Hello Knights-To-Be,
This day, October 21st, 2023, marks the two year anniversary of our Early Access release! It has been an incredible journey for us at Chashu Entertainment and we are eternally grateful you were able to join us along the way.
As we inch a day closer to our full release date of October 27th, we cannot help but look back on how far we’ve come. So, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to regale you with the tales of our journey as we await version 1.0.
A new beginning…
It was the Summer of 2016, Chashu Entertainment has just completed and released our first title to be on steam, Deputy Dangle, a small title that began as a student project.
We were happy with what we have accomplished but it was time for us to move on to something different. A new project, something more ambitious, something more challenging, and something that is better suits our style of gaming. At every end there is a new beginning, this was our opportunity to begin anew.
When Sands of Aura wasn’t Sands of Aura…
It’s often said that the best part of game development is the beginning, when imagination is abundant and ideas strike like lightning. It’s easy to assume that concepts arrive fully formed, that good ideas are just set in stone from the start. But game design is fluid and often messy, it’s iterative and ever changing. Ideas rise and fall, they’re shaped and discarded only to be picked up again down the line. Chashu Entertainment was only a team of seven back then, but each of us participated wholeheartedly in this creative frenzy. There was an obsessive fever in each member of the team to bring our ideas into reality.
As exciting as this was, it isn’t hard to get lost in a maelstrom of brainstorming and creativity. Soon we found ourselves trapped, stuck in a loop of new concepts, new ideas. We needed a way out, a beckon in the storm. We needed Terrarium.
The idea was simple. A game about procedurally generated biomes full of life and nature that you could explore and farm. It was enough to get us out of the storm, enough to give us direction, yet after a year of more concentrated prototyping, we were still missing that real eureka moment.
We see the light!
It was the notion of biomes which evolved into the first conceptualization of the islands. We created our first set: the Player Home, the Red Stone Arch, and Hurwell. Two of these islands still exist today as evolved versions in Sands of Aura. The Player Home became what you know as Tupi’s Grotto, and Hurwell became what’s known as the Ruins of Hurwell. Unfortunately, the Red Stone Arch no longer exists.
As things began to take shape, we began looking to some of our favorite games for inspiration. We knew we wanted to create an ARPG but we wanted to draw on classics like Dark Souls, Diablo, Legend of Zelda, Hollow Knight, and a few others. From these inspirations came randomized loot drops, deliberate combat, and exploration through a top-down camera perspective.
These decisions finally gave us a foundation to build upon, and that storm which had held us for so long was becoming a distant memory on the horizon.
But something was still missing…
From the concept of disparate islands came the question of travel. How does the player get to an island? Is there a choice to be made between which to visit? Our original idea had the player traveling between islands through a portal; it was simple, effective, but lacked excitement, exploration. Each question we asked only led to more questions. Why was the player traveling? Why was the world demarcated into islands? Soon each of these questions began pointing to the same missing piece…a story.Creating a story for Sands of Aura has been one of the most rewarding and fun experiences for us and our writers. However, it was never intended to be as influential as it became. The scope of the current story in Sands of Aura as it stands today reflects our deep fascination with this world and the characters who call it home.
Thus, the world building began. These brainstorming sessions were some of our most memorable ones. Conversations were heated, papers were thrown, scribbles were drawn and redrawn. There was passion, there was sorrow, there was caffeine. It was fun. We questioned each character’s idea of the world, asking how they arrived at those views and why? Eventually, the thread of “destruction” began to resonate through them all.
Be it muse or luck, the idea of “sand” soon arose and quickly after came the concept of a “sandsea.” With that, the next logical step was to allow our players to sail across the sandsea on a skiff of their own.
Our ideas were beginning to take shape and a shared vision between team members began to develop. From this we continued creating the remaining islands, developing unique enemies, and iterating on a fun and engaging combat loop.
It is all coming together!
Finally, we had all our pieces in place. We just needed to fit them together and create Terrarium! Wait a minute… what? It was still called Terrarium? Yes, it was. That is, until we completed our first demo.Tomorrow, we’ll continue diving into the struggles of development, focusing in particular on our first demo and how it didn’t necessarily develop in the way we’d hoped. We’ll discuss our strength, our weakness, and we’ll discuss how we managed to overcome the many hurdles it threw in our direction.
Thank you for reading!
- Chashu Entertainment
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
