Hello folks!
First of all – sorry that there was no update since June, It was holiday time and for us, it was quite busy, more about it You could read at the end of this post :) The update is also a little bit delayed because we had to finalize some agreements to be able to write to You about our new cooperations now!
What you will find in this update? :)
Today we would like to share with You some amazing images and pictures from great artists that we started to cooperate with.
We also would like to talk a little bit about what we have been doing for the last 3 months and what is game development progress.
We’ll share with you also few NEW environmental screenshots from The End of The Sun!
What’s more, we prepared for You -15% FOR ALL SUPPORT TIERS AND REWARDS on our webpage until The end of the Autumn! (read more at the end of this update)
“Zmora” – Amazing art isn’t it? (even if a little scary :) ) It’s made by Paulina Śliwa and because of our cooperation, You will be able to find more of her Slavic atmosphere art in our game. You could read more about it in that post :)
Almost 8000 players wishlisted The End of The Sun On Steam.
We are very happy that many players add our game to their Steam Wishlist every day!
For now, 7747 people added The End of The Sun to their Wishlists. Keep in mind that we even didn’t start proper game promotion so these are great numbers for the indie game like ours. (We are making whole our marketing on our own)
Wishlists are very important for the game release and We are aiming to get a minimum of about 15 000 – 20 000 wishlists before the game Release. So please if you haven’t added Our Game to your Wishlist yet You could do it below:
ADD The End of The Sun to Steam WISHLIST HERE. Please also share that update with Your friends :)
THANK YOU for your support!
Collecting wishlists is very important for small indie teams like ours. More people wishlist the game = more people will get single notification about game full Release. If You would like to help us even more You could click FOLLOW so You will get a steam notification about the most important updates about our game.
We hear Your opinion! Changes and improvements in The End of The Sun proposed by You!
First of all, We would like to talk a little bit about improvements and changes that we implemented or will implement into the game because of Your comments and opinions. :)
1. Additional paintings/ images to find in the game that will increase knowledge about Slavic Myths and sometimes will be connected to the storyline.
Your comments about the topic:
This is something huge! We established cooperation with 2 Artists (painters). Both of them create amazing images and specialize in paintings with Slavic myths, legends and creatures themes. You will be able to find these paintings in the game world, take a closer look at them and sometimes listen to “Ashter”(Zhrets) comments. What will be even more interesting is that some of the paintings will be connected to The End of The Sun game story!
We created a special shader (using Amplify Shader Editor that is an amazing tool) That allow us to put our artists painting into the game and automatically generate some burnt damage on it, as well we can modify its value in real-time. In addition, the shader that we created allows us to generate a “burning image effect”. You could see the effect on the video below :)
The effect Check out HERE:
The first artist that we would like to introduce to You is Paulina Śliwa.
The first artist that we would like to introduce to You is Paulina Śliwa. Paulina is an amazing artist. She is drawing and painting using mixed traditional techniques ( paints, brushes, crayons etc.) You will be able to find Paulina’s paintings when exploring The End of The Sun world. Her drawings inspired us also to improve some of the in-game puzzles and connect them directly with her paintings :)
You could see more of Paulina Śliwa paintings here on her Facebook page. Please leave LIKE on her fanpage to say additional thanks to her for sharing amazing pictures for The End of The Sun. Paulina is translating all her Facebook posts also to English so You could also read more Slavic myths and legends there. :0
Paulina shared many of her paintings with us so You’ll be able to find her paintings in The End of The Sun game. Say thanks to her and follow her Facebook :)
We are sharing with You only 3 pictures of Paulina here in that update, But trust us there will be more of it in the game :)
Many of Paulina’s paintings will be connected to The End of The Sun story. :)
You will be able to find these paintings in the game and take a closer look at them.
The shader that we prepared give us the possibility to change Photos of drawing into a little bit burnt but still shiny paintings in the Unity game engine.
The second artist that We would like to introduce to You is Maxim Sukharev
Maxim creates amazing and unique digital paintings. His art has a great unique style and spirit. For now, in The End of the Sun we will use only one of Maxim’s paintings, but trust us it will be really crucial for the game and You will be able to find it in few places in the game world.
For now, we don’t want to share that certain painting with You, maybe we will do that in one of the next updates, or we will wait until the game Release we will see. :)
Meanwhile, You could Check out Maxim’s Deviant Art profile, and follow him. He is an amazing artist and he is worth getting more attention from You!
It’s not the first time we cooperate with other artists! 
It’s not the first time we cooperate with other artists You could check out our game dev post about scanning real wooden figurines and put it into the game Here
2. Say Goodbye to “SOPHIE” and say Hello to “MIRA”
Yours comments about the topic:
Change or not change the name of one of the main characters of the game. That’s a good question. :)
Trust us it was a hard decision for us to make especially that we already have some voice acting with the name “Sophie” already recorded. After really long discussions we decided You (our supporters and community) are right. Sophia is a beautiful name but it has its beginning in Ancient Greece. It took us about 2 days of researching almost all Slavic names to pick the one to sound soft enough like “Sophie” is. It was a hard task as Slavic names used by women have a really strong tone.
At first, we choose the “Nadia” name as a replacement but it was too much similar to the name “Nadimir” (he is the second main character of our game, you could already meet both of the characters we are writing about on our 20 minutes gameplay here) so Nadia and Nadimir would make to much confusion because of big similarity.
This is why we choose the name “MIRA”. It’s connected to the Slavic word “mir” which means “peace” Mira is a short name from the name “Miroslava” which means “the person who praises the peace”. Also “MIRA” is a name that could be without big problems said (articulated) by a foreign person which was also very important for us.
Why “Ashter” not “Zhrets”?
What about “Ashter”, it is not a name, it is an English translation of the word “Żerca” (kind of Slavic sorcerer). This word was created by our team (when we started to work on the game there was no official translation for that word), and we have now some rights to use it. As we saw last time there already is an official translation of the word “Żerca” called “Zhrets” now but We’ll still keep using the word Ashter as in our opinion it sounds better and has a connection to “Ash” that was also used by Ashters(Zhrets) in rituals.
What else have we been working on in the last 3 months?
1. Finished and Polished storyline – in the storyline there were some elements that we weren’t 100% satisfied with. We finally fully organized the story and polished 95% of the dialogues. This was the biggest task in the last months. Writing story and puzzles design is the most creative element of game design (in our opinion) We had to do it slowly, hard to work 12 hours per day and still be creative. So we decided to work less per day (during the story writing job) to create better and really unique elements and it was a perfect idea! We finally did it!
2. Improved and changed some storyline elements connected with gameplay – When making video games it’s impossible to predict every small thing in the game design document. Finally, we connected and improved all puzzles in a perfect way with the storyline.
The story is one of the most important elements of The End of the Sun game. This is why we had to polish it even more. Now it’s fully organised and connected to gameplay elements.
3. Creating Next Cutscenes and missions – We are working on the next missions/stories and testing them. Unfortunately, there are many elements that we don’t have influence on which block us from faster progress and we can’t predict it. Mainly it’s connected to the game engine. Unity 3d is a great engine, but very often it has problems that have to be fixed by Unity developers directly and we can’t do anything else than wait until they prepare the fix. Of course in that time we are working on other elements of the project, but it’s something that breaks workflow and slows down development. It’s quite normal in game development. This is why so many Games move their release, cause there are many factors that You could do nothing about (or predict). Fortunately, we already finished all the main systems of the game and tested them. Fortunately, it seems that we have now a clear path to continue work on the next missions and cutscenes now. :)
Children of Water is one of the elements of the game that we have been working on the last few months (We talked about it in an earlier game dev blog post) We know we shared it a few months ago but we spend some time polishing puzzles connected to that as well we don’t want to share screens from other parts of the story for now.
4. Finishing the world locations design – We finished all locations of the game. (ok only one not designed but it’s not a standard location) In the last update, we mentioned that we have all 3d models ready. All that models needed to be placed in the proper way inside of buildings and other locations (this is what we call level design)
Locations design is one of the main things we have been working on for last months – “Spring near the River” – W.I.P Location
5. We finished environment design for 3 from 4 seasons of the year – What exactly is environment design? This is setting up on levels (scene) things like sticks, plants, grass, trees, mountains rivers, pounds etc. So because of that natural environment of The End of The Sun look more “natural” Only one person is behind that so it took us like 3 weeks of work already. It is like the whole game world to fill with objects and that job is multiplied by 4 (4 seasons of the year) so it was a huge job to do.
Great environment design is very important to create a unique atmosphere. In the screenshot you can see 2 statues of Veles (God of Underworld) You can see here part of the location that we don’t want to reveal for now.
“Apple Tree in the Autumn during sunset” – what could have more “Slavic” middle Europe atmosphere than that? :)
6. Finalizing look of all characters and 3d models optimizations – In an earlier update we mentioned that we already finished work on characters and that was true. The only problem is that we have to perfectly adapt characters textures to fit other characters. This is really important for us to all colours in-game perfectly fit each other. Also, we had to make optimization of character, we have to create something that is called LODs (Level of detail). It means that objects that you will see from far will be its simpler representation. It is crucial for game performance. All of it took us like 4 days to prepare. (We have quite a big number of heroes and their versions)
LOD (Level of detail) is huge optimization for in-game models. For example on that Gif, You can see the LOD of Nadimir character (middle-age) 3d model (At first LOD 0 it has about 20 000 triangles when on last LOD 3 it has only about 1000 triangles) because of that big optimization Your computer or console need less calculation power to run the game.
7. A Huge number of minor changes – We are making so many improvements and changes to the game that we even don’t remember what we have already done. (like for example last time we have been working on the possibility to move time in-game throw a few days not [like it was before] only inside one day range) We also don’t create any notes about every smallest improvement so we are writing updates about the most important things, but still, those minor changes take a lot of our time.
Things that we spend our time for but are not related to game development:
1. Making some side jobs to get additional funds – Overall, we work on The End of the Sun minimum of 10 hours every day ( but most days even more) 5-6 days a week in 2 people team. (Our programmer works from time to time if something special is needed.) Since Kickstarter almost 1,5 years passed and we need additional funds for our lives; this is why in this holiday we had to spend like 2 weeks on a side job to do and get some additional funds for our lives and further game development.
2. Some holiday time – After a whole year of hard work in coronavirus lockdown, we really needed some rest. We have been on some summer holidays for 9 days.
3. Things connected to taxes, agreements etc – unfortunately, there are things connected to taxes, preparing and signing agreements etc. that we have to do every year as everyone. Also, we had to prepare and sign agreements with artists (that we talked about in this update) what also took us some time. Big AAA Studios have departments and teams who are responsible for such things, we have to do everything on our own.
4. Writing that update and promoting the game. – Preparing that update was like 2 days + 1 day will be spent to promote it and write social media posts. Also promoting the game overall in the last 4 months took us for sure about 5 additional days of work.
Why we won’t write updates every month?
Many of You asked us Why we don’t create updates with “Hello we are alive and still developing the game. hmm ok…. Bye! :) “ to give You info that the project development is progressing. There are few reasons for that:
- We don’t see a purpose to give updates without important info. For simple “say Hello” to You we are using our social Media(_Facebook, _Twitter, _Instagram ) and Discord. These are good tools to post short info that does not spam your e-mail inbox. We are a small team so after 1 month of work, there is not so much to say especially that we can’t share like 90% of what we develop to not spoil storyline or game puzzles.
- Kickstarter Updates send notifications, so if we will share to You updates with info that nobody cares about like “We are still developing game everything is ok” few times per month, we are sure that 90% of our supporters will just start to ignore most Kickstarter notifications and updates about our game.
- Time spend creating updates is also a here crucial element – Even saying hello and sharing one screenshot from the game is something that will slow down game development. Sharing Updates is not only writing few words on Kickstarter but also posting it on all social media, steam, discord, then answering questions etc. So Sharing updates every month or even a few times per month will extremely slow down game development. There is a quite old saying in-game dev “If developers are not active on social media it means that they are working actually on game development” So smaller number of updates here is good for faster game development
Of course, If you have different thoughts about it just let us know in the comments :)
What with game Release? :)
Some of You asked us about the Release time of the game, and why we didn’t give info about the change of the game release date yet. The answer is short:
We wrote about it 2 or 3 times in earlier Updates. The Game release is moved to 2022 and You could read about it here in May Update also We wrote about it on our Kickstarter. This info here is just a reminder cause probably some of You just overlooked the e-mail notification from Kickstarter. To be up to date, please always check our game dev-blog. Also You could add Your e-mail to our Newsletter so we will send You info about the most important updates about the game. ( If You don’t use e-mail a lot You could follow our social media: _Facebook, _Twitter, _Instagram and get updates there)
Thank You for Your patience! All of you are very kind to us and You Understand that We need more time to finish the game, We are very glad that You prefer to wait a longer time but get a better-polished product :) We are very grateful for Your positive attitude!
If You have any question contact us on e-mail: e-mail: endofthesungame@gmail.com or visit our DISCORD SERVER where we could reply You directly and fast.
The new teaser that You may not have seen yet
In the last update, we shared New short Teaser of the game. If You haven’t seen it yet. You could check it out below. Remember to leave THUMB UP and comment . It will help us with promoting our game a lot. Thanks!
SPECIAL OFFER until the end of the Autumn!
Use code “SLAVICMYTHS2021” to get -15% for all support Tiers!
The End of The Sun Kickstarter has ended Successfully! Now, as the campaign is over, we can offer you to pledge via Paypal and still grab some of the special Kickstarter rewards!
The End of the Sun Team
