First prototype video is appropriately under the weather
Eremite Games are making a survival game set in the bleak fantasy world of their Bestest Best roguelite city-builder Against The Storm. They've announced the project with a brief video snippet of a two hooded adventurers, stalking through some rainy woodlands towards a log cabin. From this I deduce that the plan is to support co-op multiplayer. Possibly also cabin-building. Certainly, an abundance of menace.
The devs began winding down development of Against The Storm in December, two years after the game left early access. What even is a "1.0 launch", these days? The tinkering never appears to end. As of now, Eremite write in a Steam post, "most of our time now goes into experimenting with the new game".
They would like you to keep your expectations "very modest", for the moment. "The project is still in its earliest phase, full of placeholders, and nearly everything you see is subject (and likely) to change," the devs write. "There’s a saying circling in the gamedev industry: 'Just make it exist first. You can make it good later'." I apply the same reasoning to many aspects of my life, including cooking and Valentine's Day presents.
While I bounced off Against The Storm's city-building, I enjoy its disorderly realm of ruination. In the original game, you control a bunch of fractious animal workers harvesting resources for a tyrant - venturing into the wilds to build settlements that are subsequently obliterated by a recurring Blightstorm. I would love a closer look at that landscape, and I'm curious to know how the Blightstorm might affect the usual rhythms of videogame survivalism. Will my hand-built structures fall to inclement weather, as in Dune: Awakening? Will we be hauling lumber for Queenie again?
"There’s a chance we’re showing this way too early," the devs continue. "We hope you won’t hold it against us if the project evolves into something very different. But keeping this under wraps has been torture. We’re still just a small, 6-person indie team, and this kind of openness feels more natural to us."
To stave off the obvious concern – no, this doesn't appear to be the end of Against The Storm as a city-building series. "What about Against The Storm 2?" Eremite ask themselves, and promptly answer: "The idea of a sequel is something we think about often. But this time, we wanted to experiment with the survival genre and explore new facets of the Against the Storm universe."