Balrum - Kickstarter Updates #1-4

The Balcony Team has posted a few updates for it's kickstarter game Balrum. So lets get started as we missed a few updates.

The first update is called, "About us and Balrum".

Since we are an unknown developer team we felt that we need to talk about ourselves a little bit. After that we will talk about Balrum too so hang on!

We are two greenhorn game developers who want to create an RPG that is not your typical RPG game and cannot be categorised so easily. Did I mention greenhorn? Yes, you need to start somewhere. We started to work on Balrum about two years ago. We created a custom engine because we wanted total control over our game and also we wanted to learn how things work inside a PC. The result is and engine that has low system requirements and is flexible enough for us to implement things pretty fast.

Next we have a new video.

Time for a little video update!

In this video we use our dev powers to create interesting situations in the world! Spawning spiders and wolves!

Up next they talk about modding and new rewards.

NEW REWARD. EARLY BIRD! Digital downloadable copy of Balrum: DRM-free for PC, Mac, and Linux. (you get the game for all platforms) Get the game for a special early bird price!

NEW REWARD. EARLY BIRD! (All previous rewards) and you get everything listed in the LORE reward, but for a special early bird price!

NEW REWARD. LORE: (All previous rewards) and your name will be inscribed on one of the worlds objects. This object might be a painting, book, statue, armor, weapon, letter, recipe, stone tablet or something alike.

Modding: We cannot guarantee that we will have modding tools at launch, but modding is something that we really would like to support! The editor that we wrote for the game is somewhat human friendly now, but it is certainly not ready for the masses. This means that after we release Balrum there is a good chance that we will be able to work on getting the editor in shape!

Translation: We support translators, they will be able to translate the games text. It will be simple to start translating because only xml files need to be altered.

More information.

wow, that actually looks pretty cool. It reminds me of the Eschalon games in the graphics and general look, except this game world seems much more alive and interactive. I'm impressed.

Yes I'm quite impressed as well. It looks Indie-nice, and the focus on crafting and building adds something unique. I'm backing this. Early bird level for now, but I may crank it up later.

Originally Posted by GhanBuriGhan
Yes I'm quite impressed as well. It looks Indie-nice, and the focus on crafting and building adds something unique. I'm backing this. Early bird level for now, but I may crank it up later.

Aargh! They got me!

Pledged for the early bird offer as well

Backed. These guys broke through my recent Kickstarter fatigue. No easy trick there. I was feeling pretty done with Kickstarter.

Originally Posted by GhanBuriGhan
Yes I'm quite impressed as well. It looks Indie-nice, and the focus on crafting and building adds something unique. I'm backing this. Early bird level for now, but I may crank it up later.

That was exactly how I went … backed at Early Bird level, did a news bit on Gear Diary and will just keep an eye out from here …

I might have to back this.

What I didn’t like about Balrum (and in Eschalon series) was the turn based combat system. Don’t get me wrong. I love turn based combat. But with party control and action points. From what I saw from Balrum’s presentation, there’s only one player and you can only move one square in a time. There’s no action points, just like Eschalon. Lack of these really kills the tactical aspect of the combat, and honestly it’s no different than WoW style MMO combat. So the player thinks (at least me), what’s the point of turn based then.

I hope other role playing aspects of the game will be strong enough to save the game.

I'm unsure if they'll make it, but the fact they added the early bird tier helped push quite a few people over the fence. I'm glad they finally put it up, at first they refused when I talked to them about it, they were reluctant but eventually changed their mind fast enough I think.

About combat and different skills having their use. Its not set in stone but at the moment they plan to make it so the "thougher mobs" / "bosses" will learn some about you as you become more known and may adjust to your fighting style to some extent. So if you only ever used Fireball, lightning strike or whatever may suddenly become quite useful.

Looks pretty promising - nice graphics, good ideas, and they seem like they know what they're doing - may drop $50 on this.