RE: International Society - Free DLC: Mali Mystery and Dev Article

Mali Mystery

Since our release in September we have had a very positive response by a community full of Renowned Explorers. For us developers it's great to be in the forums when people are so appreciative of the game we've been working on so hard. And many of you are helpful in making the community a nice place. This response inspired us to expand upon the game with a new expedition, available now as a one-time free DLC, which is automatically downloaded.

You'll find the Mali Mystery is a level 2 expedition. This means it's available as a choice right after completing your random starter expedition.

Except for this large content boost, we'll be updating the game with smaller updates every two weeks for the rest of 2015. These will focus on balance, but might contain new secrets and adventures too

You'll meet new characters and discover fresh adventures and treasures in a set of new environments in Mali.

On top of this we've added Leaderboards. You'll find them in the main menu. They'll show a list of all your own campaigns, both successful and failed ones. But what is more interesting to aspiring World Famous Explorers is that you can now also compare your best scores with the best scores of your Steam friends. Time to start thinking about your optimal strategy with Ivan!

Now, it's time to start discovering all the new mysteries in Mali. We hope you'll enjoy it! If so, please consider writing a positive review and leaving a comment in the Community Hub. That always helps and shows us we should do this more often

Go find yourself some treasures, explorer!

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Price of innovation

Innovation is one of those things that always seem right, especially in a creative point of view. Why would you not try to find a new and exciting place for games to go? There's a limitless amount of experiences untouched by our beautiful medium, and even more directions you can take with them! A good and unique game will always find an audience, you hear often. It might be hard to make it a good game, but if you believe you can, it's worth it. Right?

In this piece, I want to use a game I was the creative lead for at Abbey Games, namely Renowned Explorers: International Society, to point out some costs attached to innovation. They're all pretty logical, but it's easy to ignore them when you're enthusiastic about your new invention!

Background

Abbey Games created our first game Reus in 2013, which was a huge success. We then went on to create a new project: Renowned Explorers: International Society (RE:IS). The vision of RE:IS was to pick a fun theme (Verne-esque explorers), create an innovative game in a niche (strategy), full of character and with a feeling of global scale. Besides that, we had to keep the technical vision of Abbey Games in mind: using our technological knowledge to create new opportunities.

RE:IS is an strategy adventure game, which you could describe as a mix between Indiana Jones, choose your own adventure, and X-COM:Enemy Unknown. You choose a group of 3 adventurers, all with their unique skills, and go out to find great treasures in order to become the most renowned explorers.

It features three layers of gameplay - tactics, exploration and preparation - which all influence each other. Conflicts are solved through a tactical game, where your abilities can also be verbal actions. We call this Attitude-based gameplay. You can be aggressive by using normal combat, devious by bullying your opponent into submission, or friendly by making friends of them. Your approach will break their will to resist you (spirit) until they are convinced (by feels or force depending on your choice). You can also switch between the approaches with different results and reactions, as they're all tied to the same system (Which Nikhil Murthy picked up and explained better). In short, you can seduce a group of mummies or fight them, all in the same tactical "combat".

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