The Guild

Greetings Guild Members!

First of all, thank you to each one of you for being part of this journey with us! Your encouragement keeps us going and we’re tremendously grateful that you continue to support us!

The Guild is our way to of providing a little extra reward for our monthly supporters and will be a place where we can share a little bit more about our journey making this game.

March 2021

While doing some IT backups last weekend, we found a few pieces of U.R. history…early prototypes of the game, which we of course had to fire up and play around with (while I filmed on my phone). It’s really fun to look back and see how far things have come.

This may very well be the first prototype mockup of U.R. for the C64 from mid-2011, when Bruce was just messing around getting a basic tile engine, music, and UI up.

This next version we found is a build from about 5 months later, in November 2011, running an early version of the Unknown Realm engine, with very preliminary tilesets (aka “programmer art”) and placeholder content. There is a lot going on behind the scenes here with the engine and you can see it’s a lot more functional already. By this point there was a basic scripting system. day/night cycles with changing tilesets, primitive combat and inventory systems in place. It appears the sound engine was turned off, or possibly wasn’t hooked up in this version. You can see the UI also evolving from the prototype. Many of the engine features you see here are in the current version of the game, but much has changed.

The CommVex 2012 demo (posted below) took place about half a year after this 2011 build.

September 24, 2020

I took a short video clip during our morning design session today while Bruce wasn’t paying attention. 😉  One of the topics we were working on was finalizing a few of the in-game automap features for Unknown Realm.

September 1, 2020

Making a game like Unknown Realm poses a lot of unique challenges. We’ve had to create a lot of what we need from scratch, from our game engine, to our development tools, to the custom cartridge, and almost all the “feelies” for the physical editions of Unknown Realm.

In our livestream Q&A earlier in May, Bruce showed off the custom dice we made for the game, and shared a little about how we made them. Below is a little video from one of those late-night engraving sessions, taken in 2017 after our Kickstarter. It took a significant amount of effort to perfect this process, and several months of late-nights hunkered over the laser engraver at our local maker space to complete nearly 2000 custom dice. Each individual dice had to be hand-turned 6 times to engrave each face! These are not your garden-variety, made-in-China trinkets…they are handcrafted with love specifically for this game. 🙂

These wooden dice feel amazing in your hands, and they’ll be included exclusively with all Kickstarter boxed versions of Unknown Realm.

June 10, 2020
It’s been a little while since we posted something here, though we’ve really enjoyed hanging out with some of you in our Guild Discord Channel (come join us!) and doing regular video hangouts through Discord as well. It’s both comforting and encouraging to see some of you face to face, and to have two-way conversations with the people who’ve been looking forward to this game.

In case any of you missed it, we wanted to post a Q&A livestream that we did on May 30th. We were hoping the livestream would be a way to bring our backers up to date with some of what’s happened in the last three years and answer questions submitted by them. The idea was to get our community up to speed by answering their questions so we can push forward on this project. We hope you enjoy! Please send us an email (laura@stirringdragon.games) if you’d like to join the Discord channel and participate in future video hangouts with us!

 February 28, 2020

Today we have Part 2 of the video from CommVex – the audience Q&A session. Hope you enjoy it!

 February 20, 2020

For our first behind-the-scene we wanted to do something special, and take you back to a much earlier time in the development of Unknown Realm, closer to when this journey really began in earnest.

You in the Guild will be the very first people to see this presentation outside the individuals who were present on the day it was filmed at the Commodore Vegas Expo in 2012. The video is of Bruce’s impromptu demo of the Unknown Realm engine.

The full video is 20 mins long and is broken up into two parts, Part I is the demo which we’re sharing today, and Part II is an audience Q&A which we’ll share next time.

Unfortunately, the audio is not the greatest on this video since it was an impromptu demo without a mic, so you may have to turn it up. 🙂

We hope you enjoy it!

A little back story on this demo: It took place on the second day of CommVex. Bruce went to the expo planning not to demo U.R., but after watching the first day of presenters and realizing there weren’t really any new games being shown, he decided to go back to the hotel room and stayed up all night scripting a small demo with the game engine that was customized for people at the event.

Obviously you can tell a lot of things have changed with the game between this presentation and the launch of our Kickstarter , such as…

– The game initially was going to be a smaller scope and intended for the C64 only (not PC).

– It was initially going to be a 2-3 disk floppy-based game – the engine later went through a total redesign which required us to make custom hardware that would accommodate the increased scope of the game and make the player experience on the C64 equivalent to the PC version. That has always been important to us.

– Graphics were being worked on during this time, but pretty much were still placeholder graphics and have gone through several iterations before we settled on our final art style before Kickstarter.