Icy - A post apocalyptic Ice Age RPG
 

Hello to everyone, I’m here to introduce the game we’re working on, since we finally have some decent stuff to show around.

http://www.innervoid.net/web/wp-cont…a-titolo-1.jpg

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tl;dr overview of the game

Icy is a dialogue based RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world where a new Ice Age stormed our beloved planet. The player will be the leader of a nomads group and will have to take difficult decisions to survive against all kind of dangers. The game will offer a lot of dialogues and meaningful choices capable of affecting the plot, but also a survival gameplay that will allow the player to hunt for food, scavenge for items and fight against beasts, monsters and other humans.

Features

• Live a survival experience in a peculiar post-apocalyptic setting.
• Affect the plot with different choices, without moral dualism.
• Manage a group of survivors, each one with different needs, ethics and ideals.
• Scavenge for items and hunt for food to survive into the Frozen World.
• Enjoy hundreds of hand drawn artworks.

Long and possibly boring overview of the game

Icy will be a narrative and interpretative experience: the player will create his/her character and play through a branching story with a free gameplay, allowing for a deep and satisfying roleplaying experience.
Icy won’t appear so different compared to a visual novel and there will be a lot of common features, since the game will feature a narrative built with lots of texts and 2D images. But dialogues won’t be the only gameplay mechanic, because Icy is a game about survival in a dangerous world, where humanity is scattered and few in numbers. The player will be able to freely travel around the Frozen World moving his party on a map, which will also allow the player to hunt for food and scavenge in search for ancient treasures. Travelling is part of a nomad daily routine, but that doesn’t make it less risky since the world is full of dangers of any sort and quite often those dangers are born from other humans' actions and needs.
We worked to create a believable setting to let it be the core of all narrative and gameplay.

The world is in a permanent winter state and this have a lot of different consequences on human life. On a biological side humanity has evolved to live in temperate climate ecosystems and, thanks to the progress, has been able to adapt to different climates. But what happens when most of the progress you achieved just collapses leaving nothing but ruins behind? Our society depends on things like electricity, internet, roads or industries creating most of the goods we use in our life. But when the humans left on the planet are less than a million people and most of them are forced to live with a nomadic lifestyle, those things cannot just keep working.

A new society was born out of this context: nomad and sedentary people often interact to exchange resources. The nomads are able to find a lot of ancient relics when travelling around the world and scavenging the ruined buildings searching for pre-apocalypse useful objects is one of their primary activities, they have also the possibility to constantly hunt and gather some food, since without that moving they don't depletes all the resource in any single area. A nomad group can be composed of just five people, but bigger groups can go up to one hundred folks who survive thanks to their big herds which provides them meat and food. Those people needs to travel every day to find new pastures, since the harsh climate condition doesn't provide much food to their animals. On the opposite side, sedentary people usually have one or more resources to barter with travellers who visit them. Some settlements are completely self-sufficient and they trade their surplus goods, others heavily rely on trade to provide supplies to their inhabitants but usually have some important resource to trade, like weapons or tools.

Life is easier living in a settlement, but it's always a hard life. Sedentary people must work for most of the day and live in constant fear of being attacked, since the richness that lies in all the settlement lures all kind of bandits. Living as a nomad is even harder, because they struggle every day for survival and many dangers lie on their path: wild beasts, snowstorms, bandits. All nomad activities are characterized by an ever present danger: during a hunt a wolf pack can attack the hunters, the scavenger searching a building may die in a collapse, each night the temperature drops and without a proper shelter people may freeze to death.

Working on the game we have different goals:

• First of all, we want Icy to be a deep and consistent roleplaying experience, full of meaningful choices able to affect the plot. We didn’t create an ice apocalypse just to put tons of snow in all the artworks, we created it to be the game’s core. The main plot, the secondary storylines, the optional dialogues: all narrative elements are born from the setting and will perfectly fit in it.
• Our second goal is to create a long and rewarding experience. We created a particular setting and we need time to let the player enjoy it, that’s why Icy can’t last just a couple of hours. That wouldn’t even be honest, why should someone buy a short game where all the good ideas are just underdeveloped?
• Our third goal is to create an entertaining game. That means correctly balancing all the different elements to create something that the player will be glad to play, hopefully more than once. Frozen World will feature lots of dialogues, but having tons of long and boring dialogues won’t create a fun game, it will only let us brag about the number of dialogues in the game. Placing thousands of fight into the game won’t make it funnier, it will only make fighting something boring and cheap. Balancing between different features is of the utmost importance.

And now some artworks and images from the game.

Artworks


Screenshots


And we’ll try to be available for any kind of questions, criticism and insults! Especially insults.

I covered the game a few times under your old name Frozen world.

Link - http://www.rpgwatch.com/games/frozen…-703/news.html

So Good luck guys I hope you eventually finish work on Zaharia also.:handshake:

And I didn't even thank you? I'm such a horrible person. Thanks for all the support, I'm actually happy to see that someone covers us!

And it seems the name Icy isn't really nice, maybe the fact that we aren't native speakers (but don't worry, we have an editor) led us to the wrong choice.

About Zaharia, well, let's see how things proceed with this game. I'm quite sure that, if we'll be able to work on Zaharia again, we'll benefit from all the experience we made. Honestly speaking, maybe we weren't even ready to do something like that and it could have been just one of the many disappointing game coming out of Kickstarter.

I'm a sucker for cold environment settings, so I'm sure I'll be playing this at some point. The premise and goals are ambitious, and I wish you much success with the work ahead.

It's no problem do you plan to use kickstarter again, or is this one self funded?
I saw this mentioned on our site before, but it's better than Frozen World.
Based on my experience of covering various games you might be right about not being ready. Still it's nice to hear you guys might eventually go back to developing Zaharia.:)

Hey OwlNathan,

I'm looking forward to the game. From reading your dev diaries, it seems like your Innervoid and I are completely in agreement about what makes for a fun RPG.

It also seems like your English has improved since the Zaharia Kickstarter. There are a few very minor grammatical errors in your posts, but the type of thing I expect only a native English speaker would notice.

But my only criticism of the sample dialogue in the screenshots of your dev. diary is that it seems a bit formal… I would guess that the toughtest part about writing in a second language is not knowing many idioms / expressions in that language.

For a possibly not-so-great example: in the one screenshot someone says "…you can be sure of that." It's not incorrect or unclear as to what he means, but it seems a bit formal to me. Depending on the type of character saying it, it may be better for him to say some variation of "you can bet your ass." Seems more like the type of thing someone would say, and it gives the character a little more personality.

Also, I realize it is all a work in progress, but the way the screenshots currently look, it is hard, if not impossible to tell who is speaking. I wonder what your plan is: e.g., will the character's name proceed what they say or will you use some visual cue to make it clear who the speaker is?

As for the name, is it still possible to change it again? Perhaps someone here will have a great suggestion.

I don't know if you guys plan on doing trying Kickstarter again for Icy (I know it is a lot of work running / promoting a crowdfunding campaign)… But if you do decide to try it, I will likely back. I'll also do what I can to spread awareness of the game.

If you change again, describe your game with the title. Something along the lines of Frozen Apocalypse is good.

I can see the lead-in

Narrator: We thought we could tame nature and bend her to our whims. We were wrong. Nature fought back and won. This is the tale of the remnants; those who have survived the Frozen Apocalypse…..

"Dark White" comes to mind. A play on ice and dark ages. Best of luck! The art is gorgeous :)

We are self funded, but since we work in an awesome country where you pay corporate taxes even if you don't earn a single penny, and we would also like to perfectly polish the game, we're going to start an Indiegogo campaign soon, maybe even the next week.

This time with a reasonable target.


Yeah, honestly speaking we lacked the people and the experience to do Zaharia like we wanted to do. Maybe we could have managed to create a decent game, but I think that after writing more than a thousand page of setting details Zaharia deserve more than just being a decent game.

Right now we can count on a better team and if in the future we will have the funds, we're totally going to create Zaharia as good as it deserves.

Consider that the in-game texts will be checked by an editor. The last time we wrote everything in italian and then translated it, the result was a prototype with a bad english.
This time I said the italian counterpart of "Fuck the hell" and started writing in english, watching english or american TV series everyday without subtitles. And I think it helped, at least a little.

Our valiant editor already fixed lots of dialogues, but we didn't use the revised texts to take the screenshots. This time we hopefully won't release something badly written.

Well, it's actually pretty clear once you see it in action. The character on the left side is your character (and you will be able to choose a different face, and a different gender too), while the one on the right is the one that's currently speaking. If there is no avatar on the right side, the storyteller is describing something.


We're going to start a survey soon to decide two names: a serious name for the game and a retard one. We'll create a special version of Icy for the retard one (but don't worry, we won't spend money to do that, there will be only minor changes).

So, if anyone has good or funny suggestions, feel free to post them. I'll take the best ones and place them in the surveys.

Sadly we live and work in Italy. And that's sad not only because Berlusconi keeps hanging around the parliament, but also because there no way to access to KS without having a company in another nation, like we previously did for Zaharia with an english LTD. But this time we're working with a low budget on a less ambitious project and we couldn't afford to keep the LTD open (we're speaking of at least 12'000$ of yearly costs).
That's why we're going to use Indiegogo. We'll have less visibility, but at least we were able to save all those money and put them into the development.
Anyway, we're going to start our campaign soon and expect the game to have a honest price.

Thank you for all the replies OwNathan, and I will gladly cover your new game when it launches on Indiegogo. Once again good luck with your new game.

I'll be always available to spend some time in RPG communities, I'm a RPGs lover and it's nice to discuss with people that actually understand how a RPG should be made. We unleash the PR man on the less interesting communities, mostly because I don't have time and interest to answer to questions like "Is it going to have a competitive multiplayer?" or "Is it a MMORPG?".

Not that I want to insult anyone, but at least here I get some good questions.

I like "Frosty". Cheers me up. Good luck

Yep. My favorite gaming environment. Probably a day one purchase. However, this game looks like its at least a couple years from release date so I refuse to get too excited this early.

Ahem. http://www.universalsite.org/communi…ccine/look.gif
The programming work on the core was finished a month ago and the programmer is now polishing everything. The writing is almost done and most assets are ready. We actually think to release the game in 2-4 months, according to the Indiegogo's outcome, so there isn't much time to wait.

Let us know when you have a youtube video up of the gameplay.

2 to 4 months???????
OMG

Anything under 9 months puts the game squarely on my radar.

My apologies, now I am excited. I would love to be snow gaming during the summer months in the high desert in So Cal.

Good to hear I look forward to playing the finished game sometime this year then. Hopefully nothing goes wrong with your Indiegogo campaign as you said.

I interviewed a developer this year, and he had a few tips. I'll list them here.

1. Be professional – there is nothing worse like making a feeling that you don’t really care about the project and that you have got no idea if you are able to complete it or how to do it.
2. Be transparent – tell directly about your own and your teammates skills. Don’t try to hide your cons, if you feel that you need extra money in your budget, just for case of something, tell this.
3. Be devoted – make sure you really want to spend your whole time just to finalize the project. People will feel this.
4. Make good videos and provide good descriptions – this is something what makes the first impression when people finally land on your page. Now you just need to grab them and persuade them to trust you.
5. Be honest – think about the project and ask yourself about the project before launching it. It is sometimes better to show it to 10 people and eventually improve or change the design, rather than wasting a month with an unsuccessful campaign.
6. Be realistic – calculate the needed funds wisely. Check how much you need to spend for various things, including payment fees, taxes, etc.

We'll have something ready the next week and I will surely post something here and update the OP.
Sadly we didn't have the chance to share the game before, because we needed to properly finish stuff like the UI or the world map to have something nice to share, but we will soon finish the game.

Thank you very much.

This time we prepared way better than the last time. There's no shame in admitting that we were unexperienced (and that we worked with an asshole too), but now we have all the fundamental core figures in our team and they're all good and reliable people. And, of course, Icy is something easier to do compared to Zaharia.

As soon as I'll have something more I'll post it right here, something like the new indiegogo video with my ugly face and my terrible acting. So prepare for it, it won't be a nice view.

Makes sense. Have you guys decided whether or not you'll do the "fixed" or "flexible" funding campaign? I would strongly suggest you choose fixed funding. I think part of the reason Indiegogo is not as popular as Kickstarter is the stigma of flexible funding (many people are probably unaware they even offer fixed funding as an option). Flexible funding kind of implies "We really need X amount of money to properly finish our product, but we'll take whatever we can get…" So it does not inspire much confidence.

As soon as you launch your Indiegogo campaign, be sure to post an update about it through your Zaharia Kickstarter. I'm sure a lot of the 720 people who backed Zaharia would be interested in backing this game, especially once they realize that the success of Icy may allow you to finish developing Zaharia one day.

People had made a few suggestions in this thread. I think rjshae's suggestion of Boreal is pretty good.

Other suggestions that I just pulled out my ass (I'll let you decide if any are good, funny, or just retarded):

Cryosphere
Permafrost
Hypothermia
Wintertide
Arctic Times / World / Land
Season of Death
Frostbite
Polar Night

Everwinter (possible trademark concerns)

And if you really like bad puns:

Apolarclypse

We'll totally do a fixed funding campaign, we need just a few money to fully complete Icy, but anything beyond the target goal will be directly invested in the game, allowing us to take more time to check what we already have and place even more contents inside Icy.
We will. I don't want to violently spam Icy around, but it is true that Zaharia will be developed as soon as we'll have enough money to properly do it, so funding Icy people will not only have a (hopefully) good RPG to play, but they will also help us gathering the resources we need to create Zaharia as it should be created.