The Way of Wrath - Progress update + Shaman Origin Story

We have a lot of great news to share with you!

Our team has grown! An awesome new developer has joined Animmal Studio.

Hi! My name is Tamta Asatiani. I’m the new developer. Very excited to have joined the team, I’ve never worked on such a cool, big project before. And my teammates are amazing as well! I will try my best to make the game experience as smooth, amazing, and bug-free as possible for all of you : ) I’m very passionate about programming. If you’d like to check out some of my work, you can do so here: Github: https://github.com/tamtaasatiani Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamta-asatiani-7506512b8/

As you can imagine, it takes a rare mindset, a lot of passion, and resourcefulness to successfully tackle a giant RPG game like ours with a tiny team and persist through all the challenges on this road. And with Tamta, we truly believe we’ve found a person like that! Someone who shares our passion for games, a deep love of the craft, and the dedication and stubbornness to make something truly great. In a short time, she has already made a large impact on our project, bringing new knowledge and ideas, finishing features, writing new ones, and delving into major code architecture improvements. We’re very happy to welcome her to our team!

With a dedicated developer joining in, the development pace has really picked up, and we now have a very clear and well-defined path to not only complete our very ambitious, large game, but also to craft something we’re very proud of and excited to share with the world!

Since a lot of things are now happening in parallel (yay!), we decided to structure the progress update accordingly.

Technical Development

There is a saying in game dev, "The last 10% is the 90%." And oh boy, does it reflect well on all the hard work needed for things to be "really finished." We’re happy to say that two large features, the item crafting system (including item upgrades, repair, and dismantling) and the Exploration Mastery System (a special, unique exploration skill system we’ve designed for The Way of Wrath), have been finished, polished, and bug-fixed.

We’ve worked on a whole new, more elegant objective and quest system that will save us a lot of time during quest QA.

We’ve made some new tools to produce cinematics and story scenes faster, where our art director can build complex sequences without needing coding support. This means we’ll be able to create more cool animated scenes for our story!

Long development, especially indie development, accumulates something called "technical debt." It’s all the loose bits and pieces and code spaghetti that build up through rushed demo work, tackling new things without knowing better, or through natural iterations and changing project requirements. Ughh... I know. But rather than sweeping it under the rug and hoping in vain that we won’t pay for it with endless hours of bug hunting, we’ve begun restructuring some of the more suspect pillars of our code architecture using well-tested coding patterns. Hopefully, it will pay off with a smoother, bug-free experience!

Art & Content

We began our previous update with these words:

"The visual identity of the game has undergone a massive evolution. After a series of overhauls and relentless iteration, we have finally achieved what we consider the definitive look for The Way of Wrath."

But actually...

Once again, the visual identity of the game has undergone a massive evolution. After a series of further overhauls and relentless iteration, we have finally achieved what we consider the truly definitive look for The Way of Wrath.

Jokes aside, we’re really excited about the new visual identity and level design. We’ve made great breakthroughs in our level design especially. We now have areas that feel very natural and grounded, while at the same time making you want to keep going to see what's around the next bend. We’re also able to infuse more visual identity and artistic believability into locations, where you can form relationships with nature and landmarks, and intuitively understand why some inspire special significance to the characters who live there.

This is something we’re very excited to share in great detail in upcoming updates.

Besides visual improvements, we’ve been able to greatly improve game performance and optimization, with the game now comfortably playable in 4K on our development machines. There’s still a lot more work left on that front, but we’re already in a good place.

Design & Story

Our next big feature to polish and finalize is combat! In preparation for that, we’ve gone over the entire combat design, improving our skills, formulas, status effects, and combat tools.

We’ve built an internal story wiki. RPGs take a long time to make, and like gameplay, stories and characters evolve through the development process. Game development is a living, breathing, ever-evolving process. Building a formal wiki was a great chance to re-examine each character, piece of lore, and historical event we’ve crafted for the game and make sure it all reflects our current vision. It’s also very inspirational to dive into all the ideas the team has come up with over the course of development, and we’re hyped to jump back into crafting more quests and stories for you to experience.

What’s Next ?

A lot of cool stuff! We’ll be finalizing and polishing the combat system, finishing the main campaign world map, and writing dialogue for all the quests you find in the prologue chapter. And much, much more!

We’ll also be recording a video dev diary where we want to show off many visual improvements and the new gameplay.

But before that, we have a little story to tell...

The Story of how Thein Shamans came to be

There was a daughter of the village of Thein. She was brave and true to the path. One night she was hunting in a forest near her home and she came upon a group of raiders. They had slaughtered her folk and her lover, and made merry with their supplies. She revealed herself to them, pretending to be a lone warrior eager to join a new pack. They saw her strength and welcomed her into their midst.

The daughter was patient and wise. She traveled with them, fought alongside them, and slaughtered them one by one by cunning and deceit, until the few that remained grew wise to her plan and challenged her. The battle was grim and bloody. In the end, they all fed the earth, but the daughter too felt the bite of their blades.

She mustered her strength and set out on the way home. The path was hard, the game scarce, and the land barren. The daughter grew weak with the passing of each day, until she was unable to hunt or find wood for the fire. She knew she would die soon, so the daughter used the last of her strength to find a tree to climb and die in. At least there she would not rot in the ground and could join the sky.

An eagle had a nest in that same tree. It was a wise old bird, and it pecked open the belly of the daughter and found a boy and a girl inside. The eagle took the children to his nest and took care of them. The children grew strong and cunning, and they learned from the wise eagle the old forgotten ways of the sky.

The eagle grew old and called the children to its deathbed. To the boy it said, "You shall take my wings for your crown, and the creatures of the sky will know to follow you and heed your commands. You shall also feast upon my heart, where I have locked away the ancient secrets and the wisdom of the world." To the girl it said, "You shall take my eyes and nothing will remain hidden from your sight. You shall also take my talons, where I have hidden all of my fury and wrath, and with them all your enemies will know fear and terror like they have never known."

The children did as the wise eagle told them. They left the nest and prepared to return to their kind. They came upon a tribe plagued by many evils and lost to the true path. The children felt pity for the tribe and swore they would make it strong and bring it back to the path of the Thein.

They gathered the folk of the tribe by the shadow of the great mountain and bid them share their woes. An old healer came forward, fell on his knees, and told a terrible tale. Death had haunted the tribe at every turn. Hunters would stumble and fall to their deaths, children would die of sickness, and the wounds of warriors would fester and resist all manner of healing.

The girl looked through the eyes of the eagle, and the world of spirits and dreams was made visible to her. Many wonders it held, but at the edge of the village she saw that which froze her heart. Ravenous and terrible, death itself thrashed and gnawed at the edge of the mountain, unable to step on the mountain soil for it was blessed by the sky.

The girl took the talons of the eagle, and a terrible fury overcame her. She stepped off the mountain and charged death with a fearsome battle cry. For seven days and seven nights, the girl and death were locked in a terrible battle. They tore at each other, and the fury of their blows shook the mountains. Finally, death's fury was spent, and the girl stopped her attacks to learn the reason for the tribe's woe.

The villagers had broken the ancient custom which said only the worthy Thein would be given to the sky while the rest would be fed to the earth. They had hung all their dead upon the trees, starving the earth and suffering death's wrath.

The girl gathered the tribe and sat in judgment. She took the most wretched and unworthy of the tribesmen and made great sacrifices of them. She fed the earth their flesh and their blood until its hunger was sated and death's fury no longer haunted the tribe.

So the girl became the first Yarbogha, the guide between life and death and the great judge of the Thein. The unworthy and the wretched came to be known as Earthbound, for it was their fate to feed the unquenchable hunger of the earth.

Once this was done, the boy asked the tribe what other evil had befallen them. This time, the warchief came forth and told the tale of his woe.

TO BE CONTINUED

Ok, we lied, it wasn’t little. But hopefully, you enjoyed it!

Thank you for keeping us company on this long journey, and there will be more cool stuff in the next video dev diary!

Cheers, - The Way of Wrath team