Hey backers

It’s been several months since our last update and we wanted to let you all know where we’re at and what our current plans are.

It’s been a tough few months. We initially made the kickstarter project a year ago to help us have the financial security to keep several people working full time until the game would be finished. Unfortunately, this being the most ambitious project we’ve done, that’s been a pretty hard deadline to estimate (RPG’s tend to be big, and the last 10% of a game tends to take 90% of the work). Even the 20k we raised could only go so far – and trust me, we stretched it as far as it would go (and beyond). Since our last update we planned to continue to work (without any income) until we could reach our alpha goal , but with the financial demands that come with living in a grow-up people’s world with bills and rent and food costs, along with personal difficulties that resulted in us losing our writer on the project, we’d pushed ourselves too far and reality made us step back. We couldn’t continue the way we had for so long. We retreated temporarily, not to wimp out, but to regroup and strategize a more realistic approach.

We tell you this not to make excuses, but because we have an obligation to keep you all informed, and to reinforce our dedication to the completion of the project in the plans we have to get back on track.

In the next couple of months we’ll be making much smaller games for sponsorship, and raise as much money as fast as possible. We’ve already finished one (you can see a preview pic here) and are well into starting our second. Our plan is to work within a budget structured entirely to allowing us secure working time on Ortus.

Between every game or two (each taking 3-4 weeks to make), we plan on hitting Ortus. HARD. We feel as a group that we cannot progress or expand, until we finish Ortus and make it as great for you as we can. Rest assured, the kickstarter has done a lot to help our progress, and we’re not some faraway dream from finishing. The game is playable, fully interactive, all the kickstarter NPC’s are written and half of them implemented and their areas and unique building fully modeled and in game. Right now, we’re just pacing ourselves so that living in the real world and paying our bills can be done more realistically, and that means putting our fingers in a few pies.

We want to reinforce that finishing Ortus is our TOP priority, and to do that, we need to survive.

Thanks for your patience with us. We refuse to be anything but optimistic, and have had so much support and enthusiasm shown to us that we owe it not only to ourselves, but you awesome people, to finish this game!

Until then, we’ll make sure to keep updates of progress on our mini-games on our Elvidian Facebook page, and we’ll be inform you all, of every time we can smash out our work on Ortus, where we’ll keep you in-the-know of our goals, successes and struggles with the project. Every time we get to work on it, we’ll make sure to share whatever we can to keep you excited about the project with us!

Sincerely-

-The Elvidian Team

Greetings backers!

It's been a hectic few months for Elvidian, after AVcon work on Ortus has been continual, but as we've said many times; it's a big task. If you would like to see what the game looks like so far you can see our Pre-Alpha gameplay footage here.

We've built so much over the last two years. The project began around this time in 2010, and since then has grown far more than we could have ever anticipated. We now have a huge array of tools to work with, character, prop, item and map editors, and much more, which allow us to build vast amounts of content in relatively short periods of time. The game so far consists of 5 capital cities (with 30-40 interiors to explore), dozens of smaller towns and village segments, hundreds of other maps (random encounters, dungeons etc), and thousands of NPC's. We have ONE coder who has built all of these tools, ONE environment artist who has created hundreds of props and buildings to fill the game, our lead Writer has contributed over 400,000 words of dialogue to the game, and we've a single person managing all outsourcing, animation and production.

So where are we at now? After two years of hard work we are at the final stages of production until the games Alpha build. Our work from now until then will consist of the rigging/testing of quests and interactions, production of the last few buildings to be put into the game, and the implementation of the games final vital game mechanics.

Our work will not be changing much until we announce our Alpha build, so until then, we will no longer be giving monthly updates on the game development process, but will instead be working full time until we reach that glorious Alpha stage from which, the focus will be shifted to balancing and polishing the game ready for backers like yourself to start playing!

We'll be posting again as soon as we can, working hard to get this game to its next important development phase, and until then we thank you for your patience and excitement in what is an extremely ambitious indie RPG project.

-Elvidian

Hello backers!

At the end of last month (as mentioned in the previous update) Elvidian had a booth at Avcon in the Indie Games room where we showed off the current build of Ortus, as well as some of our other games (the Engineer and Portal Panic)

Check out our Avcon shenanigans:

Ortus is making progress steadily, Avcon has helped provide us with renewed vigor after hearing really positive feedback and seeing people enjoy what we have so far. The Beta testing that many of you are waiting to get involved in is still not set to a date, but rest assured it is our utmost priority to get our game into it's Alpha stage and then polish it into the Beta phase for you guys to play and share your thoughts on! We'll let you know when that is, as soon as we know ^_^

Until then, check out some brand new gameplay footage of Ortus (as it stands so far):

The game is in a new 16:9 ratio with higher resolution UI, early combat engine mechanics, robust loot generation, as well as loads more maps, content and back-end features which can't be shown in this short video.

Finally, we've launched our Elvidian Newsletter, so those who want updates for future news (including things non-Ortus) can hear from us there (you can sign up here).

Thanks again for your continued support!

- Elvidian

Well ladies and gentlemen, It's been a long few months leading up to now, but things are really picking up, and we'll be at AVcon in Adelaide to show our progress.

If you live in the area, drop by the Indie Games room, where Elvidian Entertainment will be hosting twice the space we hosted last year, and we'll even be set up with a big fancy suit of armor on display, 2 computers playing our pre-Alpha build of Ortus featuring a massive new loot/item system as well as some combat and various levels and premade save-games, and 2 other computers, one playing the Engineer, the other playing Portal Panic.

Following AVcon our goals will switch into producing a fully playable alpha as soon as possible (no dates yet) and we'll keep you updated on our progress as things move!

Thanks for all your support and encouragement-

-Elvidian

For Fans and Supporters

Here at Elvidian we have noticed that a lot of the posts on our Facebook pages have been asking about the release date of Ortus.  This update is to address all those posts.

In the past we have announced dates that we hoped Ortus would be completed by.  Unfortunately we have not been able to make those deadlines due to the ambitious nature of the Ortus project.  Regrettably at this point in time we cannot give you a release date. ORTUS WILL BE RELEASED and the team is working full time to get it done, but we just don’t know when that will be.

Like stated earlier Ortus is a very ambitious project, at this point in time there is one animator, one writer, one coder and one artist working full time on a game that aims to be as big and diverse as RPGs made by multi-million dollar companies.  This team is donating their time at this point as funding has well and truly run out for the project.  They will continue to working hard until the game is complete and up to the high standard the team hold RPGs. 

We want to assure all fans and supports that Ortus will come out and we will give you a release date as soon as we have one available.

In other news, we have just launched our BRAND NEW WEBSITE, be sure to check it out, big thanks to Lochie for all his hard work!

- the Elvidian Team