Greetings friends,

DoA´s KS campaign has taken a great deal of our strength so we needed to take a few weeks off to catch our breath and to assess our options and next moves. We´re glad to announce that the work on our game is once again in a full speed and we´re already thrilled about implementing the new ideas that came from you, our backers, and some game media as well. We´ll definitely try to stay in contact with both groups for the whole duration of the development, so that you´ll be able to see where your generous contributions went. If everything goes according to our current plans, we´ll be bringing you news in about a monthly intervals.

Our general plans for upcoming months:

Originally, we wanted show off our work on KS in a form of a functioning playable demo version for everyone to try out. As the game grew on rules, features and new technological options, we´ve been able to bring you just the tech. demo of our combat system.

Now we´ve decided to continue where we left and our common endeavour now goes towards bringing you a complete location of a village, called Manto, with its nearest surrounding and several whole quests in a form of a bigger demo. Most of the game principles shall be involved so that we´ll get a better picture of all the bright sides and flaws of the game at the same time and it will show us which parts still need to be worked on or where we could improve even more.

A top notch state of the demo at the end is critically important for our future work as we want to build the rest of the game upon it. That means, some heavy alpha-testing and a communication with you will be welcomed.

Upcoming game design plans:

Some of you have surely noticed that we didn´t mention specific skills in our updates so far. Most of them are already written in black and white, but still need a lot of balancing before we let them out – our game designers and programmer are currently testing thoroughly all their uses and effects and hopefully we´ll be able to uncover some or all of them in our next updates.

Upcoming programming plans:

Arbiter, our lead programmer is currently working in a close cooperation with our graphics on the inventory system. Visualisation and stat changes of equipping and unequipping should soon work smoothly for all inventory objects and by all playable races and not just humans (who, for apparent reasons, were our choice number one in the testing phase).

Apart from that, we´ve already started some time ago converting the game from Unity 4 to Unity 5 and the results are simply breathtaking. We´re looking forward to showing you the new stuff in near future.

A lot of work for our graphic designers:

Our graphic designers have split into two teams. The first one will be working with the programmers on the inventory system and will be creating new humanoid playable races and also slightly improving the old ones. The other half has already started upgrading the textures, normal maps and lightning of the Manto village scenes.

In a spare time, they should do the same with the capital city, Lim. It should be one of the biggest areas in the game and we´re actually considering splitting it into more areas as you might know from the Baldur´s Gate or it´s younger brother Pillars of Eternity.

Do you like the idea of separate districts or would you prefer to have a big ( but compared to the total size of separated districts smaller and more dense) city area without transitions? Be sure to leave your opinion in the comments section

And a few last words…

We´ve been asked about the option to back us also after the KS campaign. Concerning this, we have already created a Paypal account which you may find on our websites www.aledorn.com. All contributions to this account will go towards reaching our stretch goals and thus substantially improving the game.

Once more, we would like to thank you for your trust and the opportunity to bring our game into existence and we´ll continuously bring you updates about our efforts and results.

Until then, we wish you good luck in everything you do and thank you for your support,

yours

TEAM21

Greetings friends,
we´re bringing you another update from the development of Dungeons of Aledorn. As always you´ll get to hear where we made progress, what´s been added recently and what are future plans are.

First and for many also the most important news is the long promised launch of our backers´ forum. You may find it at http://forum.aledorn.com . The forum is open to everyone, but only Zombie tier (and of course all tiers above) backers will have the rights to post replies and create new threads as well. The main goal of this forum is a more straightforward and better communication with You, our backers, as this game is first of all being made for gamers like you.

Those backers who fulfil the prerequisites as stated above should right about now get an extra mail with registration and login instructions. For those of you, who should have been entitled to a backer forum rights and from some unknown reasons didn´t receive the mail or something else got wrong, stands our e-mail address team21@aledorn.com at disposal. Write us what´s wrong and we´ll do everything we can to fix your problem.
As our KS campaign didn´t reach all possible backers and community members in time, we´re considering adding a special add-on to our paypal account. It would cost about 9 euro/dollars and would enable all Skeleton tier backer´s to upgrade to the Zombie tier, making them a full-pledged contributors of the backers´ forum. Would anyone of you welcome this offer? If yes, send us a message and we´ll try our best to enable the upgrade for you.

Enough about the forum. What´s new about the game?
The new screenshots reveal the latest addition to the area of Manto village. It´s a small forest area at the edge of Manto and perceptive adventurers may be able to find several hidden secrets, quests and fights between the many "bark-armoured giants" of this mysterious place. It will be of course already included in the alpha.

Those interested in a process of game design might find the other picture quite interesting. It´s a look at the "bare bowels" of our updated "pod-engine". It´s still not completely perfect and will need some more improvements, but nevertheless we managed to create a fully functional and non-linear quests in it. The graphic shows just one smaller quest which you´ll be able to try out in the upcoming alpha. A small legend to the paths and colour differentiation follows: Yellow cells represent the very parts of the quest - "sub-quests". The green cells than show how you might fulfil them, call them e.g. "quest-paths", the path which leads you forward in the quest. The red cells are also solutions to the quests, but not a successful ones. These usually represent a dead-end states of the quest and won´t lead you any further in the quest-line. And finally the purple cells than contain various developer information about the quest.

The last news is rather a bitter one. Because of a higher occurrence of unforeseen development complications and setbacks in the last month, you´ll get your hands on the alpha not this year as intially planned. We´re have to postpone the release to an earlier Q1 of 2016. We hope that you understand and that you won´t hold this delay against us in the future - we just don´t want to release a crippled bastard of what we´ve promised.


Thank you all for your devotion to our game,


for the TEAM 21
Nefarit