Hello,
My name is James Allen and welcome to PyroCode. Together along with Jeremy and Reuben we form the core of a small team of game developers based in Australia. We are committed to building a game studio that listens to its community and takes their feedback on board when creating our games.
We are currently working on developing and designing many games, a couple which will be discussed below. Over the next few years we have two games in development for release, these games are Military Artificial Intelligence Laboratories (M.A.I. Labs) and Blade’s Edge.
M.A.I. Labs
The first game we plan to fully release is M.A.I. Labs. Since we’re a small studio we have kept the scope of this project within reasonable limits so it shouldn’t take too long to get a beta version of the game out for people to access.
M.A.I. Labs is a first person dungeon crawler where the layout of each ‘dungeon’ is different. The ‘dungeon’, excluding the starting rooms, are randomly generated (within certain limits) to ensure that each journey through its maze is a different adventure.
As mentioned earlier we hope to have a playable beta version of the game available by mid-2016 so that we can receive feedback from our critics and supporters and act on that information. As it currently stands M.A.I. Labs is shaping up quite nicely however, in order to produce the best possible result, an upgrade of our current equipment is required.
Blade’s Edge
Blade’s Edge will be an open world adventure game with a heavy emphasis on story. It takes place on the continent of Starandi Enda, a once united land which is now torn apart in a brutal civil war. The Emperor, an aging man is struggling to unite the region once more but as the unrest continues to grow and cities stop acknowledging his rule, he turns to more discrete methods of removing the leaders of this rebellion. One such method involves under the table deals between his loyal servants and bounty hunters to remove the nobles that oppose him, amongst whom is the player.
We acknowledge that this is a substantial project and is a huge undertaking for our team, so any time and money devoted to it will be carefully managed and monitored. Due to the size and scope of the project it will be a number of years before we can offer a playable beta to the community; however we have made progress on the environment and core gameplay mechanics that will be used. More information on this will be released as development progresses but we intend to give the player as much freedom as possible within the game.
Kickstarter
Since we’re still in the early years of PyroCode, we cannot single handily fund our larger projects, especially one like Blade’s Edge. In order to try and cover these costs and allow us to produce high quality games, we have decided to use Kickstarter to help us with the initial funding. The Kickstarter stage isn’t expected to go beyond the first initial push so that we can get our first couple of games onto the market and become self-sufficient.
Games like Blade’s Edge will not be entirely funded through Kickstarter, instead they will be done using the profit from our games like M.A.I. Labs. Using Kickstarter in this manner allows us to have a smaller goal while still being able to work on our larger games and if successful will allow us to move away from Kickstarter after we release a couple of games.
Road Map
We will be working hard over the next few years to get the studio to the point where it is self-sufficient but until then we will need all the help that we can get from the gaming community.
Our starting games, like M.A.I. Labs will require assistance for the original funding but this period of time should end quite quickly and not continue past the release of Blade’s Edge. We estimate that this period of time will be at worst three to four years but in order for it to happen we need to have the profit from our early games to be enough to support the development of following games.
Development Cycles
Currently we are developing the two games mentioned above and have potential designs and ideas drawn up for a numbers of others. During the development of these games we hope to involve the community from even the early stages so that we can produce a final product that is as close to what the players want as possible. We will try to stay true to this statement for our games but we know that it may not be possible depending upon time constraints and hope that you can understand if this is the case.
Plans for the Future
As we look towards the future we hope that we will be able to grow both our development team and our gaming community while still maintaining the close knit, open relationship that we have.
Thank you for reading and we look forward to working with you all in the future.
James Allen
PyroCode
