Sakuraba & Ambe, Stretch Goals Reveal, and our Discord server!

First of all, thank you & merci for your support of our campaign on Kickstarter to help us make ALZARA Radiant Echoes a reality. We are so excited to be working on a love letter to any of the JRPGs we grew up with, and we are grateful to everyone who joins us on this journey.

In this first update, we are going to introduce two of our exciting collaborators, share our early stretch goals, and share the corner of the internet we’ve carved out to bring our community together: Discord!

Now, here's a bit of an intro for myself: Hello folks, my name is Colin! I am the community developer for Studio Camelia during our crowdfunding campaign. I’m the voice behind our updates and our social media, and I’m the admin of our Discord server! I’m very excited to help this team bring this project to life, and I’ll be here for the whole campaign to support the team and you: our community!

Now, without further ado, let’s introduce some folks you might recognize…

Introducing our composer, Motoi Sakuraba…

We are very excited to work with Sakuraba-san on the ALZARA Radiant Echoes score. We are huge fans of his work, and we believe the game will truly sing with his music backing our most powerful moments. Overcoming a powerful boss, visiting a peaceful seaside town, sacrificing something dear to bring peace… these memorable moments are found in many RPGs, but with the right music behind them, they can become something more.

As our campaign continues, we’ll have more to share from Sakuraba; he is prominently featured in one of our stretch goals!

…and character designer Yoshiro Ambe!

Our party comes to life with the help of acclaimed character designer Yoshiro Ambe! We wanted ALZARA to feel classic and even timeless, a throwback to the JRPGs of our youth. Thanks to Ambe’s work on Kayla, Adil, Hugust, and Nakheel (and others to be revealed), we feel that our core party could easily exist in 2024 or would be just at home in 2004 on a PS2. The party is the heart of our game, and with Ambe’s contributions, we believe our heroes will stand tall in the pantheon of RPG protagonists.

Stretch Goals

We are close to unlocking our stretch goals! With full funding right around the corner, let’s talk about what comes next! For anyone unfamiliar, Stretch Goals are higher tiers of additional funding that upgrade rewards, unlock additional in-game content, and more! (Social Goals are similar but focus more on building on our community and providing smaller upgrades for backers)

Our very first stretch goal is for English voice acting, specifically for our major cutscenes and for in combat! We’ll update our goals every week day and share progress through our social media, Kickstarter updates, Discord, and our newsletter!

We’re grateful for the support shown so far, and we have some fun goals ahead of us to unlock! We also want to add that console porting is not part of our stretch goals at any point. We plan to release on consoles, though specific consoles will be announced later in development. This gives us the opportunity to start conversations with potential platforms that could help us with additional funding, marketing, or other support for those console ports.

Say hello in our community Discord server!

We have a Discord server! We know what you’re thinking: why should I join this server???

Our server has a few fun benefits: We’ll have contests, giveaways, and Q&As with the team. We also kept it pretty small and straightforward, so you don’t have to navigate a billion channels and can go straight to the good stuff. We also intend it to be a great spot for JRPG fans to chat, with forums set up to discuss the classics or more modern titles.

We know folks’ server lists can get long and a bit unwieldy, so we wanted to ensure we earn a spot on yours by being straightforward and cutting out the cruft. You also won’t get ANY notifications you don’t want, except we probably do one or two “@everyone” for the big announcements. We get excited.

You can join the server here: http://tiny.cc/alzaradiscord

(For backers: Keep an eye out on a separate update very soon on Kickstarter with instructions on how to get your "Backer" titles in the Discord server!)

Don't miss out on Runa!

Runa is an adventure game inspired by modern and classic JRPG, with a turn-based battle system, social links and a story-rich science fantasy world.

Promising to keep intact what makes classic JRPG games fun, Runa also features elemental puzzles and base building, as well as minigames like farming, fishing, and cooking.

The campaign is ending soon, so don't miss the chance to support Runa! (Late pledges will also be after the campaign ends!)

Thanks to everyone for your support. This is just the first of many updates planned! We have interviews with our collaborators, deep dives into our world and gameplay, and some fun additional content that celebrates the culture and community around JRPGs.

Until next time,

💛 Colin & the team at Studio Camelia