First of all, we are sorry for the extra delay! One thing we learned is that it might seem like there are no problems at all.. but sneaky problems always lurk in the shadows! Oh, and another thing is that we need to be more careful from now-on with deadlines.

All of you who are eligible to participate in the beta already received a key that will allow you to play the beta. For everyone else we put together a video showcasing the new content.

There are a few areas that are considered really early prototype versions: -weapon crafting -armor crafting -bow abilities. All crafting systems need more work and will be much more complex in the future! Also not all features are in the game (character creation).

We are planning to release a couple of updates for the beta version. With your kind help we hope to fix a few nasty bugs hiding in Darkwood so please if you find a bug and your time allows, send us an email describing the bug and how to reproduce it. Also if you find a fatal error (an error that will cause the game to crash) please send us the debug info by pressing the “Send debug.txt” button in the launcher.

Enjoy the beta and have a nice day in Darkwood.

P.S. you need to put abilities/spells into your main bar (at the bottom of the screen). You can find your spells/abilities in your spell book ‘S’. You can select one melee ability and one magic to be your main attacks (left click is the melee, right click is the selected spell). There will be tooltip informations everywhere in a future update.

We updated the beta to version 002. If the window title says 002 that you have the newest version. If it displays Balrum_v0.0.85_beta instead of Balrum v0.0.85_beta_002 than you have an old version so please re-download the game. This is an important update so please make sure you have the 002 version.

Hello, everyone!

We have got some bad news, and some good news.

The beta is delayed until february. The delay is totally on us. We underestimated the work needed. Thankfully it’s nothing too dramatic. We need a few extra weeks to finalise everything for you guys.

On the other side we have a lot of things to share this time around.

The main quest’s dialogs for chapter one are all done. We hired a british writer who is proofreading for us.

Our composer just finished working on the music for chapter one and all we can say is that it is much better than what we expected. Don’t get us wrong, our expectations were high but our composer exceeded them. Thanks Matt for your hard work! Check out Balrum’s main theme.

All chapter one monster types are finished. There are 20 monsters in the game already! All of them use various spells/abilities against each other and of course against the player. We won’t show you all of them, but here is one new:

The lock picking mechanic is done. Yes you will need to find the proper combination.. Craft a lot of lock picks!

Teachers are in the world. If you fully progressed a skill level you have to go to a trainer to learn the new level of the given skill.

The crafting systems are finally done! We need to balance it a little bit more, but it turned out to be a really interesting feature. All things that we promised like a little randomness in crafting, all kinds of crafting combinations for custom items, naming and selecting an icon for your custom item and special really powerful combinations that you can figure out by yourself are in the game.

Hundreds of sound effects are completed, giving the game a totally new vibe.

Dozens of UI improvements:
Now you have 5 main bars that you can select from. (you can put your foods on bar 1 and your potions of bar 2, spells…etc)
All new items are highlighted in your inventory.
The loot panel was completely rewritten.
Improved trade panel.
With crafting randomness we had to figure out a problem. The problem was that when you craft 10 minor healing potions they might be a little different from each other. These minor healing potions show up in one icon, but when you shift+click it a new panel appears where all of the minor healing potions are sorted buy their attributes.

All humanoid and a few other NPCs have complex daily routines. For example: Aron is the blacksmith in your village and he usually works on his anvil during the day, after a hard day of work he sleeps in his bed like a child, but before he goes to sleep he turns off the torches that would disturb his sleep.

There are 10 optional dungeons in chapter one, all of them are in a near complete form.

A lot of puzzles are completed. For example: You can expect to have a little bit of a headache when you are trying to get in..or out of a dungeon.

The list goes on and on but these are the most interesting things and we don’t want to spoil everything. The full list of changes is a multiple hundred item list.

Ohh yes,...

As promised, here is an ingame video of the cave that we showed you last time. Our hero finds out, and quickly forgets the secret of the crystal golems.
As you can hear, sound effects are being added to the game. We are really excited about the new environmental sounds in the caves. It is great to finally hear the game not only see it!

Hello, everyone!

It’s time for an update!

We are working on the chapter 1 dungeons and caves. Designing the caves is really refreshing, because we just finished with the grasslands (640000 tiles of landscape) and it is nice to work on a different kind of environment.
Now we only show you 1 screenshot, but you can expect a video of this cave in the near future!

Have a great day!

Hello, everyone!

In this update you can see how dungeons will look like in the game! There will be at least another type of cave/dungeon wall tileset, so don’t worry this is not the only design

Thanks to our great graphics team things are going really smoothly!
Also, we just received the first demo track of Balrum’s main music theme and it is amazing!

Hi there everyone!

Here is a small video update for you featuring a few new monsters!
Hope you like them!

Everything is going well, so the beta is on track!
As always, have a great day!

Hello there! Things are looking really good! The engine is really close to the feature freeze state, this means it is near complete!

Our graphics team will start to work in the coming days on the extra art that chapter one needs. We can’t tell you a lot, but there are 8 new monsters that will be in chapter one and they are not your regular fantasy type monsters! Also, the caves in Balrum will look really good!

We contacted a lot of musicians! This means that Balrum will have an amazing soundtrack in the near future! (if you are a musician and you contacted us in the past, but you have not received an email regarding the music of Balrum, please contact us)

Dear Backers, we sent out emails to those of you who bought some of the addons! If you bought addons, but somehow you have not recieved the email, please contact us!

We also sent out the „design a monster and design your NPC” emails! All of you have received the email, but if something went wrong please contact us!

Have a great day!

Another update!

We changed the way our renderer works mainly because when using the 2x zoom option there were a few errors that we needed to eliminate, but at the same time we also added ambient lighting. Ambient lighting will help us in creating the atmosphere of certain areas like swamps, dungeons..etc.

If you looked carefully enough at our pre-alpha videos you might noticed that doors were problematic. They were hard to select and they sometimes were rendered incorrectly. We fixed the doors and rewrote the „selection” algorithm so that everything can be selected with ease.

The savegame option was disabled in the pre-alpha demo but now it is working. The main thing that we really want with our save system is it to be patch friendly. This means that if we release a patch we want to make sure that you don’t need to restart the game because we broke the system with the fixes included in the patch.

Lakes and rivers are important. We have not shown you guys how our water effect looks because it will change and we are still not satisfied with it, but here it is so you can have an idea on how it will look.

Ohh, and here is something new.

Hello everyone! We promised to keep you informed and here we are! We took a few days off but development resumed on this Monday.

We finished the crime system. In our pre-alpha „demo” the system was disabled because it was buggy and unfinished, but now it works flawlessly. So no more stealing without consequences!  (check out the video below)

We promised that you guys will be able to translate the game and the system for that is complete! You simply need to edit a xml file and your translation will appear in-game!

PayPal

The PayPal page is finally up and working!

Just click here!

If we reach a stretch goal with the kickstarter sum + PayPal we will announce it!

There are a few extra options that you can select, these extra options will be available for 30 days. After the 30 day period you will be only be able to purchase Balrum with no extras. Also after the 30 day period PayPal purchases won’t count to unlock stretch goals.

Thank you for yours support guys! Let’s hope that we can unlock a few stretch goals!

Have a great day!