture in Thessaloniki, while developing a great interest in design, modelling and animation.

Welcome Ioannis!

Social activities for the month included us donating €250 to the Ukrainian Red Cross, as well planting trees in the National Park Sierra de la Macarena in Colombia via the https://gamesforest.club/blog/torpor-games-is-planting-trees-in-the-national-park-sierra-de-la-macarena-in-colombia/.

We hope you have a good month in April, see you again in a month. Vectern sis da!

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Soundcloud and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

Vectern sis da!

Feb 2, 2022

January Broadcast

Suzerain - hopppi

Citizens of Sordland!

We hope you have all started the year well. Our team was able to enjoy a short winter break and we are now back with new energy.

First things first: One of the projects we have been busy with has been finalised and is ready to be launched. You can read about it here.

On the other hand, work on the unannounced project progressed side by side with the mobile from September until the present, but now that the majority of the work has been completed all of our studio resources are focusing on it at full capacity. Here we have made massive strides in finalizing the art direction, starting the character pipeline, adding animations, spatial audio, narrative design updates as well as other design developments in gameplay. We are currently in a very fast-paced development environment focused on developing a core product.

On other news, we finally have an official launch date for our merch store, the 24th of February. The items available at launch will be:
- Stickers
- Map of Sordland
- Flag of Sordland
- Torpor Games mug
- Suzerain art poster

Join our newsletter if you would like to be notified on the day of the launch.

We would also like to congratulate The 167th Yes Voter for winning the anthem contest. The Dawn March has been chosen to go along the new anthem of Sordland.

Our nation's official linguist Pyry Paavola is currently working on the Sordish translation and musical arrangement for the anthem, which will be shown to the world upon completion in the upcoming weeks.

The overall quality of the submissions is astounding and these anthems deserve special recognition: on 2nd, 3rd and 4th position we have O Sord, The Velchord March and Light of Sordland respectively, as they received the highest amount of votes on Discord, where all of the lyrics have been listed.

Here's a snippet of the winning anthem:

At the end of 2021, Making Games magazine issued an article about Torpor Games, Suzerain and the indie gamedev journey, you can find the article online here.

Finally, on the 16th of February at 17:00 CET, Ata will be talking about the development of Suzerain and running an indie games studio with games:net Berlin Europe, more info here.

TS

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

Vectern sis da!

Feb 2, 2022

Suzerain is coming to mobile 2022

Suzerain - hopppi

Citizens of Sordland! Suzerain is coming to mobile, in the first half of 2022. An official release date will be announced in the upcoming weeks.

Our mobile project started in late June 2021 and we have reached completion in January 2022. Lots of effort went into making the game more optimized for the mobile platforms including smartphones and tablets both in performance and user experience. Towards the end of the development we entered a quick iteration process, polishing as much as we could to make the experience feel close to native to the devices as well as fixing dozens of bugs. We are glad to be at the end of the process. Special thanks to Daniel and Juan who focused the most on the mobile project so far.

For this, we are looking for people who can help us playtest. If you are interested, join our Discord and follow the instructions in the News channel.

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

Vectern sis da!