Alrighty folks, it is time we got everyone up to speed on what we have been doing for the past two years, and how the team working on Eydigard got put together!
2021 - Making the leap
Starting in spring of 2021 the co-founders Jostein, Stian, and Casper set out to create an open-world RPG with deep North-Norwegian roots. We had plenty of experience on the player side of things, but we had not done much in terms of actually creating games ourselves. At this point we knew a few main things about our game. We wanted to make a game that was beautiful and filled with fantasy, but we needed it to be a world that took itself seriously. We wanted to see the Norwegian and Sami folk tales come to life with the grim backdrop that old tales in medieval times would offer. And above all we wanted to make a solid RPG multiplayer experience with a variety of options for rewarding gameplay and good times for a group of friends. With these ambitions set before us we quit our jobs during the summer and focus all of our time and money on making Eydigard a reality.
2022 - The year of organizational growth
Having spent 2021 mapping our way forward and exploring all the different choices in softwares and pipelines for production, we sat out in 2022 with a clear goal. Flesh out our gameplay mechanics, get the coding infrastructure underway towards a robust multiplayer experience, and start hiring the right people for our 2D and 3D pipelines.
Early in 2022 we started to work on our overall style and game feel. We had a lot of lore already written and knew we wanted to rely heavily on the fairytale style art of Theodor Kittelsen in our art style. We started working with two talented concept artists, Judith C. Meca and Ingri Nedkvitne, and had great input from them into the creation of a coherent style for the game in 2D. We decided to go for a non-realistic stylized approach in terms of overall game style but tried to avoid the most exaggerated shapes that many stylized games go for. Staying true to Kittelsen was a bit challenging when translating it into a 3D environment, but we decided to go with a painterly look on our characters and a bit less stylized look in the games environments.
3x 3D
By the fall of 2022 we had enough 2D concept and world building done to start filling permanent positions on our 3D pipelines for both 3D Characters, 3D environment and 3D world building. After a long list of interviews we were lucky enough to have Steffen Salte join the team as our lead 3D artist in the characters pipeline, Lars Vetle Johnsrud as lead 3D environment artist, and Aslak Kjølås-Sæverud as our 3D world builder and houdini artist. A few notice periods later and by christmas we were up and running with our awesome new team!
The programmer of all trades
Even though we had a very capable programmer in our team already we had already seen the amount of time needed on the programming side of the project to realize our hefty ambitions towards gameplay mechanics, player freedom and multiplayer functionability in an open world. By mid 2022 we had already come to the conclusion....we needed a dedicated lead programmer. The good news was that we knew a really good programmer already. The bad news was that he was already taken by the Norwegian Computing Center and we were heftily outgunned financially. So we had to do what all desperate suitors find themselves doing, we leaned on our charms and we pitched hard over a few slices of pizza. Having played games through his childhood and loving the idea of Eydigard, we got lucky landing our lead programmer; Vegard Kværnelv.
To create the authentic Norwegian medieval fantasy RPG experience we needed to create new Norwegian medieval fantasy RPG music. By the end of 2022 we had found the composer tasked with putting our vision into sound; Maren Selvaag. She had already made Norwegian medieval music on other projects and was familiar with many of the sound scapes needed in Eydigard.
We ended 2022 on a high. We had written a bunch of lore, we had fleshed out our game mechanics and the art style of our game, and most notably we had assembled an awesome team in all our production pipelines!
2023 - The year of production
We started 2023 with a huge backlog of characters, environments and biomes for the team to create in 3D and get in engine. Come april we had put together an alpha build with loads of characters, interactables and props in the first test area of the game. The basic multiplayer functionality was working, as well as the first iterations of our crafting and trading systems. Two years on we are well on our way with loads to go. We have a small motivated team and the basic features of Eydigard are working. Through the summer we are working towards improving combat, AI-brains, UI, new environments, new characters, new factions and more. In the next posts we will dive into what we are currently doing to improve the game and look more closely at the challenges being tackled in our respective pipelines.
Best regards,
The Frostisen Studio Team
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