Dev's Blog: Boreas Demo!

For a year now, our small team has been joining the ranks of indie developers and working on a game that we'd love to play ourselves.

Today on itch.io we released a test demo of Boreas! So we want to tell you what projects we took on and what came out of it.

French Revolution

Back then, we were all about creating a strategy game about defending city districts from an advancing army in the style of the French Revolution. The enemies were approaching with cannons and cavalry, and the player defended themselves using barricades.

We even came up with two character’s concepts: wooden toys and tin soldiers.

In about 1.5 months, we put together the first prototype, played it, and realized that something was missing. Although the game looked interesting, we needed to add either barricade construction or the ability to engage in battles inside buildings; otherwise, the game would quickly become boring. At that point, motivation within the team hit rock bottom, and everyone lost interest in the project. But we decided not to give up and try something else.

Square-Pigs Steal the Show

That's when we decided to shrink the playing field and introduce various buildings. We replaced the French Revolution with a cattle yard, where animals defended the farm against aliens. Our initial idea was to have defense without close combat and fortifications, but we encountered difficulties with balance. It either turned into a fast-paced tactical shooter or overly drawn-out positional standoffs. In the end, the gameplay looked as if someone had decided to play chess on a calculator.

Oh, and we created cube pigs, which turned into a bit of a meme.

We quickly realized that the initial idea simply wasn't working, so we started brainstorming a completely new project. The brainstorming phase lasted a while, with many ideas on the table, but none of them grabbed us enough to dive in. So, we compiled a list of the team's favorite games, extracted 5-6 interesting concepts from them, and voted to choose one that everyone liked. We wanted to create a small game to avoid it dragging on for years. That's how we arrived at an adventure game with a ship, similar to Far: Lone Sails, but with resource management instead of puzzles. Simple yet beautiful. And that's when the development of Boreas began.

Relaxing Trade Simulator

The new project took about half a year to complete. During this time, we tried a lot of things, even changed the concept of the game (yup, again).

Our main character? Just an old man, decked out in a yellow raincoat. Don't ask us why sailors popped into our heads with that image. There aren't many yellow raincoat-wearing sailors on the internet, so where we got that stereotype from, who knows?

The visual style was quickly decided: calm, simple colors that reminded us of Tomm Moore's works, especially "Song of the Sea". But the real challenges came with the water and the ship itself. Even though we had islands in the game world, players spent most of their time sailing, so the water and the ship had to look as cool as possible.

We had to strike a balance between realism and a unique style to make it believable while fitting into our game's world. Tricky, but we nailed it in the end.

Yep, there were problems with the water

The most time-consuming part? The ship. Exactly. It started as a tiny boat and grew into this massive steamship that needed regular fixing through mini-games.

Then, out of the blue, we had this idea of a seagull-mailman in the game. We wanted something a bit quirky, not just your average mailbox. Plus, we're bird lovers, so adding a seagull felt like the right move. We have stickers with seagull on Discord btw, so join in!

In July, we set up a page on Steam. The game's prototype was already somewhat playable, with just a few tweaks needed for the mini-games and economy. The trailer release and positive feedback on social media boosted our team's morale, so we started working even harder.

We had planned to release the demo in September and participate in Steam Next Fest in October. But... come the end of August, we suddenly realized that we could make the game much more engaging. We wanted players to be more immersed in the sailing experience rather than just planning and inventory management.

Mini-Races and Demo

Instead of trading simulator, we've made ship races. Now the main goal is to get to the island faster than the others. There is a map on the ship, on which you can choose the route yourself and see what weather conditions you have to sail through. Now in the demo version there is only a mini-race, but in the future the game will have more content.

Thanks for reading! Share your opinion on the demo, it will help our team get to the next level!