Dec 27, 2023

CHARACTER SPOTLIGHT - SANGRAMA VIJAYATUNGAVARMAN

Unsung Empires: The Cholas - tapasya

INTRODUCTION AND LEGACY

Meet Sangarama, king of Srivijaya a coastal kingdom known for its serene Buddhist temples, beautiful rainforests and huge harbors that thrived during his rule. He had an important role in making Kadaram a huge hub for traders and creating these opportunities.

LEADERSHIP AND EXPANDING TRADE ROUTES

As trade began to expand, Sangarama became a dependable person, making Kadaram the hotspot for traders. He hiked up taxes out of jealousy towards the Cholas, hence, taxes became the primary income source of the kingdom. The people noticed this shift, their values slipping away, which made the people of Srivijaya unhappy. This discontent sparked rebel protests, affecting their livelihoods, yet Sangarama's ego led him to believe that no one could defeat or overthrow him.

APPEARANCE

He stands seven feet tall at the age of 35, known for being a war god, his armor is layered with sleek leather, symbolizing luxury and rebellion at the same time. Cloaked in royal silk from head to toe, he proudly wears Srivijaya's royal crown crafted with gold and jewels, visually proclaiming his heritage and authority.

ARSENAL AND ATTACK STYLE

Sangrama's tall figure is matched only by his double hammer, a weapon of swift, fiery attacks and thunderous, heavy strikes.

IN-GAME PROLOGUE

Sangarama and Chola have their epic showdown to decide what happens to the city and all the trades. Experience Sangrama's might firsthand and get this, in the game, you even get to be Sangrama for some gameplay, calling the shots and the rise of a war god involved in both business and conflict.

DESIGNING SANGRAMA: BRINGING VILLIAN TO LIFE - A NOTE FROM THE ARTIST

"Making Sangarama from scratch required more than just polygons and textures, infusing personality, menace and carefully crafting every aspect of Sangrama’s design.

Each vertex that I placed and every texture that I carefully mapped all served the purpose of creating this villain, whose encounter will be unforgettable for the players.

As a 3D artist, my canvas is this game world and within its parameters, I sculpt not just a character but an interactive, evocative piece of art that awaits players to unravel its mysteries" - Sudharshan

Wishlist our game here on Steam and be among the first to join the epic journey of Rajendra Chola.

Dec 27, 2023

Questions and Answers session results with Daisho development team!

Daisho: Survival of a Samurai - Saturnus

Hello, Brave Samurai!

Hope you're all having a wonderful time during the Holiday season.
We're getting a lot of questions regarding the future of the game, and here are the answers to the most common questions from both Facebook and Discord social media!

🤔: What was your inspiration for creating the idea of Daisho?

👨‍🎨: As you know, our studio's first title is "Gladiators: Survival in Rome," and we were inspired by the idea of creating a game similar to how Ubisoft approaches their Assassin's Creed series. They manage to transport us to various places and eras without significantly changing the gameplay.

We chose feudal Japan for several reasons: firstly, it's quite popular and romanticized in various media nowadays; secondly, we discovered that most of our team is really into Japanese culture, which sparked a flurry of ideas about the characters, visuals, and storyline.

Another significant decision was regarding the main character's gender. Unfortunately, we currently don't have the feature of main character customization in our games, nor do we have the manpower to support it. Therefore, we had to choose one gender. Deciding to experiment, and since we already have a game with a male protagonist, we opted for a female samurai, and we've grown quite fond of her 🙂 In an age of breaking boundaries and erasing differences, this decision felt right, especially knowing that female warriors (onna-musha) existed in medieval Japan. Pop culture examples like Disney’s "Mulan" (though about Chinese culture) also inspired us with its appealing story.

Of course, we drew a lot of inspiration from PC/console titles such as "Ghost Of Tsushima," "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice," "Nioh," "Katana Kami," "Onimusha," and others. We're also excitedly anticipating "Rise of the Rōnin" and the TV series "Shōgun," along with other titles set to release on various platforms in 2024.

🤔: When will we have a new map? / Is there a new area coming? We want to see more than mine and forest ^^

👨‍🎨: In one of our upcoming updates, we plan to add more levels to the mine, as its main idea and mechanics have not yet been fully explored. New locations will primarily be introduced through repeatable events, which we aim to create in the first half of the next year. Additionally, there will be an expansion of the estate map to introduce new constructions and activities.

🤔: Is there any future development coming up in upgrading the equipment from Level 1?

👨‍🎨: In "Daisho," the equipment upgrading system revolves around merging equipment to attain better rarity and, consequently, improved parameters. As of now, we do not have plans to introduce levels to this system. Future development will focus on introducing new tiers of equipment.

🤔: When will the "saga" be continued? I mean the story quests, that is the reason I started playing this game (btw, I played Gladiators before for a while, but there, I loved the quests but not the energy system).

👨‍🎨: As much as we love crafting story content, its creation requires considerable time and effort, and typically, it's experienced just once by players. This can leave you with expectations of frequent new additions, which our small team is challenged to meet regularly. However, this doesn't mean we'll stop adding new story elements. We will certainly continue to do so as a reward for your progress in the game. At the same time, we're focusing our efforts on developing perpetual mechanics and repeatable activities. These will keep you engaged and also provide us with more time to create content like story missions.

🤔: Will we have a male character in the future?

👨‍🎨: We hope to implement character customization in the future. However, this is a technically and artistically demanding task for us. For instance, it would require creating two sets for every piece of equipment we introduce. Therefore, while we're interested in this feature, it's not part of our immediate plans.

🤔: When will Daisho release camouflage feature?

👨‍🎨: Currently, we do not plan to develop any special stealth mechanics, as they would significantly alter the game's core dynamics, potentially transforming it into a completely different experience. "Daisho" is a game about a samurai, known for engaging in open battles, rather than adopting the stealthy maneuvers of a ninja. 🙂

🤔: Could we keep the fir tree after the event in our estate as decoration? Would be a great addition.

👨‍🎨: Sorry, it is only for the holidays. However, we'll be adding more decorations to future rewards for you to place in your estate. Stay tuned! 🙂

🤔: I play mostly on the PC so would you ever link the HUD to the keyboard? Like "I" for inventory, "T" travel "A" for auto, etc? Just to make it easier to switch between?

👨‍🎨: We are actively working on developing controller support for our games, which will include keybindings for keyboard interface use as well. We're aiming to release this feature in the first quarter of next year. Stay tuned!

🤔: Maybe a dump box, where you can throw all the resources you can't/ don't want to store away and maybe get like one coin for each item?

👨‍🎨: While we don't currently have plans to create such a mechanic, we are looking into revising how the current merchant operates. Additionally, we're considering introducing more traders to provide you with more options for selling resources.

Dec 27, 2023

Happy Holidays from Galacticare - 2023 Recap

Galacticare - Brightrock Games

From all of us at Brightrock and CULT Games, we wish you the happiest of holidays and a wonderful new year.

As we approach 2024 we've taken a look at what we got up to this past year and how we have worked towards getting where we are with Galacticare today. Being what is essentially our last full year working to release Galacticare, so much has changed since the start of 2023. We've worked on making our own style of content & social media assets, we've been going to events to show off the game, we released a demo and finally got to watch loads of you play Galacticare.

So in this blog we've made a list of some of the things we're most proud of from 2023. Enjoy!

Content

Firstly lets take a look at some of the content we're proud of from this year

Meet The Xil

Gameplay Trailer

Live Brightrock Q&A Session

Achievements

There are many moments from 2023 a lot of us would consider as our achievements, but if we boil it down to just a few it would be these:

Demo

We released our demo during the Steam Next Fest and got to enjoy watching loads of you stream our game. The demo was an amazing opportunity for us to listen to your feedback and talk to our community about all things Galacticare.

TikTok

On our journey of venturing into the social medias and experimenting with Galacticare content, we ended up with way more exposure on TikTok than we initially expected. As it turns out a lot of you really liked our shortform video content and we ended up hitting 6 digit views on a good number of our uploads which was incredibly flattering and gave us so much confidence.

Gamescom

Gamescom was an amazing time for us, we had our own booth which we turned into a replica of a treatment room in Galacticare and we had so many people sit with us to try the game out. By the end of the event we got to go home and read through all the press which all-in-all just felt really great. As we get closer to launch, the thought of having so many hands and eyes on our work is a little daunting but after hearing so much positivity from people who got to try it out, we're more excited than anything.

And that's it for 2023, it's been a fantastic year for us and we hope it's been a fantastic year for you too.

Our plans for 2024 are huge and the whole team is filled to the brim with excitement, we can't wait to see what next year looks like.

Don’t forget we publish a new deep-dive blog post once a month, and more weekly explorations (including daily Condition Research Journals) across our TikTok, Twitter, and Discord.

We will see you again next week, enjoy the rest of your holidays and have an amazing new year!

Dec 27, 2023

Big Update! The Best of Adam is Here

Adam - Teta Studio

[GAMEPLAY AND MECHANICS]
- Optimized the very long (10sec) transition screens with transition screens in the 1-3 sec range.
- In order for you to get the story elements of the game, a cinematic at the beginning and end of the game has been added with our robot character shouting about the story. If you don't want to watch the story video, you can switch to the game by pressing any button.
- After you die; "How many enemies you killed, how much "Adamant" you earned, how long you stayed in the game, what abilities, armor and bullets you used are shown in a table. Having to go to the main menu after dying has been speeded up by replacing it with the replay option on this screen.
- You can now get rid of them by punching them when you get stuck with (Mouse Right Click).
- Dash (Dash Forward) time has been reduced, now with a faster regenerating ability.
- Weapons spray mechanics have been improved.
- Improved the feel of weapon strikes.

[MAPS]
- The first level has been updated as a map where we start the battle by descending from the hangar to the underground tunnel.
- The "Transition Levels", as we call them, have been optimized by making them much shorter.
- The caravan where we use the main menu has been replaced with the hangar map where we do all our work.
- The first 5 levels of underground tunnels have been simplified and made easy for everyone to pass through.
- Updated the maps by adding train, warehouse and factory levels.
- Added a small boss after each level group (warehouse levels for example) and a big boss level at the end.
- Fixed map bugs, fixed dark spots.
- Boss levels have been replaced with new ones.

[ENEMY ROBOTS]
- Improved the artificial intelligence of enemy robots.
- Optimized enemy robots' running speed, damage and damage dealt.
- Fixed enemy robots running at us the moment we enter the level and updated their locations to be more strategic.
- Improved the animations of enemy robots. Reaction animations work when they take damage.
- Zargana robots now explode and deal damage when they die.

[ANIMATIONS AND VFX]
- Added VFX and voice interaction based on the materials you shoot in the game.
- VFX have been added to make the bullets, armor and abilities we choose more effective and distinct.

[SOUND AND MUSIC]
- We've updated the menu to allow you to increase or decrease all sounds, whereas before only the music volume could be turned down.
- Sounds have been added to make the bullets, armor and abilities we select more effective and distinct.
- 7 New "Dynamic Transitions Music" added

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- The entire game interface has been redone from start to finish
- Fixed the game opening in windowed screen mode to full screen.
- Updated the game's intro video with a story video explaining the purpose of fighting in the game, who we are and what our goal is.
- The trailer with the main menu has been replaced with a hangar where we can choose our weapons and develop our characters.

[GRAPHICS]
- The graphics of the game have been improved. Even if you play on low graphics, we have made improvements with a visual close to high graphics, but of course there is an FPS difference between low, medium and high graphics. With this update, we are using Unreal Engine Lumen technology to achieve real-time and true-to-life lighting. In previous versions, light was cooked and presented with average light and shading quality. Now we provide gameplay with the closest to realistic lighting and shading.
- Lights and post process have been redone.