Hi everyone!

In celebration of PAX East, we will be streaming on the store page. Come check the game out!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/969330

Hey Everyone!
In this update, we wanted to share our progress and show off some new armors you can wear in the game.



Development is going great. We're wrapping up core development on most new gameplay systems and now working on polishing the player experience, replacing prototype stuff with final UI and art.

A New Real-Time combat option has been implemented, and Turn-Based combat greatly improved. You'll even be able to switch between them mid-combat and also save the game during combat.

We're implementing full gamepad support and most common movement styles with mouse and keyboard. (Point and click, Mouse hold, AWSD)

Next, we'll be polishing the player experience with new features and working on finishing a new prologue chapter that will be like a mini demo version of the game. It will server as both tutorial and the story will offer deeper insight into the last days of the 10-year war that precedes the main campaign story. You'll also have unique play experience and story starting point depending on which origin you pick. We'll share with more about opportunities to play Prologue Beta in future updates.


In The Way of Wrath, you'll find different armors that fit different playstyles and roleplay roles. Armors and weapons are also made from a variety of materials and this changes their stats and the difficulty of crafting.

Hunter's armor is one of the lightest, giving great bonuses when stalking your prey through the woods or sneaking around enemy camps.



You can upgrade most armors by adding additional layers of protection to get an enhanced version of the armor. And of course, this comes with the visual upgrade!



Because you are locked from the outside world, you will be scavenging or looting all the resources you need. And most of the time you'll be crafting your own armors. Everything you can hunt or harvest will be very useful, as, besides yourself and your party, you have a whole fort of allies to supply with equipment.

Players who like to balance speed and protection will like berserker's armor. Which comes with unique bonuses to keep you in the battle flow.



And of course, it comes with an enhanced version.



Armors come in two parts in The Way of Wrath. Base armor and helmets. Helmets have a unique role and they can affect how charismatic or how intimidating you appear to other characters. Combined with the reputation you gain from your action, these stats can open many new ways to solve conflicts in the story and increase the power of some of your abilities.

Last but not least, for the players who want to stand toe to toe with any foe we have something special!



And yes, even this armor has a beefier, enhanced version you can craft if you are brave enough to hunt for the materials you need.



We'll share Shaman armors and higher-tier armors in future updates.

As always if you have questions or feedback you can reach us through comments here, on our website, or our Discord Channel.

Cheers,
The Way of Wrath Team

We have some exciting news!

We at the development studio Animmal have teamed up with the indie game publisher Hooded Horse! We're very excited about this partnership as Hooded Horse has a unique developer-friendly approach, they are hardcore RPG & Strategy gamers at heart and we instantly clicked with the team.

To celebrate this news we have a cool new trailer put together by the Hooded Horse team to share with you!



We also have more to share--a victory in a local startup competition, the latest progress on the game, and more. Come check out the update post here to get the full details: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/animmal/the-way-of-wrath-rpg/posts/3362571

We've been hard at work on the prologue chapter of the game and improving the play experience. We've also added & reworked some major game features.

We've improved many UI and feedback systems to make each activity more enjoyable.





We've changed and improved some existing systems

We used to have a modular interaction system, where each item could have any number of possible interactions, and when you hovered a mouse on an item in the game world, the icons for the possible interactions would show up. This worked great for complex story items that had multiple possible interactions (Use, Take, Examine). But it was kind of a chore for items with one possible interaction like picking up loot or harvesting plants.



You had to first move the mouse cursor over the interactive object, then move the mouse cursor to the interaction icon. We changed this to a dual system, where if the item has single interaction you can directly click on an interactive object in the world, and if it has multiple interactions the UI icons with choices will show up.



This is one of the many such game development iterations that happens a lot during game development. While stuff like this can seem trivial, often small details like these can have a significant impact on how enjoyable basic gameplay interactions are.

And we have added/overhauled others

We mentioned this before in the updates as a possible iteration on exploration skills, but after a lot of thought, we decided this was something we needed to test in the first demo shared with you.

The non-combat activities will get their own progression system. Hunting, Fishing, Herbmixing, Crafting, and Cooking will now become Mastery Skills.

Each mastery skill will have its own experience bar and levels. Each time you perform the activity associated with these skills, you'll gain skill experience. (Similar to how skill progression works in games like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. )

For example, when you cook the food you gain cooking experience, crafting an item gives you crafting experience, and so on.



This is the basic way to gain experience in these skills. But, the main reason we are excited about Mastery System is in special challenges you can perform to gain a large experience boost. These challenges come in many shapes: Story Quests, Achievement/Trophy style tasks, Exploration Challenges, and secrets.

Leveling up a mastery skill will allow you to take on more difficult and rewarding activities, and it will also unlock new skills and perks.

With the mastery system, we want to make exploration more rewarding, activities more fun and in general, improve the impact each player interaction has on their progression and immersion into the game world.


The combat progression will still use a classic skill tree, where you unlock new skills with skill points you gain from leveling up.

But we are also considering introducing additional depth to combat by creating some combat-based mastery skills.

This could take shape of skills based on playing style. Aggressive, Defensive, Trickster. It could be broken down to weapon types your character wields. For example, the more you use swords and other similar weapons, the more sword-related features you'd unlock to make your weapon choice more meaningful.

This is something we are still brainstorming and you are welcome to send us your thoughts and ideas on this.

The way we handle damage, healing, wounds, and environmental hazards have gone through many iterations. And we feel we found a nice balance between complexity, fun, and impactfulness with the newest iteration.

We settled on a smaller number, of multistage wounds that take multiple steps to heal and that reward exploration and experimentation.

When your character will fall in battle, suffer through extreme environmental hazards, or has bad experiences in story encounters they will gain wounds.

Wounds are a serious business, and they will have a noticeable impact on your gameplay. Untreated wounds can deteriorate into a version of wound or disease with severe penalties, and treated wounds can sometimes take days to heal.

Wounds are treated with medicine, which is very often inspired by real-world folk cures.

Special activities you can find in the game world (Taking hot/cold baths) can speed up the healing of the treated wounds. (Or delay them.)

Very superstitious Thein will also be happy to share with you many mystical and unusual treatments to heal your ailments. You'll have to use your best judgment when choosing which healing methods you want to try.


We spent our lives playing and replaying, reading and re-reading, watching and re-watching amazing works of art and entertainment. We obsessed over what made them work, why we loved these experiences and how could this knowledge help us create new projects that we could be proud of.


The Way of Wrath takes inspiration from many great games, books, and tv series. The non-exhaustive list: Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Deus-Ex, Legend of Zelda, Thief, Gothic, System Shock, Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, The Divinity Original Sin, Warlord Chronicles, Deadwood, The First Law, The Heroes, Vikings, Connan: The Barbarian. And last but most certainly not the least. The real history of the earth.

In Part 1 of our inspiration article, we'll talk about some of the books and tv series that inspired us.



Warlord Chronicles is a trilogy of books about Arthurian Legends by Bernard Cornwell. His take on the Artur is a more realistic one. No Camelot, Sword in stone, or honorable knights and the round table. Artur is a warlord and the story follows his struggles to push back the attacks by invading Anglo-Saxon tribes.

The books do a wonderful job to bring to life a world as it might have been seen by humans living in the dark ages of Britain. Where the powers of druids, curses, and myths were real things in the eyes of the average human.

This vivid depiction of the ancient world had a great impact on us. It fueled our fascination with the ancient world that served as a basis for our setting. We wanted to depict life, as it might have been lived by ancient humans, and to turn real the perception of the world they had.

While reading these books we also came to one realization. All the mystical and supernatural elements in most fantasy books are clearly described and explained. This takes away from the very mysticism and the allure of the unknown such elements are usually meant to evoke. After a while, the fictional world feels safer and more structured than the real world we live in. You know whether gods are real and the extent of most magical powers.

We wanted to avoid this feeling of a safe and structured world. And we did away with the mechanics of a reliable narrator. Everything you learn is just a personal opinion of the character who shares the knowledge, biased by their culture and opinions. To learn the truth you have to rely on personal experiences. (or failing that try to find the truth by looking at the subject from multiple points of view and try to deduce what might have really happened.)





Deadwood is one of the best TV series out there and we took deep inspiration from its handling of character and character-driven stories. Its characters feel real, they have flaws and impulses. Conscious and subconscious goals, they stumble through the world and try desperately to cling to something that will give them meaning. The clash of their personalities and desires is weaved into a masterful tapestry of character conflict-driven stories. Each episode builds upon the previous events and creates an impactful narrative.

This served as inspiration for us to make each NPC a unique character and give them their personal branching storylines that reacts and builds upon character choices and other quests.




These are fantastic fantasy books by Joe Abercrombie. The “low magic” aesthetics, more realistic characters, and cynical tone left their impact on us and we incorporated these inspirations into our design.


TV series had its ups and downs but it further fueled in us desire to explore more types of historical characters as the base for our protagonists. We wanted to design a setting where we could tell stories about warlords, conquerors, Rulers, diplomats, traders, priests, inventors, and many other possible professions.

Always feel free to ask us any questions you have, or share any ideas you want to. You can reach us through Steam Forums, Our Discord Channel or our website.

We are very happy to announce our Kickstarter campaign is funded at 131% and we are now fighting for Real-Time with Pause combat addition.



On February 1st we launched our Kickstarter Campaign and 860+ amazing backers supported us to reach our goal and have the funds we need to greatly improve the quality and features of our game.

In addition to our base funding goal, our community helped us unlock our First Stretch goal "New best friends" which adds advanced pet mechanics and more pet variety.

Now we are close to our second stretch goal "Real-Time with Pause Combat" which will add this very popular combat mode to our game. And when you start your adventure you'll be able to choose between Turn-Based and Real-Time battle systems.



If you are excited about this feature, you can help us by pledging any of the awesome awards we have in our Kickstarter campaign. Or by spreading the word on social media by sharing these posts: Facebook & Twitter




We want once again to thank you, everyone, for joining our game development journey and we are very eager to get started on development and create for you a much better and bigger game, that we hope you'll love to replay for many years to come.


Cheers!
The Way of The Wrath team

What a week we have had!
So many new players to join our community, many awesome ideas, and our Kickstarter Campaign is now 60%+ funded! We are very keen on reaching 100% soon to unlock many stretch goals like Real Time With Pause combat addition, voice acting, tactical gameplay advancements, advanced pets and localization.



In today's diary we'd like to share with you about Choices & Consequences
We have posted a few more updates on the Kickstarter. We avoided writing you with daily updates and articles, to avoid spamming you and planned to write these articles on steam with more of a delay between updates. But if you would like for us to post such articles 3~4 times a week. Then we'd be very happy to share them here as well. Let us know in the comments!
#1 Justice system and Law
#2 Superstitions and Omens
#3 Character Creation Options
#4 Hunting Mechanics
#5 Factions


Choices and Consequences in interactive stories can be very exciting when done right, and they can be very frustrating and disappointing when they don’t quite work or matter in games.



Without some sort of futuristic storyteller AI’s, that can spin the tales in real-time and populate the game with cinematics, simulated voice acting and build new game maps in an instant. The C&C of video games will be a limited experience. There is only so much handcrafted content you can have in a game, and there is a limit to how long procedural stories can keep their impact.


But within these limitations, it’s possible to create engaging C&C stories that add to replay value and make your experience more personal.


So, what makes choices good and interesting? We believe the choices work best when they let you achieve your overarching plans and explore the personality of your character. Help to build relationships with other characters and challenge you with interesting dilemmas.


And they are at their worst when you are ambushed by unexpected choices with vague implications on their outcomes. That leave you confused and frustrated over being forced into picking between good old "bad & worse".


We try to include what we believe to be good values of C&C into the choices we design.



When we iterate over our quest we ask ourselves.



We try to design quests and gameplay in a way that clearly introduces you to the dilemmas and problems at hand. And after that gives you freedom and options to solve those dilemmas the way you see fit.


Almost every problem the player faces will have multiple solutions. Some tied to players' reputation or skills, some to previous choices, and others can be discovered through deeper exploration. There are many degrees to failure or success and there are no “wrong” choices.



With our day passage system and personal stories for each NPC, you will get to know each character and faction very well over the course of the game. Choices you make will affect them deeply, and you will get to experience many consequences during your playthrough rather than only at the end of the story.



We chose to focus the story on character conflicts and make their problems grounded in the reality of the setting. This way we get more opportunities to focus dilemma on things that feel relevant and real to the world you are exploring. Things that have more chances to make you really think about how you and your RP character would approach such problems.



Listening to exciting character backgrounds can be fun, but if you don’t get to experience similar stories with those characters during gameplay it sometimes can feel like their best stories happened without you. We focused on exploring characters through shared experiences with players, rather than their past.


There are many more considerations that go into C&C, and we’ll explore them in future updates and quest design live-streams.


Tell us what you love or hate in C&C in the comments. We'd love to hear what you think!

This is huge! We have launched Kickstarter Campaign!




On our campaign page you'll find a beautiful description of the game with a new trailer, gifs, lore, and awesome rewards for you to get.



We are very excited about this opportunity to expand the scope of our game. We have amazing mechanics planned that will make the game more interactive, more tactical, add more fun minigames.



With stretch goals, we'll be able to add Real-Time with Pause combat option, Voice acting, expand level design, improve visual and audio quality. We'll be able to take the game on another level and create for you a game you will love to play and replay for many years to come.



Join us on our adventure! Leave your mark on our RPG. Will you answer our call?

More than three years ago there was an epic rain in the city of Tbilisi in Georgia. The roads had turned to small rivers and unable to get home from a work-related meeting I took shelter in my friend's tiny basement room that his indie music band rented for practice. We decided to wait out the rain there.

It had been a long time since we had gotten together and soon we got to talking about our favorite games. As it often happens it didn't take long for us to start talking about old games and all the things we missed about them. The handcrafted open world of Gothic, the epic story and companions of Baldur's Gate, the interactivity of Ultima and Zelda, the open-ended design of Thief or Deus Ex, the feeling of being alone with the environment of Tomb Raider.

We talked with great excitement about all the cool features and design trends that seemed lost to time. And the inevitable question soon followed. "Why does no one make games like these anymore?"

Except for this time, it was followed with another question. "Why don't we make it ourselves?"



We grabbed pen and paper, laid it out like a battle map on the wooden board perched on a bunch of bricks that served as a recording studio table, and got to designing our concept. Nothing was hypothetical, we had spent tens of thousands of hours learning and practicing our craft. By that time we had worked on many projects for over 12 years, including indies, big corporations, outsource, video games, board games, even an award-winning animation short.

We were seeing that the path from drawing doodles in school and making mods for Morrowind as teenagers to professional game dev had paid off. We didn't just have a dream before us but a solid concept, with a solid pipeline to make it a reality.

When the rain had stopped and I walked out with a head full of ideas, my mind had never felt clearer. It was time for us to make an RPG game of our own.

Three years of really hard work later, we have designed all the core systems and mechanics. We are really excited about what we have accomplished. We are seeing the soul of our favorite legendary RPG's come to life in our game and so much that is new and exciting.

But we know that it can be better. It's possible for us to win more time to focus on gameplay and story and really polish up each piece of the content. And there are specific mechanics currently out of our scope that can bring the whole picture together into something truly special.

We want to make those mechanics a reality. We want to make something worthy of the great classics that inspired us to become game developers and pursue our dream of following in their footsteps. We want to make you an awesome RPG that you'll enjoy playing and replaying for many years to come.

In just five days we will be launching a Kickstarter campaign. Where we'll have a new playable story demo for you to play, much of the lore to discover, and awesome rewards to get.

With Kickstarter's base goal, we'll be able to hire talented people to help us with amazing quality music, sound, atmospheric effects, and text editing. This will give us more time to focus fully on gameplay, story, and level design and fill every nook and cranny of our game world with exciting details for you to discover.



If we can reach stretch goals, we'll be able to add amazing mechanics to the game (We'll share stretch goals in our newsletter soon). Add voice acting and translate the game into more languages.

We need your help to make this a reality. To push beyond our limitations and deliver you a truly remarkable RPG. A game designed fully on your feedback and a game where we would not have to sacrifice anything from our vision of the game.

If you are excited about our project and want to help us craft a bigger and better game there are five things you can do to help.

• Sign up for our newsletter or join our discord so we can share with you a preview of our Kickstarter page and hear your feedback.
  
• Tell your friends who might be interested in our game about our campaign.
  
• On February 1st and 2nd help us share the game on social networks and in gaming groups. If we can get funded in under 48 hours, the KS algorithm will highlight us and we'll have a very big chance to hit many stretch goals. This is why it's important to have a large activity on the first two days.
  
• Follow our Kickstarter page so we can panic less and not get heart attacks before the launch :D
  
• And if you are able and willing, back us on Kickstarter. We have awesome exclusive rewards, and you'll be the first to play the game and shape it with your feedback. Our development will be fully transparent to our backers and you'll get to play each update of the game.

And last but not least, a huge thank you for following and supporting us on our game development journey. We are always happy to hear your comments and suggestions. Keep em coming!

Choose your tribe, earn glory, and win challenges in fun competitions. Check out the new Tribe Wars website and take a quiz to learn which tribe you like best. The savage Bear, the cunning wolf, or the wise eagle.



In Tribe Wars you can earn glory for your tribe in community challenges, grow your influence, and unlock new loot for your tribe. Which will feature unique in-game customization options and bragging rights.

For the first Tribe Wars challenge, let's kick things off with something fun and simple.

A shaman cursed a mighty warrior and it has lost its shape. Finish the drawing to help the warrior break the curse and regain its true form. You can use basic drawing software like MSPaint or online apps like https://aggie.io/



The best images will win glory for your tribes. And each contribution will earn you 🍖
Share the images in the comments, Discord, or on Facebook/Twitter with #TheWayOfWrath #TribeWarsChallenge hashtags.


Good luck warriors. May the glory be with you always.

We invite you to join our new community-driven streams - Community Forge! In our second stream, let’s design new armors for The Way of Wrath RPG together! Best ideas will become part of the game.



You can Join streams on Facebook, Steam-Broadcast, and Twitch.

Links:
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/broadcast/watch/76561198037893332
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewayofwrath/
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/animmalstudio