Lost Eidolons - Now on Kickstarter

Lost Eidolons is live on Kickstarter. The goal is 45K with 29 days remaining. Below is a video to introduce the team at Ocean Drive Studio.

Lost Eidolons is coming to Kickstarter on Wednesday, April 21st! The game is already fully funded and we're leveraging Kickstarter to build a larger community of passionate gamers to develop the game alongside! Please support our campaign.

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More information.

Hmm...didn't know it was live on kickstarter. What the hell backed.

Couchpotato said:

Hmm…didn't know it was live on kickstarter. What the hell backed.

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Thanks! Let me know if you or anyone reading this have any additional questions about the campaign or the game!

We're pretty excited, but also nervous. It's our first time ever doing Kickstarter for any of us in all of our years of working in this industry.

Yeah, backed as well. For now.

You mention in the KS pitch the game will consist of 27 "episodes" (which is "a major storyline battle, the events that occur at the camp during the unit management section, and the narrative elements piecing them all together").
That sounds (at first glance) fairly linear with no exploration or choice & consequence. Is that correct? It's a linear progression from one battle to the next? Does the battlefield change based on prior decisions, maybe?

At 1 hour per episode (playing casually) it's not the longest game, either.

They might need the money, but amateur game developers they are definitely not! I think its a safe bet to back this one as they appear quite able to convert the KS money straight into content with a good pace!

wiretripped said:

Yeah, backed as well. For now.

You mention in the KS pitch the game will consist of 27 "episodes" (which is "a major storyline battle, the events that occur at the camp during the unit management section, and the narrative elements piecing them all together").
That sounds (at first glance) fairly linear with no exploration or choice & consequence. Is that correct? It's a linear progression from one battle to the next? Does the battlefield change based on prior decisions, maybe?

At 1 hour per episode (playing casually) it's not the longest game, either.

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It is a fairly on-rails experience yes. In a way, this is more a tactical game than a strategy RPG in some senses, with a bigger focus on the narrative it's trying to tell rather than choices the player would have to make make and impact that it would have.

The game does have an additional ending route based on some decision making throughout the game's campaign, but ultimately the player's focus is on unit management and combat scenario problem solving, while taking in the game's story, rather than heavy-handed choices.

We'd been asked before if this was a choices matter kind of game and we elected to say no to that question. I think for us, if we were to make that kind of game, we'd have to commit 100% to it, and should we make a game where we offered players the illusion of choice but it had little to no real impact on the story, we'd feel we didn't really give a choice at all at that point.

@mercy; - Thanks! The plan for the Kickstarter funds is to add additional systems that wouldn't have been present in the base game. This includes a toggle for Permadeath for reaching the funding goal, and for stretch goals, an enhanced Hell Mode difficult with more challenging main scenarios (not just stat bloat) and a Debug Menu similar to that of Hades or DQ where you can adjust unique parameters to tailor your game experience.

@Farflame; - For some reason I can't answer your DM (I tried multiple times including trying to send a separate thread), but my response is yes to your inquiry!

That $25 pledge seems like a trap for unwary players (or ones who aren't good with English, as I see there's a Korean response in the comments already) - most kickstarters have an early bird package with limited numbers where you get the game for $5 or $10 cheaper if you get in early and get one. This one has an early bird package where you get beta access, but not the game (instead getting a $5 off code for the retail price?), and it's sitting in the usual spot you'd expect the full game early bird pledge to be in.

Avantre said:

That $25 pledge seems like a trap for unwary players (or ones who aren't good with English, as I see there's a Korean response in the comments already) - most kickstarters have an early bird package with limited numbers where you get the game for $5 or $10 cheaper if you get in early and get one. This one has an early bird package where you get beta access, but not the game (instead getting a $5 off code for the retail price?), and it's sitting in the usual spot you'd expect the full game early bird pledge to be in.

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Okay, if you read it that way, then I need to fix the wording. The $25 Early Bird includes the game; it's $5 off the Early Access retail price of $29.99 later this year.

Edit: You can't edit the wording of backer tiers after people have pledged, so I'll add the memo to the campaign FAQ. Damn it.

Avantre said:

That $25 pledge seems like a trap for unwary players (or ones who aren't good with English, as I see there's a Korean response in the comments already) - most kickstarters have an early bird package with limited numbers where you get the game for $5 or $10 cheaper if you get in early and get one. This one has an early bird package where you get beta access, but not the game (instead getting a $5 off code for the retail price?), and it's sitting in the usual spot you'd expect the full game early bird pledge to be in.

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That's how I read it too, I understood from this early bird tier is that you only get access to the beta since no "full copy" of the game included in this tier.

Backed. I tend not to be a big fan of very linear games but I'm willing to give it a try.

Saintone said:

Okay, if you read it that way, then I need to fix the wording. The $25 Early Bird includes the game; it's $5 off the Early Access retail price of $29.99 later this year.

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That's the way I read it. It would have been silly to not offer the full game, but a rebate of 5$, for 25$ instead of 30$. Seeing how popular the early bird package is, I suspect most people understood it this way, too.

By the way, what are your most important inspirations, behind this game?

vanedor said:

Backed. I tend not to be a big fan of very linear games but I'm willing to give it a try.



That's the way I read it. It would have been silly to not offer the full game, but a rebate of 5$, for 25$ instead of 30$. Seeing how popular the early bird package is, I suspect most people understood it this way, too.

By the way, what are your most important inspirations, behind this game?

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Some people did back the $30 package, so I DM'd them directly letting them know they could switch their pledge to the $25 and receive the same backer reward for $5 less. I'll probably do this for anyone who pledges the $30 tier until Early Bird copies are exhausted, if they do at all (we can't edit or remove tiers at this point after the campaign launched and people already backed them).

To answer your question, Lost Eidolons is made by people who just really enjoy strategy games and turn-based games or worked on them in their professional career. While it's obvious games like Fire Emblem had a striking influence on the making of many of the individual systems, it was with the caveat that we'd try to ground the world in a more western-influenced aesthetic as well.

This comes from two places. One, making this type of game with anime graphics would be a little too strikingly familiar. And two, the team wanted to try to make this style of game that would appeal to an audience that enjoyed strategic games of another leaf but within the same genre (Baldur's Gate, D:OS) or were a fan of graphics in media like The Witcher.

It's a mish-mash of those types of styles that's most familiar with people who see the game for the first time. But I'd also say the Creative Director has been partially influenced by his prior work on Romance of the Three Kingdoms: The Legend of CaoCao as well when it comes to individual game systems.

Onboard as well with a pledge of squire. Looks very interesting and fun so far.

Yeah that whole $25 pledge confused me as well. Glad to see it contains the game and was an early bird special. Anyway I was wary at first but the game updates sold me.

@Saintone

Quick question how long will the Early Access last, or an ETA for the full game? As one lesson I learned long ago backing games is don't believe the estimated dates.

Couchpotato said:

Yeah that whole $25 pledge confused me as well. Glad to see it contains the game and was an early bird special. Anyway I was wary at first but the game updates sold me.

@Saintone

Quick question how long will the Early Access last, or an ETA for the full game? As one lesson I learned long ago backing games is don't believe the estimated dates.

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Your skepticism is sensible given how many games get delayed nowadays.

The timeline for Lost Eidolons is Early Access by October 2021. Then open development with community though the end of the year. Target that we're working ourselves to the bone towards is early 2022 for full release (all 27 episodes and stated features), but we're giving ourselves up until Q4 2022 to make the game as perfect as we can, entirely contingent on success of the project during the Early Access phase, and how ambitious we want to get with extra content, and feedback from players.

There are more games that we want to be able to work on, so ideally we're not trapped in Early Access for all of eternity. Still, we have to take ample time, it can't be rushed.

It's a lot of headroom. But we'd rather be upfront about that then promise a hard deadline and not be able to meet it. Being early is a better surprise than being late.

Game had three more updates. This was the more interesting update.

Release Timeline, Physical Copy, and Fulfillment Schedule

Link - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oceandrivestudio/lost-eidolons/posts/3169394

Today we're talking a few campaign-related matters. As you can see by the title, we're going over the 1) release timeline for Lost Eidolons, 2) potential limited run physical copy of the game, and 3) the fulfillment schedule for your backer rewards. To start, let's go over the known and future timeline for the project.

• Lost Eidolons was announced to the public on Friday, March 26th.
• The Kickstarter campaign began on Wednesday, April 21st.
• The Kickstarter campaign ends on currently runs until Friday, May 21st.
• There will be a Windows PC beta testing period sometime between the end of campaign and Early Access, TBA. All backer tiers $25 and up have guaranteed beta access.
• Early Access is planned to start in October 2021.
• Early Access will run until Full Launch. During Early Access, we'll be regularly looking to collect feedback on Lost Eidolons in order to make updates that align with players' thoughts.
• Full Launch is planned for Early 2022, however, we're giving ourselves additional headroom of up to Q4 2022 at the latest.

This entirely depends on how successful the project is, and if Lost Eidolons gains a respectable amount of traction we'll want to spend more time polishing and potentially adding more features, which would require more development time, and could result in us delaying the planned release. We will target to complete by Early 2022 as we mentioned nonetheless.

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Also it has raised $21,649 of it's $45,000 goal with 23 days left.