Cevari

[DevLog] Stirring Abyss - Now in crowdfunding!

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Hiya folks!

 

I'm Juhani from Sleepy Sentry, a young indie studio from Finland. We're a three-man team, and we've previously published a couple of simple mobile games that we created while studying. In 2016 we took the step to working on the company full time, and started development on a PC game; in many ways the game we wanted to make:

 

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Check out our story trailer and/or gameplay trailer!

 

Indiegogo campaign page.

 

Stirring Abyss combines deep ocean exploration, squad strategy and Lovecraft-inspired storytelling. You take charge of the surviving crew of the USS Salem, U.S. Navy submarine that sinks while on a top secret research mission during the early years of the Cold War. They find themselves surrounded by the ruins of a forgotten civilization, their vessel too badly damaged to escape the depths.

 

Some things we're especially proud of include:

 

  • Our beautiful underwater environments, in a classic 2d isometric perspective.
  • Varied strategic combat.
  • Diverse character traits and skills, as well as gruesome mutations unlocked during the game.
  • Unsettling and fully original soundtrack.
  • Interactive and chilling story with truly meaningful choices.

 

Some pre-alpha screenshots:

 

Spoiler

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I'll be posting updates here as we go, although since it's manual work it may take a moment after stuff gets posted on our blog and social media. If you have any questions I'd love to answer them, and at this point any feedback is welcome but I imagine there will be more opportunity for that as we can actually show more of the game.

 

Feature Spotlights:

Spineskulker

 

"Darkness and silence hang upon the abyss like a funeral cloth, but what truly terrifies me is that this place is not lifeless. It is asleep, and something stirs in the gloom..."

 

 

Edited by Cevari
Crowdfunding started!

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Sounds like a cool concept for sure. Looking forward to following along!

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Posted a blog today, talking game design and the difference of designing for fun and designing for balance. Featuring examples from Diablo 2 and 3, and how we feel the design philosophy at Blizzard changed between the two.

 

Fun vs. Balance - Design Philosophy

 

Let me know what you think! I feel like this is a mistake that a lot of devs make in this day and age of competetive multiplayer games becoming the norm, especially on the PC side.

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The summer is here, and because we are Finnish it brings cold tidings from the depths!

 

Today's blog marks the beginning of a new series, in which we show off specific features of Stirring Abyss. The first star is none other than the mutated dark-dweller known as the Spineskulker, a deadly but cowardly enemy that can't stand the bright lights our heroes bring with them.

 

Feature Spotlight: Spineskulker

 

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Another update from the salt mines. Summer vacation? Never heard of it, like most indie devs.

 

Really excited today though, since we finally judged things presentable enough to share the first batch of ingame screenshots! I hope you find them interesting, it's just a little glimpse of what lurks at the bottom of the ocean.

 

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The rest of the screenshots are below, or you can check out the blog post here.

 

Spoiler

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It's very dark and gloomy here in Finland; perfect for sitting around indoors all day working on the game!

 

Some features we've recently completed or been working on:

  • Recruiting your own crew instead of just random characters. We'll do a full blog about this a bit later, when it's more or less production level.
  • The 'bursting pod' environmental feature, as of yet without an official name. The pod explodes when attacked, offering new strategic options and making ranged enemies very dangerous if you're standing next to one!
  • New Skills and Mutations for increased character customization, for example the Chemist and Linguist.

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Some more screenshots and other fancy things for you to check out:

 

Spoiler

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I've updated the main post quite a bit. We've been quiet for a while, basically we realized we were still a bit further away from release than we thought and really put our heads down and went into full dev mode for a while.

 

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Some new sights, and a completely revamped diver model.

 

The big thing right now is that we finished our first gameplay trailer. Would love to hear any feedback or opinions on how it turned out, I think it's pretty sweet, personally.

 

Apart from that we're prepping for our crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo, starting next Thursday (October 11th). Extremely nervous, but also very excited about that.

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This looks great. I really like the setting, atmosphere, and design you have shown here. It’s hard to get a great feel for the tactical layer in just the trailer but it rings nostalgia of old BioWare games and that’s exciting. Nice work!

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Thanks theschap, I'm glad you like what you've seen.

 

If you want to get a better idea of how the game actually plays, there's a lot more info on our Indiegogo page which just went up today.

 

In other news we also released our story trailer, which I have to say I'm really proud of.

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