Huge Price Cut, Discounts coming. Hello all you wonderful gamers. I bet you are all wondering what this completely unrelated picture is all about? It's my current work in progress, that's what it is. I've been working on Immortal realm now for over 6 years now. You see, making video games is like a passion hobby for me, a rather expensive hobby because I am no artist (laugh track). Folkvang Studios is one person, me. A pretty small indie game dev studio.

Flashback moment

Way back in 2017 I had some life changing events and a corporate job that was comfy, but it sucked my soul away. So i'd spend weekends in the mountains. But something was missing. My childhood dream of making games, long pulled from my grasp for the basic need to pay rent and buy food. One day while my soul was being crushed by my career, I got an Ad for a game making platform that I won't mention because, while it worked, it was pretty scammy. I made a few cheesy mobile games and this lead me to Unity and Animal Friend Adventures was born. Animal Friends had a mobile release, but I wanted more for the game, so I started on a PC version. I took a voluntary layoff early 2019, cashed out my 401k and focused solely on Animal Friends adventure. I wrote the AI, game mechanics. I scoured the Asset store for the right cartoony post effect shader and just went to work. 6 am till 11pm 7 days a week.

Then I ran out of money.

and October 2019 I took another corporate job in AI, Where I am now. I don't hate the job, but I really love programming, game making, story writing, directing and the whole creative process. So I still worked on Animal Friends Adventure and pushed it to multiple platforms right around Jan 2020.

Still not satisfied

I wasn't happy with how disjointed the UI was. The game just looked sloppy and duct taped together. So I took advantage of the lockdown to completely revamp the UI. What I overlooked was that the UI was a huge portion of the game and logic. So I basically rewrote the entire game except the AI and some other items. Then I localized the game in 7 different languages and I had no clue just how much text I actually had in the game. It became an entirely new beast of a project to work on. But I achieved far more than I can remember looking back at all the time spent on this seemingly basic game.

Current Day

Sorry about that little ADHD moment. Seems it gets worse as time marches forward. So I've been working on Immortal Realm and Steam City on the side as I pushed through all the iterations of Animal Friends Adventure. This year has been pretty huge in progress. I switched to Unreal engine (oh my) and am completely focused now on Immortal Realm. If I can someday, Animal Friends will be ported to Unreal as well. But it is actually more challenging to do that I had thought. One thing at a time for now.

The Call to Action

So here's what the plans are, and What I need from you, the awesome gamer. Immortal Realm is an aRPG, so may not be your interest if your here. that's ok. Every purchase of Animal Friends Adventure brings me closer to independence to focus more fully on Immortal Realm. If I can resign from my Corpo job and work 22 hours a day, 7 days a week on Immortal Realm I would do just that. It's something I love doing.

Buy this game

Even if you never play it, I put the price barely higher than a cafe Mocha coffee. I have 700 games in my Steam library (I'm a bit of a gamer) 500 of which I never played, or put less than 1 hour into. I just like supporting the little guy like me struggling to make dreams come true. Anyway, thank you.

[ 2024-06-12 00:47:46 CET ] [ Original post ]