August is here and the SKARA team has been busier than ever improving the game.

We have just released the 0.5.3 build. Instead of loading two builds, we decided to basically merge the content planned for the 0.5.2 and 0.5.3 versions into one, so we are jumping from 0.5.1 to 0.5.3 to avoid confusion.

The result is a much bigger improvement in the game, we think. As usual, we look forward to your feedback.

Here’s a list of the improvements to be found in the version 0.5.3

• Bug fixing: these kind of things are normally invisible but you will notice a difference.
  
  
• Thanks to popular demand, Keybindings and Invert Y camera options are now available both in-game and in the menu settings.
  New UI 3D scene. Now your character is always visible when navigating the menus.
  
  
• There are also new class skills for all characters:
  
  • Shinse gets Forest Wind to attack foes and escape from difficult, close-combat situations.
    
    
  • Khärn are now able to attract enemies thanks to the new ability, Rage Vortex.
    
    
  • Celea can now turn their shielººd into flames and hurl it, hitting enemies from a range. It then returns, like a boomerang.
• We have released the first iteration for our matchmaking system. Now it is easier to join and leave matches, find people to play with and avoid crashing out. We know this has been the biggest hurdle to enjoying the game, and we are working hard to fix it.
  
  
• New HUD: Health bar and shield bar have different behaviour and graphics now. This feature is not finished though, and we’ll implement more changes in the 0.5.4 version.
  
  
• Durno and Tamvaasa silhouettes are now visible in the Character Selection menu... and will be coming soon!
  
  
• XP and levels have been re-factored to make progression more balanced. This will wipe out all progress made thus far… sorry about that!
  
  
• Duels on Jaarvi are three kills based now, like some Versus games you may know… :)
  
  
• Groth is now visible during the first phase of the Coliseum. Watch out at about the 5 minute mark of your match for him to be released.

This Tuesday at 5pm UK time (6pm CET, 12pm EST, 9am PST), the Skara dev team will be livestreaming the new build on Twitch. Tune in to see the new features of the game in action.

We also look forward to hearing from players who have tried the game and anyone who has an opinion or idea about its development. get in touch with us in the forums or on social.
See you on the Battlefield!

Pablo and the SKARA Team

We are happy to announce the arrival of Skara 0.5.1! This is a first glimpse at the real deal. What came before was really more like a demo. A helpful demo, where we were able to create our combat system and try out tons of features, but a demo all the same.

Now Skara feels like a game.

Players create accounts, can choose characters and see progression. It’s a proper skeleton with some of the organs. Now we just need to add muscles and some skin--not to overdo the metaphor!

Highlight of New Features:

Class skills

Every character has their own special abilities, making gameplay a lot more fun and tactical.

It is now possible to personalise fighting styles by picking the character and their special abilities.

Let us know if there are any balancing issues, and generally what you think of them.

New Character: Khärn

The Khärn are more like a tank character than ever before: Slow and Strong. We definitely look forward to seeing how players use their abilities. We think they are pretty well balanced against the Celea and the Shinse, but this is something we aim to perfect.

Again, feedback will be useful!

New Arena: Zem Moorlands

We brought in a dedicated Team Deathmatch arena: the Zem Moorlands, and, we think you will agree, the results are pretty spectacular.

We’ve enjoyed trying the Team Deathmatch experience here in the studio, and we look forward to hearing what you think.

If you find any bugs, inexplicably fall through the floor, or whatever else, let us know!

NEXT STEPS: Match times, Streaming & Development Schedule

We are thinking about holding dedicated times to play Skara to help make it easier for players to find each other. Let us know if you want to create an official play time and we will do what we can. For now, if we are playing, expect to find us around 7pm CET time.

Please feel free to stream your gameplay! This is the best way to spread the word. If you are interested in having your stream hosted on the official Skara Twitch channel, get in touch.

Our development schedule continues apace. The last two characters are currently being modelled, we have new class skills in the works, and lots of plans for improvements to the UI and much more.

Got a question? Want to know more? Get in touch! We are active on social media (

Skara on Twitter

Skara on Tumblr

Skara on Facebook

and will try and respond to emails sent to contact@skarathebladeremains.com

See you on the battlefield,

Pablo

Skara’s next build, version 0.4.6, is going to bring the largest bunch of features and improvements since we launched Skara on Early Access and will represent the beginning of our alpha state.

In addition to passive and special skills, the most important updates will come in the backend. Build 0.4.6 will bring player accounts, levels, experience and rankings as well as other community tools such as live chat for the lobby and in-game VoIP.

These features have been demanded from the beginning by a lot of our pre-alpha testers and will help a lot of our players to find other people to play with and interact in-game. But it is an ambitious feature for our small team: a lot of care and dedication must be taken to avoid bugs and crashes, as well as to prevent player's accounts being hacked. But we are working hard to get there.

The next build will also bring some cool improvements to the in-game action: We will complete the core combat mechanics for Celea and Shinse, including new features like dash attacks, parry and executions. These features still need to be proven, so don’t necessarily expect a complete list at this stage.

We cannot confirm a release date for this new build, though we would love to launch it the beginning of May. In any event we'll announce the final date for the release soon.

Thanks a lot to all of you who played and enjoyed our prototype and pre-alpha builds. Your feedback has been incredibly useful and your support was our main motivation to keep working hard and create an incredible multi-player experience.

See you on the battlefield,

Pablo from the SKARA Team

It’s time to try the new build of Skara, which represents a giant step in progress of the game development.

Most of the updates and features described in our earlier blog post are there to try out. The only thing we had to remove at the last minute was the special area attack, which lacked balance and smooth animations, causing it to disrupt gameplay.

Below is a list of updates to the build. This list will also be published separately as part of our ongoing changelog. Please use this list in your feedback, so we can easily keep track of it and put together the most comprehensive view as possible.

Updates:

- Improved free-aim mode.
- New Shinse skin (available from the main menu).
- New Shinse Heavy and Fast Attacks.
- New Shinse Unstoppable Attack.
- New final Boss - Groth the Soul Ripper.
- New Game Mode (kill Groth) for the Lava Coliseum.
- Optimization patch: screen resolution, quality reduction, character Level of Detail (LOD).
- New in-game menu, including Graphic Settings.
- In-game notifications: kills, assists, etc...
- New chat-like in-game notifications.
- Ranged weapons first iteration: throwing knives.
- New blood system, including blood decals in any surface.
- New health and stamina HUD
- Super nice crown HUD showing who is the top scoring player in a match.
- New hit animations for both characters.
- Localization issues fixed (useful for Spanish speakers)

Although we did our best to test the new build before launch, it remains a work in progress. You will find problems, bugs, and other issues that might prove frustrating. Please share these with us, since that is the only way for us to fix problems and improve the experience. Depending on your feedback, we may work on a bug fixing build to publish soon.

Gradually Skara is becoming the game we envisioned it being. We hope you find this build a big step forward, and enjoy playing Skara more and more.

See you on the battlefield!

The SKARA Team

Hi everyone,

After much debate, the development team has decided to roll our next two updates into one. Faced with the choice of delivering a bug-infested build in January, or giving ourselves more time to do things the right way and publish it in February, we obviously went with the latter.

That means several more weeks of Skara without changes to explore, but we are confident that the community would prefer good, polished content instead of shoddy, half-baked stuff we plan on improving anyway.

So keep your spirits up! We will be able to deliver not only the optimization patch (which will allow most of you to play Skara with lower-end computers, opening up our potential player base significantly) but also most of our core game mechanics for the future.

Those mechanics include player accounts, improved game modes, in-game notifications, and both primary and secondary objectives for you to accomplish in game arenas. We are also working on new combat mechanics and may even be ready to implement our ranged weapons system, as well as improved attacks, animations and game flow.

All of these things should make Skara an entirely new gaming experience, and that is completely because of your help. Your feedback throughout our first months in Early Access has been crucial to getting the game to its current state. Without your suggestions and advice we wouldn’t have implemented bots, character balancing, in-game flow and a lot of other features that are there now. So on behalf of the entire team, I want to send you a HUGE THANK YOU for all the support you have given the project. Our small group of devs read EVERY post you have written about the game, as well as the reviews about Skara in our Steam Store, both positive and negative. Without you guys there wouldn’t even be a game!

Because the response to our streaming and Steam group sessions have been so incredible, we are going to have them on a weekly basis from now on. SKARA IS YOUR GAME, and we’ll address the development of Skara any direction you want to go, since it has proven itself to be a wonderful, wonderful idea and way to work on a game.

So every Monday at 6pm UK time, we will have a developer Steam chat and every Friday we will have a developer stream, 5pm UK it will be in Spanish, 6pm in English.

This is the crucial moment to be influencing the development of SKARA. So please, keep being active on the boards and in social media. Don’t be shy about proposing new ideas and suggesting all kind of features for Skara, even if they are crazy and unachievable - those ideas tend to generate amazing conversations related not only to Skara, but the gaming world in general. We are just gamers like you and are always happy to jump into a conversation about multiplayer game modes, movies or books.

Again, thank you for all this support. We can’t believe how lucky we are to have a community this great behind us. We won’t let you down!

Pablo

Here’s an update on all the improvements and expansions to Skara we have been working around the clock to get out to you.

New Arenas!

Finally, players can get out of the suffocating Lava Coliseum and breathe some fresh air! Two new arenas will be part of the new build. (SPOILER ALERT: one of them will be hot and the other not)

These new arenas will be much bigger than the Coliseum experience, allowing players to get a feel for the larger combat scenarios we envision for the game. More space means more players at the same time, means (hopefully) more fun.

The new arenas will not be polished, leaving some room for you all to tell us what you like about them and what you would like to see changed. That’s the whole point of Early Access, right?

New Character!

Also at long last, Skara opens up beyond the Sons of Fire. We can finally introduce a race that consider the Celea their arch-enemies, the most ancient race in Skara—the Shinse.

We went for the polar opposite of the Celea (female, light weaponry, fast) for a reason—to try and balance the characters correctly. Some aspects of the Shinse will be rougher than others

NOTE: some animations and effects will be place holders but again, we wanted to leave room for your feedback before we started fine tuning. So please, join in the conversation.

Player Lobbies!

We realize one of the most frustrating part of the game is finding other players to play with, so we have set about creating a space to make it easier. With the new player lobbies, you can find your friends (or frenemies) to schedule fights.

This aspect of the game is one of the most important and (thanfully) one of the easiest to alter, so let us know what you think.

(Less) Lag!

In the midst of this frenetic development, we have been trying to tackle core issues at the heart of the gaming experience. We are a small team and are limited by the number of hours in the day, so some of these fixes will be better than others. Players should have less lag. If you notice anything in particular about this issue, or anything else technical, tell us about it and include as many details about it as possible, including your computer specs and screenshots.

It is really helpful for us to know about problems and issues, and we know it takes time to tell us, so many thanks in advance!

Closing Thoughts

So here’s a brief outline of the new update:
2 new arenas
1 new character
Player lobbies
Enhanced menu/UI
Less lag

We hope these improvements do a LOT to enhance your experience of Skara. Early Access can sometimes be a let-down, and players have to sometimes use their imaginations to see the final product. It is also a lot of fun, and honestly, we wouldn’t want to develop our game any other way.

Thanks again for joining the Skara community and see you on the battlefield!

Hi All,

We have been looking at ways to continue improving the Skara experience, particularly the community part of it. After all Skara is a PvP!

So, in order to help player’s meet each other and have the chance to play a few matches, we have decided to institute ‘official match times.’

The idea is, if you log on at the given time, you should be able to find someone in the arenas.

With a global user base, this isn’t as easy as it sounds! But we think there are a few times that work for different time zones, so here they are.

• 9:00
  
• 15:00
  
• 19:45
  
• 1:00

• 7:00
  
• 13:00
  
• 17:45
  
• 23:00

• 6:00
  
• 12:00
  
• 16:45
  
• 22:00

• 1:00
  
• 7:00
  
• 11:45
  
• 17:00

• 22:00
  
• 4:00
  
• 8:45
  
• 14:00

Like all things in Skara, we leave it to you to tell us your opinion! When do you want to play?

A new build featuring new combat moves, new armor, better UI and a new menu design means Skara’s Early Access is a better deal than ever before. Let us know what you think, what you liked and what you didn’t.

After all, one of the best parts of being in an Early Access is the chance to help shape a game with the developers. We are excited to welcome you into the team!

First of all, there are the usual amount of bug and issues fixing. Check the Changelog on Monday to see the complete list.

We also tweaked the combat system, following your advice. Impacts are more physical now, and the new effects provide a better feedback during the combat.

We've also added some new movements to further enliven the fighting. Check them out and tell us your opinion.

A new heavy armor for the Celea character will become available. It will act as a skin for now, so don’t expect to become invincible.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=347236863

The UI has been almost completely re-designed. Let us know what you think.

We’ve expanded the menu to allow users to explore Skara’s rich background, including information about the races that populate it. For more, visit our website to read the history about this war ravaged planet, shaken by cataclysm.

Finally, you will also see a lot of small changes and improvements to the overall game experience. There will be a new scoreboard design, a Final Score screen, new animations and some new effects... Let us know if you noticed these and what you think of them.

See you on the battlefield!


User Interface:

- New UI Design.
- UI partial controller support.
- New Menu section: The Story of Skara.
- In-game HUD re-design: player stats.
- New End Game screen.

Gameplay

- Spear lenght increased (we are working on new characters with shorter weapons).
- H1/H2/H3 combo added.
- Hits are more physical now.
- New Unstoppable cooldown.
- New stunt animation (guard breaking) and VFX.

Cosmetic Features

- Celea Heavy Armor available.
- Coliseum lighting modified.
- New VFX.

On November 17th the latest version of Skara became available. That’s one week later than planned, but we had to spend all our time fixing bugs and waging war with the lag that players were experiencing.

Because of that, we could release a more limited update this coming week, but we decided it would be better to work on more substantial features that really enhance the gameplay instead.

So here is the list with almost all the changes you will see in a little over one week:


· IA: Added bots to every match. If a player joins a battle, he will enter a Spectator Mode until the bot dies.
· Combat system:
- Unstoppable attack: now it works holding X (controller) or E (keyboard)
- The unstoppable attack doesn’t consume stamina anymore. Now it has a cool-down timer, check the icon on your lower left corner.
- Attacks and dodges are not ruled by stamina, but by penalty timings.
- Stamina will be used for sprint and block control.
- Camera moved slightly away from the player, in order to allow players to see menacing objects behind them.
- Hit, block and thrust values were tweaked.
· New menu and UI: Now it is simpler and cleaner, and works with the controller.
· New Celea Armor (skin): now you can select from the menu the Celea Mid Armor. It works as a skin for your character - meaning it has exactly the same stats as the basic armor.
· New HUD: the health and stamina bars have been redesigned, including your player name in the upper left corner. Bots and human players also have their Steam names over their characters.
· Some lag problems are solved. However, this is a long term task and won’t be 100 percent resolved anytime soon.
· Black screen problem with certain resolutions is solved in the current version.
· Some FPS performance issues were solved as well, but we still need to refine some assets in the Coliseum in order for it to work perfectly.

After a long, long ride, somehow we managed to get Skara to a playable stage. What started as a side project born in the university is now close to being a proper game. But there’s still a lot of work to be done, and we want to rely on our community to get Skara to the next level and beyond.

So, important things to notice about our Early Access launch version: It will have very limited features. Host a match or jump into a quick fight to try Skara’s newly designed combat system. Then help us to improve and balance it, we don’t want to move to the next phase until we deliver a competitive experience that fits the most demanding player.

Then, every two weeks we’ll release new content for you to try out and provide us with feedback, propose new ideas and suggest ways to improve Skara. You can see the development Roadmap in our Store page, including the content for the upcoming two updates and our final goal: Skara’s full release.

We have been testing Skara internally, since we don’t have a budget for QA sessions, and we’ve already discovered some issues with slow connections and low-end computer specs. The game gets laggy and it’s almost impossible to play. We are working to fix that, but we need as much data as you can send us if you experience lag problems: your pc specs, your connection settings, if you are broadcasting Skara at the same time you play, etc. This is the only way we can take care of every specific case and move things to fix problems. The more of you reporting problems and laggy games, the faster we can fix the issue and improve the experience.

What you should take away: We do know that the game is at a very, very early stage, (especially everything involving menus, user interface and usability) but those things are easy to implement and we wanted to focus on the combat system--the most important element of gameplay. We also wanted to give the community (you!) every chance to collaborate with us to improve Skara through feedback and idea sharing.

After all, if we release an almost completed game in Early Access, what’s left for you to develop with us?