Devlog #2 - Elyndra's Lore & Our Plans

Hello!

It’s been a crazy month for Quorum Games and Call of Elyndra. We’ve seen a lot of support, joy, and hope. We also received a lot of valuable feedback that needs to be introduced to our game.

This post is about our plans for the future. We’ll also talk about Elyndra itself.

Lore behind Elyndra, the village (light spoilers ahead)

Elyndra may look like a regular village at first glance… Second, third, fourth, and so on probably wouldn’t change much. For you, an inhabitant of The Empire, it’s a frontier village like many others. However, there’s a deep history in this place.

Elyndra hasn’t always been known as Elyndra. It used to be something grander - a municipality called Argentia. It was one of the grandest cities in the whole world. Unfortunately, it fell due to a disaster that obliterated the city and left very few survivors. Even though their home was wiped off the face of the planet, their life had to go on. They wanted to reestablish the city on the ruins of Argentia. It became Elyndra. One could say that the unbreakable will to survive and thrive of these people has become immortalized in the stubborn and resourceful inhabitants of the village.

Unfortunately, life there wasn’t what it used to be. Waves of emigration thinned out the population and from an almost city, it devolved into a town and then a mere village. With the people, the knowledge and memories also went. Gone were the great technological advancements and high culture. The descendants of those who stayed switched their focus to agriculture. Working the land became the main activity of Elyndrans. They were nowhere as sophisticated as their ancestors, but they could survive in this community.

Now, with the histories of old relegated to the status of mere myths and folk knowledge, Elyndrans live their simple lives. They are also aware of the old and mysterious ruins that lay nearby. Nobody knows what hides there.

Will you venture there and uncover mysteries thought to be lost to time?

Hopefully, you enjoyed that little bit about the lore. Now, let’s move on to the other part of the devlog.

Our plans regarding the game's development

We’re more or less a month past the game’s announcement and a week after the demo release.

We’ve learned a lot about how people perceive our game. It’s been mostly positive and it makes us quite happy. Our hard work wasn’t in vain and we’re looking with our heads held up high into the future. Still, there are some things we need to work on.

Three areas that universally demanded improvement were:

• The game’s performance.

• Movement and responsiveness of controls.

• Melee combat.

Our focus will definitely be on them. In order to see how our changes are perceived, we expect to update the demo build every few weeks and see what sort of feedback we collect. The reason why we opt for treating our demo a bit like a test build is that it contains most if not all inner workings that the game will have. Code, mechanics, and so on. This effectively means that while we still edit stuff in the engine and write code, we expect to focus on adding content to the game. New areas, monsters, graphics, so on.

In order to do that, we are about to modify some of our internal processes and switch our focus to adding content. We want to expand our team to make more content. The area that demands the most work to be done is animation. All of it is hand-drawn, pixel by pixel. The quality is great, but it takes time and loads of effort. Realistically speaking, we will be able to speed the whole process up and we feel quite good about that aspect.

Something else that demands a lot of work is the inherent stuff caused by RPG Maker, our engine of choice. The engine has a lot of great solutions in its vanilla form. Its big downside is that it is quite limited without customization. We knew that well, as plenty of our team members had worked in RPG Maker before. One of our goals is to create one of if not the most impressive RPG Maker game ever made. And we’ll need to navigate some uncharted waters to do that. Still, we’re quite confident in our ability to make the game as responsive, fluid, and pleasant to play as possible. These things are attainable.

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We’re about to finish this devlog. As this was only our second, we wanted to talk a huge part about the technical stuff. The future ones will likely be more about the lore and the art. Here’s a quick collage of some of the gifs that our gifted artists have made recently. Some of them are NPCs, some are monsters. All look cool!

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 2025 is going to be great!