Hi Everyone!

A month ago, we went public with Sovereign Syndicate after more than a year of work. We announced the game and launched our Steam page, website, and social media profiles. The response has been overwhelming and it’s both exciting and humbling that we’ve started to build such a passionate and engaged community around the game in such a short period of time.

We received press coverage from outlets around the world, including several articles in English, Russian, Chinese, French, and German. We’re glad to have an international audience and are trying to come up with ways to better engage with these communities. Our Steam page was seen by almost 18,000 people and our Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and Steam community posts generated hundreds of comments and interactions, resulting in over 3,200 wishlists.

Over on our Discord more than 70 people became a part of our community and had the opportunity to play an early prototype and provide feedback to help guide our development efforts. Combining this with the feedback we heard on our other social media channels and reddit posts we’re working on some exciting new content and quality of life improvements to make the game even better.

Here’s a quick overview of what we’re working on over the next few months:

New Content:

• Adding some additional scenes and item interactions to the existing prototype
  • Combat encounter
  • Stealth encounter
  • A mechanical puzzle
  • Some additional inventory items
  • A couple more ways to die if you’re not careful 😉  

• Redesigning character sheet, journal, and skill check interactions to make them feel more cohesive
  • Better integration of character sheet skills and tarot cards
  • Better description of skills, secondary skills, and etiquettes
  • More information given to the player about the possible outcomes and factors in skill checks
  • Better integration and organization of player journal

Quality of life improvements: 

• UI and control improvements
  • Reinteraction disabled when no new content is available
  • Retry on death goes right back to decision that caused it
  • Tooltips / Labels for UI elements
  • Controls menu display
  • Cursor changes to indicate walkable and non-walkable areas
  • Improve item hotspotting
  • Mouse wheel zoom in and out during gameplay, camera re-centered
  • Mouse wheel scroll in dialogue system
  • Make journal, inventory, and character sheet accessible during dialogue
  • Add numeric hotkeys to select dialogue options
  • Provide better clarity between internal monologue / narrative and spoken dialogue

• Minor typos and bugfixes
  • Correct typos in dialogue and UI
  • Tarot card starburst remained on screen intermittently after dialogue window closed
  • Add in-game feedback, screenshot, and crash reporting

Thanks so much to everyone who engaged with us over the last month and took the time to check out the project. Whether you liked it or you didn’t, we appreciate you taking the time to have a look and give us some genuine feedback. We’re looking forward to continuing to work on the project, engage with the community, and deliver a game we can be proud of.

Until next time,

-Isaac