Happy Earthblade Reveal Trailer day!! (And also Game Awards day, for those who celebrate) If you haven't seen it yet, watch the trailer before you read this newsletter! The entire team is SO excited to share it and so proud of what we've made.
We've been talking to Geoff Keighley of the Game Awards about doing a reveal at the event for a while now, and this year the planets aligned for it to finally happen! Thank you Geoff and TGA team for giving us this opportunity to introduce Earthblade to a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't hear about it. We're nervous and excited to see the reception it gets!
Please share your thoughts with us on Twitter or Mastodon, on our Discord or in the video comments on YouTube 🙂 we genuinely love reading feedback and reactions to our work. We're also planning a livestream on Twitch for Monday- we're taking questions ahead-of-time for that on social media, and it'll be a fun hang out with the team where we answer questions and talk about the trailer with y'all.
When we did the original Vibe Reveal for Earthblade we made sure to mention the game's "seamless" world. But reading the word isn't really the same as seeing the free-roaming, dynamically-loading map in action. We thought very hard about the best way to show off that central element.
The result is this long panning shot across different areas, with Névoa (the player character) showing up repeatedly, engaging in several different actions that players will take part in as they explore.
In our original plan for the teaser, this panning shot was much shorter and was only to be used as the finale to a much more typical indie game trailer. But we found it so engaging and time-consuming of an idea that it quickly swallowed up almost the entire runtime.
We think that this "seamlessness" will likely be Earthblade's defining feature, and it is related to why we hesitate to call this game a 'Metroidvania'. It does feature character growth and progression - your moveset is not static as in Celeste - but structurally it doesn't feel quite right to promise something that fits nicely in line with those storied Metroids and Vanias. Maybe we're just too close to it, or overthinking it… or maybe it will drift nearer to that archetype as development continues. Regardless, we still stand by our 'explor-action' classification for now.
And of course we amended our release year from 202X to 2024 - after previously hoping to have it out in 2023. No one wants to release this game as soon as possible more than us, but this just feels realistic considering the scope of the game and where all of our lives are at right now.
Thank you for your patience, and thanks for watching our little teaser and being excited about our game! This is one of those dream projects that we can't believe we have the resources to actually make. It has been a long process and we have a lot of work ahead of us. But even before seeing the reactions, I can say that making and releasing this trailer has given us a big morale boost and made the game feel a lot more real and finishable. There is a light at the end of this long tunnel, it turns out.
Have a wonderful holiday season everyone, and stay safe out there!
-Maddy ♡
