Friday, September 29, 2017

User Stories: 6 Eyes Studio - I left EA 2 years ago to work on my own game

I left EA 2 years ago to work on my own game: a tactical RPG with great pixel art and lush hand-drawn battle maps.  After more than a decade working in the video game industry, the last 4 at EA, I decided it was time to do away with "non-compete agreement employment" and I quit my job to follow my dream and start working on my own game. 




Together with my wife, a kick-ass pixel artist, we set off to create Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a story-driven tactical RPG aiming to bring back the glory days of Final Fantasy Tactics and the like. Today, we're both developing Fell Seal on a full-time capacity and making awesome progress. 

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is a turn-based tactical RPG set in a fantasy universe, with a touch of steampunk. We're focusing on a mature story and dialogues, an intricate and vast class system and solid core gameplay. The game is a mix of lush fully hand-drawn environments with carefully crafted high-res pixel art. 

The gameplay aims to be as faithful as possible to timeless classics like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, but brings in its own set of improvements and additions, such as improved UI, a novel items system, potent visual character customization and lots of exciting abilities (to name but a few!).

The maps feature various types of terrain and elevations, which allows for more options and crafty play during combat. For example, tossing a unit that can't swim into water is going to yield pretty potent results...

Our artist decided she needed to draw a ridiculous amount of clothing for characters, so we created a system that lets you customize the visuals of your units from a very large array of portraits, outfits, skin colors, hats, hairs, accessories, eyes, etc. All with many color options. With this system, none of your units are going to feel generic (unless that's your thing).

This makes for as large and varied an army as you fancy it... You can set up all your units in the camp view, which allows you to change their gear, abilities, class, etc as well as craft new gear and items. You'll also be able to unlock secret classes, on top of the 20 core classes.


The game focuses a lot on the story, which is told via in-game cutscenes in a mix of the style of games like Final Fantasy 6 and Tactics Ogre.

We launched our Kickstarter for Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark 2 days ago and we're 15% funded at this point.

Fell Seal has an incredible amount of at put into it (we're up to about 80,000 individual sprite frames at this point, which is a staggering amount), so we've been relying on the help of a few awesome contracted artists to make sure we can both keep the quality high and the timeline as lean as possible. The Kickstarter will allow us to keep using their vital services and aim for a Q3 release in 2018.

We're off to a good start on Kickstarter and the community there has been awesome. We hope you're liking the style of our game and will consider supporting us on Kickstarter!

Feel free to post any questions you might have (preferably about the project, but anything else works too, lol)! We'll be happy to respond!

6 Eyes Studio

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