Playtesting...
Hey guys!
It's been a while since I last made one of these updates, so I wanted to let you know what I've been up to! First and foremost, I'm working on my next game: Ker Nethalas: Into the Midnight Throne. I haven't officially announced it or anything like that but I've been working on it for over two months now, and I'm extremely excited about it. I took a step back and decided that I needed to create something faster to get into, a game that could be recommended to all those people curious about solo games. And what better game than a dungeon crawler? Ker Nethalas is just that: you are thrown into a necropolis, and you gotta try to survive the many horrors you'll encounter there. Of course, this being a Blackoath game, it has TONS of character customization and progression, randomly generated areas, events, and magic items, a pretty large bestiary with detailed combat actions for each one of the creatures in it, and a rogue's gallery of 10 bosses for you to try to defeat. All in a suitably grimdark setting, of course. The game's almost written, and I've been playtesting it for a few weeks now, and having a blast at it. It has the best combat system I've ever written, and the exploration is super fun and satisfying, so I think you guys are going to love this one. My character had quite mediocre rolls during character creation and I'm an idiot and I picked a Mastery (which are kind of the classes of the game, although you pick 2 to begin with; there are 20 of them) that I cannot dream to use (Icon Caller, you have these artifacts called icons that you can place in the ground and have AoE effects, like constant healing or casting fear, etc.) because I don't have enough Aether (i.e. mana) to summon the starting Icon... So I'm stuck with a single playable Mastery for now, Abyssal Reaver (a hellish melee/caster hybrid). It's not going too bad, though!
I still don't know how I'll be releasing Ker Nethalas, but whatever happens with it, it will be after the release of Under Ashen Skies. As some of you already know, I'm working with the awesome Alan Bahr on this one, and he's close to being done with his part of the writing (admittedly the most difficult one -there's a reason I got stuck with this game...). Meanwhile, I've been working on the layout and preparing the Kickstarter page for it, so it will be launching soon. I cannot wait to share this one with you, there's nothing like it in the market. You'll see! We've gone nuts with the setting, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
So that's it for now, Ker Nethalas will be out for Patreon members (although it will be missing some art) in September, and then I have a bunch of other things in line for the rest of the year. It's going to be great!
As usual, if you like what I do and you're not a member already, please consider joining this Patreon, your help means the world to me and allows me to continue making cool stuff!
- Alex