this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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Dragon's Demand Kickstarter Updates: Funding Goal Reached! (www.kickstarter.com)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/30560583

The Kickstarter is just about to hit its halfway point, and so far they are just over 67% of the way to being funded. People feel somewhat optimistic about its chances, given the timeframe involved, but there's still a big gap between what's been pledged and what they need. If you're interested in a Pathfinder cRPG based on the 2e rules, and you haven't checked it out, the link is in the title.

And a friendly reminder that the pricing is actually in Canadian dollars, so most people will have a friendly conversion rate given the CAD's current value.

The developers have been doing some interviews, though their ground game doesn't seem to be particularly strong. I've collected some of their media tour below.

They've also posted a couple of updates to the Kickstarter page:

Update 1: Approaching 60% Funded!

Dear Demanders,

Today, we are happy to celebrate that we are a goblin's breath away from 60% funded with over 4,000 backers and nearly $300,000 CA raised!

Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand is our dream game. To all who have backed, THANK YOU for sharing our vision of a single-player, turn-based Pathfinder Second Edition CRPG that takes role-playing back to its roots with miniature-based characters and digital dice to recreate the look and feel of a tabletop RPG. With your support, we had a strong launch and were 40% funded in only two days!

To those who have not yet backed, we invite you to learn more on our Kickstarter page and in our interviews.

Looking for more reveals? We’ve only just begun. Don’t miss these interviews with Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand Product Director, Alan Miranda:

LIVE Q&A WITH DRAGON'S DEMAND DEVELOPER - PATHFINDER 2E VIDEO GAME with Nonat1s on YouTube Discussing Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand with Project Manager Alan Miranda of Ossian Studios with Really Dicey on YouTube

We have more exciting interviews in the days ahead!

Here’s a behind-the-scenes insight: For our in-game “props,” we partnered with Gracewindale Mini Scenery because we loved the style of their tabletop scenery and wanted to include it in our game Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand. Their entire line of 3D printable STL props are fantastic, so please check them out! www.gracewindale.com

Every Kickstarter needs its backers to amplify the campaign, so please share your enthusiasm with your friends and ask them to join the party. Your recommendation and word of mouth are invaluable. You can also shout out about us on social media–Kickstarter makes that easy. We’ve dreamed big, and we need your help to make this dream a reality!

In Gratitude, Ossian Studios

Update 2: Spread the Word With This Surprise

Greetings Demanders!

We've been busy getting the word out there for Pathfinder: The Dragon's Demand, doing interviews this week with PC Gamer, The Rules Lawyer, and Matt Chat (all soon to be posted). They're all super excited for this game! Being both video gamers and tabletop players, they could relate to the miniatures and dice, and were intrigued by the prospect of playing in a 3D cubic grid system where characters can do all kinds of cool things.

The vertical movement in a full 3D grid can take your character almost anywhere they want to go. You can levitate to a window at the top of a tower or climb down a chimney for undetected infiltration (mind the fire!). You can rain down volleys of arrows on your unsuspecting enemies from the cover of tree branches or send swooping monstrosities spiraling away with magical blasts of wind. This is a whole new dimension for tactical combat CRPGs!

And speaking of flying monstrosities, the grioths from the Dark Tapestry inhabit frozen, lifeless worlds in the blacks voids of space, and continuously seek out warm worlds to conquer by ritualistically tearing them away from their suns. But now, these bat-like humanoids have come to the small town of Belhaim with an inscrutable purpose...

https://2e.aonprd.com/MonsterFamilies.aspx?ID=240

So we'd like to bring these creatures to everyone who has backed us so far. In this update, we're giving the Grioth STL from our miniatures collection as a free gift via the link below! If you share the file, don’t forget to tell people where you got it. ;) Thank you all for your support and please keep telling your friends about the game to spread the word so we can reach our funding goal!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sjVYeMHYWE81tvjWSB47UWI8oLvlZaAZ?usp=sharing

(Printed and painted by our art director, Philip Lyon)

In Gratitude, Ossian Studios

Update 3: Weaving a Narrative

Greetings, Demanders!

We’re thrilled to announce the project is now 66% funded with a little over two weeks remaining. With your continued support and enthusiasm – and, if we may so bold as to ask, social media shares and word-of-word – we’re hoping to smash through the funding target and into the stretch goals with the force of Gorum exploding across the realms!

I'm Luke Scull, lead designer and writer for Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand, and I want to talk about our approach to implementing the game’s story and many colorful characters, as well as how we plan to grant the player agency in interacting with this beautiful world our artists have created.

Firstly, it is important to state that Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand is a deep, intricate computer role-playing game with all the narrative depth and dialogue complexity of the most celebrated titles in the genre. Players will experience a compelling new plotline that weaves the machinations of the Dark Tapestry into the high fantasy story of a town under threat from a wicked dragon.

During the adventure, the player will meet hundreds of NPCs that can be interacted with. How these characters respond to the party will depend on the player’s choices and the dialogue skills they possess. Do you wish to be a paragon of virtue and help the many colorful characters that dwell within Belhaim? Or would you rather take advantage of those you meet, and lie, cheat, and steal for profit, or to deepen your connection with the mysterious dark benefactor who haunts your dreams?

Every NPC in Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand has a story to tell. Unique dialogue options will show up depending on the player character’s ancestry, background, and class, as well as their reputation, for as the hero’s legend grows, the people of Belhaim will begin to react to their deeds. Harm too many people or loot too many houses and you may find yourself almost as reviled as the great scaled beast that threatens town. Go out of your way to do favors for folk and they will cheer your name as you walk by. Some may even gift you powerful items or show up to aid you.

The world of Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand is hugely reactive, with every choice the player makes changing how the story plays out, and deciding the fates of the hundreds of characters who call Belhaim and the surrounding environs home. No two players will have the same experience: in fact, the game will encourage multiple playthroughs with different character builds to fully experience the breadth of possibilities.

Allow me a moment to talk about companions. We plan to have a total of 12, of which the player can select up to three to travel with at any time, for a total party of four. Aside from the Iconic goblin alchemist Fumbus, these companions have yet to be announced, but each will have their own backstory, character arc, and associated quests. Companion relationships with the player character, as well as each other, will shift as the story unfolds. Upset a companion too often and they may leave the party permanently… possibly to show up later as a sworn enemy. Impress a companion often enough and new dialogue options will be revealed—perhaps even leading to romance, if Shelyn wills it…

These companions, as well as important story NPCs, will be voiced by experienced actors, bringing some of the best voice talent to Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand. With thousands of voiced lines and enough dialogue to fill several fantasy novels, my ambition as lead writer is to provide a deep world of incredible complexity and unforgettable characters that is every bit as engaging as the best tabletop campaigns.

Finally, I would like to say how excited I am about working with Pathfinder fans on incorporating their own creations into the game. Our higher reward tiers allow backers to include their own personalized magic item, NPC, bard song, or even quest in Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand. These would henceforth become part of official Pathfinder lore, to be discovered and enjoyed by players from release to ten or twenty years from now.

If you’ve ever had a beloved magic weapon from your tabletop campaigns that you wish to see included, or you’re a GM who would love to see a favorite quest you once wrote experienced by thousands of players worldwide, consider investing in one of these higher tiers. Your support will also help push the game towards its funding goal and beyond—maybe unlocking new stretch goal features to include even more of the magic of what makes Pathfinder Second Edition so special!

In Gratitude, Ossian Studios

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Alright, I backed it. I must admit to being a bit sceptical though - seems like a small team to develop such a game.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Definitely a consideration here, yeah. It's not at all clear how many people work as Ossian. They only spotlight their leads.

I'm hopeful, at least, because it seems like the engine is there, and the leads all have deep experience working in RPGs. But I'm not expecting it to be a quick turnaround on development.

Still, I'm really rather taken in by the TTRPG minis aesthetic, so I have my fingers crossed!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

New update posted a couple of days ago! As of this morning, there is 1 week left in the Kickstarter, and they are 82% of the way to their goal. Kicktraqs has them trending towards 107% funding.

Update 5 - Pathfinder Rules Implementation

The project is now over 78% funded with over 5,600 backers!

Greetings Demanders!

I’m Kevin Smith, lead programmer on Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand, and in this update I’ll be getting into more detail about about the remastered Pathfinder Second Edition rules implementation we’ve been working on.

At Ossian Studios, we know that there are two types of RPG players: those who want to spend at least six hours on the character generation screen, and those who want to jump into the story as quickly as possible. Consequently, we have designed our character creation screens to seamlessly support both styles of play. You can pick from a variety of fun pre-generated characters, or you can create a completely custom character and drill-down into all the details by selecting from hundreds of options, including Feats and Spells. As many of you already know, the Pathfinder character generation process can be extremely complicated, but we are working hard to make it both fun and easy to understand by providing a highly flexible sheet-based user interface that rivals any other CRPG on the market today.

After character creation, as your party gains experience from adventuring, you'll be able to level up any party member using just a single mouse click. Alternatively, you can delve deeply into any character's details and hand select every level up option imaginable.

As part of a robust level up system, we hope that our backers help us unlock the Multiclass Archetypes stretch goal because this will unleash a vast array of powerful and highly customized characters! Pathfinder’s Multiclass Archetypes can be used to create exciting combinations of different character classes. You'll be able to customize your own character, and all of your party members. But remember that all of the enemy NPCs also benefit from Multiclass Archetypes, so expect more unique and exciting new challenges during strategic combat encounters.

Behind the scenes, our Rules Engine orchestrates everything in the game, from Exploration Mode to Combat Mode. The Rules Engine directly loads a huge amount of tabular data that was extracted directly from the official Paizo rule books (thank you Archives of Nethys!). Supporting the Rules Engine are our generic frameworks for Feats, Spells, and Actions. We have tested both the Rules Engine and the frameworks by implementing hundreds of Feats, Spells, and Actions up to tenth level. The frameworks can support the addition of new Feats, Spells, Actions, and even Character Classes with relative ease.

From the very beginning, we knew that this would be a Pathfinder Second Edition game, rather than a converted First Edition game. Although we began developing this game long before the Remastered Pathfinder Rules were invented, Paizo graciously provided us with very early access to the new rules. Consequently we've had a significant amount of time to adapt our custom game systems to support the new remastered Second Edition rules.

Developing a game of this size and complexity is certainly extremely challenging! What are some of the things we tangle with on a daily basis? The sheer quantity of Feats and Spells that we are implementing is a huge challenge (I actually love implementing these!). The Pathfinder Rules, although very well designed, have many unique edge cases, which are not well described. We often have to pause and debate exactly what should happen in various complex scenarios. As much as possible, we stay true to the Pathfinder rules-as-written, but also adapt where necessary to make a better CRPG experience.

Despite these many challenges, we have already implemented all Second Edition core Ancestries, Backgrounds, Classes, Deities, Heritages, the vast majority of Class Features, and all level-up benefits including gained spells and spell slots.

After the game is funded, we're looking forward to interacting directly with our many backers to help prioritize key game features, and even debate how to resolve some of those tricky rules edge cases! Please help spread the word about the game so that we can attract more backers! Thanks for all of your help so far!

*🐉*

After receiving some feedback on our sold-out Limited Pledge Tiers, we’ve decided to add some additional quantities of these. We are happy to bring you:

15 Personalized Mark Editions
10 Personalized NPC Editions
5 Personal Framed Portrait Editions
5 Personalized Magic Item Editions

And don’t forget that all our pledge tiers include everything from the previous tiers! For example, the Personalized Magic Item Edition includes the Framed Portrait, Personalized NPC, and Personalized Mark limited rewards, on top of the Digital Tabletop Edition. That’s quite a stack of rewards! 😃

Thank you again for supporting our campaign!

In Gratitude, Ossian Studios

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

And another update this morning! GOG and Steam Deck Kickstarter is now approaching 87% funded.

Update 6: GOG and Steam Deck

🐉✨ The project is now over 85% funded!

Greetings Demanders!

This is just a quick update to let everyone know about a couple of things.

Firstly, we’ve been listening to many of your comments requesting a GOG version of Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand. So we’re happy to announce that we’re committing to releasing a GOG version of the game! Our goal is to get it to backers as soon as possible after our Steam release.

Secondly, we’ve heard your requests for the game to be Steam Deck compatible. Instead of evaluating that topic after the campaign, we’ve reviewed it now and decided that we’ll definitely support Steam Deck! This support will be added as soon as we can after our Steam release. Even though the game’s primary design is for mouse and keyboard, we designed our UI framework from the start to be flexible enough to be adapted for controllers. Our earlier hesitancy to support Steam Deck came from the fact that we’ve never attempted this before, making it hard to estimate the additional dev time needed. That’s why it will have to come on the heels of our desktop release. But the whole team has played a LOT of console RPGs, so we are resolved to take it on!

Once again, a big “THANK YOU” to everyone who has supported this campaign, including the recent backers of our Personalized Quest tier – wow! We’re going to have lots of fun working with you on your rewards, and with everyone else who has pledged on one of our Limited Tiers. ☺️

In Gratitude, Ossian Studios

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

And another update this morning! GOG and Steam Deck Kickstarter is now approaching 87% funded.

Update 6: GOG and Steam Deck

🐉✨ The project is now over 85% funded!

Greetings Demanders!

This is just a quick update to let everyone know about a couple of things.

Firstly, we’ve been listening to many of your comments requesting a GOG version of Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand. So we’re happy to announce that we’re committing to releasing a GOG version of the game! Our goal is to get it to backers as soon as possible after our Steam release.

Secondly, we’ve heard your requests for the game to be Steam Deck compatible. Instead of evaluating that topic after the campaign, we’ve reviewed it now and decided that we’ll definitely support Steam Deck! This support will be added as soon as we can after our Steam release. Even though the game’s primary design is for mouse and keyboard, we designed our UI framework from the start to be flexible enough to be adapted for controllers. Our earlier hesitancy to support Steam Deck came from the fact that we’ve never attempted this before, making it hard to estimate the additional dev time needed. That’s why it will have to come on the heels of our desktop release. But the whole team has played a LOT of console RPGs, so we are resolved to take it on!

Once again, a big “THANK YOU” to everyone who has supported this campaign, including the recent backers of our Personalized Quest tier – wow! We’re going to have lots of fun working with you on your rewards, and with everyone else who has pledged on one of our Limited Tiers. ☺️

In Gratitude, Ossian Studios