Quite a genre change for Project Hospital developer Oxymoron Games, as they've just put their Heroes of Might and Magic-like game Silence of the Siren into Early Access. Note: the developer sent me a key.
A very promising one if you like the blend of exploration and turn-based strategy, although this is in a fun sci-fi setting where you're fighting for control over a distant star system. You get to explore what's left of various planets, secure resources, upgrade your bases and hire big armies. From what I've seen and tried of it, if you enjoyed Heroes of Might and Magic III then you're pretty much guaranteed to love this I think. For everyone else: it's a fantastic start for this mixtures of strategy, exploration and RPG mechanics that I'm excited to see now available.
Check out the Early Access trailer:
Direct Link
Current Features as of the EA release:
- 3 completed playable factions - Fossorians, Children of the Source, Sovereign Fleet.
- Story campaign for the Fossorian faction with 4 levels (average playtime >12 hours) + 9 playable skirmish maps.
- Explore a rich sci-fi world and discover secrets of a lost civilization.
- Collect powerful artifacts, secure important resources, upgrade your bases and hire the strongest units.
- Encounter a wide range of enemies in turn-based combat, use your tactical thinking to gain advantage on the battlefield.
- Learn unique moves of your units, deploy your commander's special abilities and outsmart even much stronger opponents.
- Level-up your commanders and crush your enemies in exciting turn-based battles.
- Available in: English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Simplified Chinese, Hungarian.
The developers expect it to be in Early Access for around a year while they implement new features, bug fixes, general improvements and two more factions. There's already multiple tens of hours of content to play through right now.
Linux version seemed to work really nicely too. I'm somewhat in love with the style of the artwork as well. I'm a real sucker for sci-fi and the way this blends everything together looks fantastic in motion. Fun faction designs too. Absolutely worth checking out.
Available from the Steam store. It has Native Linux support just like their previous game.
Quoting: JarmerThank you so much for your comment! I have a general question: Would you ever be interested in doing a "show us how it's done" type post about how you do your development? Not super detailed perhaps, but even just basic stuff like what tools you use, what environments you use, how you communicate with your team, etc etc... I love reading or listening to developers talk about how they do their craft, but so few do.
I'll try to briefly answer your questions. We use Unity engine, which can produce binaries for various platforms. There's rarely any issue with something working on Linux and not on Windows and vice versa, but we've always found a solution/compromise. For writing code(C#), we use Jetbrains Rider. For graphical assets, the team uses various mix of tools - Blender, Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity. Music and SFX is outsourced. For versioning we use git with lfs extension. We used to use Perforce, which is probably better suited for games, but the cost for a growing team was just too high. We're 8 guys in a single office, so communication is easy and you can talk to anyone at any time. For online communication we use Discord, which I'm not a big fan of, but gamers apparently use it a lot so it's also our main communication channel with the community.
Sometimes we publish interesting things from the development at our steam page
And I like this video, where you can see how we do the animations using blender.
Quoting: ja_oxyQuoting: JarmerThank you so much for your comment! I have a general question: Would you ever be interested in doing a "show us how it's done" type post about how you do your development? Not super detailed perhaps, but even just basic stuff like what tools you use, what environments you use, how you communicate with your team, etc etc... I love reading or listening to developers talk about how they do their craft, but so few do.
I'll try to briefly answer your questions. We use Unity engine, which can produce binaries for various platforms. There's rarely any issue with something working on Linux and not on Windows and vice versa, but we've always found a solution/compromise. For writing code(C#), we use Jetbrains Rider. For graphical assets, the team uses various mix of tools - Blender, Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity. Music and SFX is outsourced. For versioning we use git with lfs extension. We used to use Perforce, which is probably better suited for games, but the cost for a growing team was just too high. We're 8 guys in a single office, so communication is easy and you can talk to anyone at any time. For online communication we use Discord, which I'm not a big fan of, but gamers apparently use it a lot so it's also our main communication channel with the community.
Sometimes we publish interesting things from the development at our steam page
And I like this video, where you can see how we do the animations using blender.
That's super interesting info!!! Thank you so much. Interesting on Rider. I too dislike Discord, but yes it's true that so many people use it. I absolutely HATE the chat format of discord vs traditional posting forums (mainly for archival info and searching) but I'm old so I remember the glory days of forum communities.
Really looking forward to the game release, and thanks for sharing this info!
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