Explorminate checked out the tactical RPG The Great Whale Road:

Monday eXcursion: The Great Whale Road

The Great Whale Road (GWR) is a tactical RPG from Sunburned Games set way back in the good old Viking days that seem to be so popular lately (see also: The History Channel…). Your character starts as the newly minted, albeit unlikely, new village chief after the old chief got himself killed off by a group of Saxons while out on some raid or another. Oh, and almost every warrior in town was with him and they didn’t come back home either. Your mission is to guide your people to prosperity and seek revenge against the folks who robbed your village of all of its semi-competent members.

The game moves through various phases as time passes. You do some village management to gather food and produce trade goods and resources. You sail around the North Atlantic and handle random events. Visiting other towns lets you buy and sell goods, engage in combat, and rest up before heading back home to prepare for another winter.

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Thanks Farflame!

Cosmic Engine has reviewed the story driven RPG The Great Whale Road:

The Great Whale Road Review

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The Great Whale Road leaves Early Access today:

The Great Whale Road Release Trailer

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The Great Whale Road is a story-driven RPG set in the Early Middle Ages. Travel through an ancient world, sailing along the North Sea and battling foes in turn-based combat. Interactive historical fiction comes to life through its digitally hand-drawn art, colourful characters, atmospheric soundtrack, and deeply researched lore.

Fight, trade and discover the story of your village and its heroes. Are you worthy to lead them to renown and riches?

Gameplay is split into two seasons. Winter to manage and plan for the year ahead and summer when you sail the whale road and visit other towns and villages. You and your warband have to fulfill a quest each year, while ensuring that you have sufficient food to feed everyone through the long months of winter. Digitally hand-drawn locations are connected by an atmospheric side-scrolling sailing mode. Grid based tactical combat means that Valhalla can be just a warcry away.

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The Great Whale Road will leave Early Access on March 30:

Release Ahead: March 30th, 2017

The Great Whale Road is getting ready for the next leg of its journey. We have been working on the game's concept since the beginning of 2015, and the first artists and developers joined the team in April that year. We weathered the odd storm or two and entered the Sea of Early Access eight months ago.

It has been an exciting few months and we are super grateful for the community's help and feedback. We are implementing some smaller features which we had postponed until now into the game and are busy polishing the rougher edges.

We have decided to leave Early Access on the 30th of March - this will include the full story of the Danes and all features we have been adding since 0.6.2. Among them a new combat camera, more warcries, development area upgrades, an enhanced ship upgrade system, new journal screen, trade screen enhancements, AI improvements and more. And yes, the game will be steamified, too! Enjoy the new release trailer.

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Complete Nonsense Reviews has reviewed The Great Whale Road which is currently in early access.

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"The Great Whale Road is an interactive narrative game, with some lite-RPG and resource management aspects which also features turn-based tactical combat that is firmly set - thematically speaking - during the Viking Age."

The Great Whale Road on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/464...

The Great Whale Road got a combat update - here's the trailer:

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Hello Everyone!

The long awaited combat update is finally here and we’re really excited to share it with all our players.

While redesigning the combat system, we paid close attention to all your feedback to assure this was the game we wanted to make and you wanted to play. No more timer! No more shuffling cards in search of heroes to deploy! Warcries galore!

As it’s very common with big changes, some new issues might arise, so please let us know of any problems you encounter on our forum’s support section!

We’ve made quite a lot of changes under the hood, so here’s a list of the most noteworthy. Thank you and we hope you enjoy this new update!

• Added a new hero: Widukind.
• Deploying characters is now linked to their Loyalty. The more loyal they are, the quicker you can bring them into battle.
• New combat objective: Kill them all!
• Timer has been removed from combat, you can now die as slowly as you want.
• Each Hero has 3 Warcries they can use from the start.
• Using Warcries now costs Warcry Points. You start combat with a pool of points to spend, and you can gain more by defeating enemies.
• Completely new weapons, with Damage Ranges and Critical Hits.
• Slash, Blunt and Pierce attack types have unique properties.
• The Blocking stance will always defend hits as long the character has Defence Points.

Here's the roadmap for the Early Access game The Great Whale Road:

Early Access Dev Blog #4: The Updated Whale Road-Map

Hello Everyone!

Gamescom was only a little bit over a month ago and we have been super busy in the meantime. Update v0.3.0 will be released on Monday (10/3) instead of today, as we have added so many new things that we have given ourselves a few more days for testing.

MONDAY - v0.3.0: TRADE, QUESTS & LOADS OF NEW FEATURES

New Features:

• Character loyalty
• Character afflictions
• Dynamic trade
• Healers in settlements: See them if you want to recover quickly.
• Fast travel
• And hunting dogs finally hunt!

Improvements:

• A new event screen with a larger font and space for an illustration. We even added the first event images, with a lot more to come in the next updates.
• Optimised for full HD and screen resizing for lower resolutions. Please let us know if you experience any issues on smaller/older screens.
• Winter planning and results: revised screens and we changed the system from assigning focus points to assigning your villagers
• A new weather system with fog, wind and sky variations
• Streamlined the amount of intermittent screens
• Combat rewards! Now some fights will result in you getting loot, in v0.4.0 we will limit loot to when you actually win a fight.
• Odin, beer is no longer free! Spending the night partying at a tavern costs silver now.
• Reduced the number of personality traits

Content:

• Two character storylines with quests and winter events
• New sailing events for character afflictions
• New winter events
• Updated most location names in the game to increase their authenticity. Special thanks for historical-linguistic advice go to: Peter Alexander Kerkhof, PhD

END OF OCTOBER - v0.4.0: COMBAT & STORY

New Features:

• Enhanced combat system

Improvements:

• New combat AI
• More new screens and Event illustrations
• Loot!

Content:

• Danish storyline chapters 2 & 3
• New character storylines
• Additional Danish characters (Thorir Throatcutter & Widukind the Beardless)
• Additional NPCs
• Locations along the Frankish & Frisian coast
• New winter events
• New location events
• New sailing events
• New rumors

END OF NOVEMBER -v0.5.0: RENOWN & PROGRESSION

New Features:

• Renown
• Character progression
• Ship upgrade

Improvements:

• Combat enhancements
• UI upgrade - part 1

Content:

• New warcries
• Trading quests
• New winter events
• New location events
• New sailing events
• New rumors

On the 28th of July The Great Whale Road will be available on Steam early access. For that the following trailer has been released:

The Early Access version of the Great Whale Road will be released in July:

Development Update - June

Hello Everyone!

I am starting with the important stuff - we have decided to move the Early Access date to the end of July. A game in this phase of development can do with every hour of work it can get, and rushing things in the face of E3 and the upcoming Steam summer sale didn't seem reasonable.

On the way I also did a bit of rescoping to give myself more writing time, as I am not Stephen King and other studio stuff will always encroach on my schedule. After six months I was finally smart enough to realise that and to plan accordingly.

The adventure will start with 'Episode 1' of the Danes, while we will continue to add features and content. We'll unavoidably run into August, when most of our team will take some well deserved time off. Therefore the second part of the Danish story will follow at the end of the summer - as long as the end of September still counts as summer. We would also like to have the first part of our Northumbrian story ready by then, but I am not swearing an Óðinn oath on that just yet.

If you are in Barcelona at the end of June you can meet us at Gamelab, which is still the place to chat about indie games in Spain (or so I have been told by the cool kids). In August we will be at Gamescom in Köln, but due to affordability you will require access to the business area if you want to stare at our tiny stand in awe. We simply couldn't afford a place in the public entertainment area. Even so the costs have swallowed a major chunk of our marketing budget. But if you don't have a press pass or similar and are in Köln at the time give us a shout. We will be happy to organise a show & tell Bratwurst eating contest! Because there is always time for Bratwurst.

Development and art have done great work while I have stumbled through the storyline and refined the style of events. The objective is to make all the writing in the game immersive and fitting the historical game world, even if this sometimes means that events have to be thrown away and rewritten.

Our next mini-milestones are the setup of the Steam store page and the production of our gameplay trailer - both due in the first week of July. And as tradition demands, I am asking you to follow us on Twitter and Facebook: @WhaleRoadGame and The Great Whale Road. If you are really keen you can try to find us on Tumblr and Instagram as well.

Every time you decide to share one of our Facebook posts or retweet one of our tweets you expose The Great Whale Road to a wider audience, including your nan and that bloke you are pretty certain you have never met before. Everyone matters and your grandmother might enjoy an historical story-driven tactical RPG.

Thanks for reading this to the very end! +5 Renown

Best.

Joachim @ Sunburned Games

EnklawaNetwork interviewed Joachim Sammer - the co-founder of Sunburned Games about The Great Whale Road:

Sailing on The Great Whale Road - an interview with Joachim Sammer

At the end of las December The Great Whale Road failed its crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. However, developers from Sunburned Games are not going to give up and constantly work to finish their ambitious project. In this interview I speak with Joachim Sammer, Managing Director and co-founder of Sunburned Games, about the core aspects of The Great Whale Road, the approach to history in games and plans for rest of this year.

EnklawaNetwork: Let's start with the title of your game. The Great Whale Road sounds very poetic and intriguing, but it doesn't say much for a typical gamer. Can you explain what this 'Road' was and how important it is for the setting of your game?

Joachim Sammer: The game is set along the North Sea coast during the Dark Ages, and one of the main culture groups in the game are the Anglo-Saxons. These folks didn't have TV, and most couldn't read either, so they had to come up with creative ways of entertainment. Poetry, riddles and stories in general where a key element of their culture. Whale road is a kenning, a figurative expression, and the 'road of the whales' is the sea. For us today kennings are more like riddles, other examples are sky candle (sun) or battle sweat (blood). If you are interested in kennings checkout Beowulf, which is an epic Anglo-Saxon poem with nearly 3200 lines.

We were looking for a name to represent the period of the game and its setting. Our first brain storming sessions produced titles like 'Action Saxons' and 'Blood Sea'. I wanted something more rooted in the historical setting, and The Great Whale Road represents that and makes the connection to the seafaring adventures which are a cornerstone of the game.

EN: Indeed, this title fits your game really good. At first sight The Great Whale Road looks like another viking adventure; however, after close examination, it's getting clear that you strive for a much bigger picture. We already know that your game will bring to life six different cultures. What are the differencss between them, i.e. Northumbrians and Danes, and how they affect gameplay?

JS: Yes, we are planning to have six cultures in the game once we get out of Early Access towards the end of this year. The player will manage a settlement of the culture they have selected, which will also be the starting point for the journeys along the whale road. Each settlement has its own quests and main story line, and those are linked to their culture and history. There will also be a number of NPC locations for each culture along the coast, Northumbria will have Eoferwic and Bebbanburg among others. This will enable the players to start their adventure in a friendly environment. On the combat side we are working historical differences into the design of the cultures, too. We started with weapons, armour sets as well as culture and class specific war cry cards, and we will continue that with culture specific abilities. The Northumbrians for example will have more armour and more defensive abilities than the Danes, for which we plan a more offensive combat design. And last but not least they will have different visual designs, authentic names and so on. If players like what we are doing, then these six cultures won't be the last either and we will extend the game with DLCs in 2017.

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The development of The Great Whale Road is progressing very well:

The Great Whale Road moves a little bit closer to Steam Early Access every week. February has been as busy as expected so far and we are happy to present our new user interface design.

UPDATE & A NEW USER INTERFACE FOR THE GREAT WHALE ROAD

We certainly haven't been idle since the last update! We found and hired a third developer - Alex - who joined the fyrd at the beginning of the month and really hit the ground running. We have also started testing potential candidates to grow our art team, as we need one more 2D artist to ensure we can hit our production deadlines on the road to and during Steam Early Access.

LOOKING BACK

We have made progress in a lot of areas in 2016 - across design, art and development - but the most visible is (not surprisingly) the new UI. We started last year with a textile design, utilising historical colours and patterns.

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Thanks Eye!

The Kickstarter project The Great Whale Road has reached 11K from the 50K goal with 17 days to go. You can download a 2-player-combat preview version:

Scrappiness

Hello Everyone!

Christmas is coming and I am looking forward to my first Gingerbread Latte of the season. I am sure that a scrappy little Christmas tree will find its way into the studio soon. I might just hang some tiny 'human sacrifices' on it, to make sure Odin is on our side. 

I am using scrappy in the North American sense of being determined, which is an essential trait for an indie studio. Bugs, invoices and taxes are the only certainty, nevertheless we continue onwards scrappily. And in the spirit of scrappiness we made the development combat preview a lot more scrappy. It can now deal with low specification PCs and high network latency! I wish Photon (our cloud service for networking) was as scrappy out of the box. I recommend that you download the new version, and ideally don't mix & match with previous ones. There is a Linux build (for DIY fans only), and we are looking for a volunteer who can help us by creating a .deb package.

We are also working on the first special mercenary characters, which can be used with any crew independent of their culture. The art team is already working on an Ethiopian sword master, and we finished our first Hunnic warrior yesterday.

Notice how clean her outfit is? She can chop of extremities and she is scrappy enough to avoid all blood splatter. CSI wouldn't like her at all ;)

And last but not least I would ask you to vote for The Great Whale Road in the Indie of the Year 2015 award on Indie DB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-great-whale-road. This is not a high gloss award, but something scrappy indies fight for. ;)

Thanks!

Joachim @ Sunburned Games

Trading Card Games has previewed The Great Whale Road - a medieval RPG with turn based combat and comic art style:

The Great Whale Road – Early Preview

The sea is a cruel and merciless mistress in 650 A.D. In The Great Whale Road (the Anglo-Saxon name for the sea) you embark on an adventure in the North Sea in order to supply the people of your village with food for the coming winter. You must do whatever is necessary to survive and return home safely.

The Great Whale Road combines the RPG genre with turn-based combat using cards. You can trade with or try to pillage your way across the sea against the A.I., and then test your mighty heroes against other players in bespoke PvP battles. Can you bravely face the elements in this real-time SRPG (Strategy Role Playing Game) title?

Will The Great Whale Road sink or swim? Read on to find out…

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First Impressions

The Great Whale Road has one of the most bizarre names given to a game that I can recall. Sure, it’s (supposedly) historically accurate, but it’s something of a tongue twister when said out loud! Needless to say, the game has just as much complexity to it.

Playing a game set in an era where brutal and bloody fights were commonplace is a smart move. The injuries that can be sustained are a stroke of genius and definitely add to the realism of the game, I think. I really liked being able to change the roles of my crew by equipping them differently battle to battle. This gave me some flexibility and enabled me to try out new strategies that I would see my opponents use.

With so much to discover, The Great Whale Road is shaping up to be an amazing experience. This experience will be enhanced with some improved visuals, but it’s not entirely necessary. All that is needed is your support on Kickstarter to bring this to life.

-> Kickstarter Page

The Kickstarter RPG The Great Whale Road has been greenlit by the community and Sunburned Games offers free T-shirts for backers:

Greenlit, Black Friday Special & Shout-Out

Hi All,

Happy (Black) Friday! I hope all our backers across the pond had a great Thanksgiving yesterday. We didn't get any turkey, but we got Greenlit! Thanks to everyone here and on Steam who has voted for The Great Whale Road. You are amazing!

Specials

Check out the Specials on the page, we have added them last night. Existing and new backers will get exclusive characters, and you will get one The Great Whale Road 'Cultures' t-shirt for free, if you add the required shipping amount to your pledge (based on your location). All backers at €125 and higher tiers have global shipping included. Here are two designs to start with, there will be at least two more (Danes and Franks) to choose from once we'll send out the backer surveys.

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You can now play the development preview of the core combat gameplay of The Great Whale Road.

The development preview of our core combat gameplay is available for Windows now. Please remember that we are still in development, so this is just a taster of what we are working on – it is a snapshot of work in progress, with some placeholders and defects. But we really want to show you where we are heading. It is for two players online, Internet connectivity required. What a great opportunity to share this campaign with your oar brothers and sisters!

Head over to The Great Whale Road website for the download. Please make sure to read the warnings there, we don’t want you to get lost at sea!

This is barebones functionality and the final combat will have complex war cries, class and cultural abilities, more weapons and armour sets, character progression and AI. None of that is in the preview, but it allows you get a feeling for the atmosphere of the full game. The deck building and armoury screens will change, they exist in this form only for this preview and contain some placeholder art. You can find a ‘How to play’ inside the preview, as well as some help.

Thanks Eye.

Eye spotted this new Kickstarter campaign for The Great Whale Road. A single player turn-based RPG with drop-in online battles.

The early medieval North Sea is waiting to test your mettle in this single player RPG with drop-in online battles. And if the sea does not kill you, pirates and sickness are already waiting in line.

The whale path has many endings, a cold or bloody death at many of them. Whatever made you leave the warmth of your hearth, the dagger that cuts your throat does not care about your dreams. Choose your companions wisely, your oar brothers and sisters can keep you alive or sell you on a slave market. 

Set sail with your party to gain renown and find supplies to prepare your village for the coming winter. Sometimes wyrd gives you chosen warriors, but often you will only find drunkards and the beardless willing to join you.

Explore the coast to discover safe harbours, markets and villages.

The most important currency on the whale road is renown. Companions will follow you more willingly, if some of your fame rubs off onto them. Renown is not only gained by slaying ones enemies, but also by exploring and heroic deeds. 

Help your crew to solve their problems, and someone might stop the arrow aimed at your throat. If you want to be a leader, become a ring-giver worth of sagas.

Single-Player Saga Mode, Crew Duel Mode & Drop-in Battles

• Crew Management: You manage a ship and its crew led by your chosen hero. Choose from a number of heroes including a fearless warrior, a weathered trader and an exiled murderer.
• Exploration: Travel and explore the coast. Discover stories and follow their threads to uncover quests, hidden treasures, and quite often, death.
• RPG: Select classes and assign abilities as well as equipment, which can be upgraded as characters gain renown.
• Trading: Discover trade routes, historical trading towns and avoid pirates (and customs officials).
• Turn-based Combat with Cards: Quick paced turn-based fights against the AI or fellow humans in drop-in battles and duel mode.