Tahira - Drops Episodic Release Plan

In the most recent update, they've announced that they've decided NOT to release the game episodically. Tahira was initially publicized as a one episode game, as the team could not guarantee to potential backers that the funding received ($68,000 AUD) would cover a second episode or more. But the game has turned out to be longer than the 4-5 hours Whale Hammer Games promised (which is of course a good thing) and the team claims that "it would be a disservice to call [the game] an episode." Down the road, should the team choose to make a second episode or more, they want to draw out the development process and integrate improvement and feedback from the original release. That's why Tahira; Echoes of the Astral Empire will be released as a standalone title, no episodes or funky labels and whatnot.

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Development:

With all that discussed, let's run through a list of all of the things that have changed or improved since the last update.

Art:

All of the artwork for the environments has now been completed. This is a very exciting milestone for us, as the world of Tahira has now been fully realized. Pete is now spending his time polishing cinematics, the UI, adding animations where we think they'd look nice and will soon start working on some promotional art for Steam and other places.

Combat:

Combat is now system complete. Our stealth system, the ability to knock people off the edge of terrain, the AI and a huge number of other things are fully implemented. Now it's a matter of refining the rules that govern them and polishing the way you interface with them.

On Steam:

We now have a build running on Steam, which we're pushing updates to. It was quite a thrill to see Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire listed in our Steam Libraries. Tom will be looking at Cloud Saves and achievements in the coming weeks.

Save and Checkpoint System:

Tom is in the process of implementing this system fully. This will allow you to save mid-combat, a feature we really wanted to implement as it's a pet peeve of ours in some tactics games.

The game is content complete:

A big milestone for the whole team was when we got the game to the stage where the game is playable from the beginning to the end. There's a lot of polish and refinement still to be done, but it was a huge step for us!

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daveyd said:

Funny thing is I bet they would've raised more funds if they had announced this from the start. IIRC that was the main reason I didn't back it and I'm sure lots of people were turned off by the episodic model. However, I did like their pledge to not have filler / have unique battle scenarios and hope that is still the case.

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