Introduction & Our Journey Begins
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Hey everyone, I’m Tiaguini, a community manager for Atlantra Entertainment / Varadia, and welcome to our first monthly dev update!
Before we get into the updates, I want to take a few minutes to share how our journey creating Varadia began.
Before the birth of our universe, Vegatti made a post on Discord in a server for game developers called Game Development League or (GLD), looking for a programmer to start building a team with. After a bit, someone named Bobshishka DM’d him, who later turned out to be Ron. The two of them started talking and realized they had a lot in common. They grew up playing the same kinds of games and had similar ideas and goals for what they wanted to accomplish. Of course, at the beginning they didn’t have the experience they do now, but the first step was putting together a clear game design document (a GDD). From there, they set out to create a demo and eventually launch a Kickstarter to raise some funds to actually bring the game to life.
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Vision and Ambition
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Vegatti explained to Ron that he wanted Varadia to be more than just another game, and Ron wanted the same thing. Both of them wanted it to be something people could truly enjoy, connect with, and have an emotional experience from, not just a game about systems and numbers, I remember Vegatti telling me “Some movies are just movies, and some movies are emotional experiences”. They wanted players to get lost in its world, with everything they saw and heard feeling stunning and captivating. The goal was always to create something that could extend far beyond the first game. In fact, Vegatti told me he had already written the majority of the framework, lore, and story for Varadia, with many chapters and storylines that eventually converge and culminate in the far future. The best comparison I can give is how all the Marvel movies built up to Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, where everything eventually came into a focal point.
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Preparing for Kickstarter
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When the decision was made to eventually launch on Kickstarter, we knew we needed something that showed people it was worth following. Not only did we want a free-to-play demo, but also a cinematic, a prologue video explaining the history of the game Curse Of Ya’Fjora, trailers, and a presentation to try to be as close to perfect as we could make it.
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Building the Team and Creating Content
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Some months later, Alex “Fuzzy” Moreno joined the team. With his background as a software architect, he and Ron built a solid, scalable codebase. But Fuzzy’s contributions went far beyond coding, and Vegatti often said things would have gone seriously wrong without him. Soon after, Anthony Ricci came on to develop additional systems, putting in crazy hours designing key mechanics, and later Adam “Sath” Clark joined to design quests, create content, and handle a variety of other critical tasks.
For a while, Vegatti was the only artist, working on pretty much all of the art you’ve seen. That changed when Fuzzy introduced Nikolaize, whose work really helped speed up the art pipeline. Over time, more talented folks joined to cover sound, music, VFX, and other critical roles. Here is a link to developers if your curious varadia.com/our-team
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Progress and Looking Ahead
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We took our time building things the right way instead of rushing, which slowed us down and obviously as you can imagine we had our speedbumps and countless headaches. Even though everyone was balancing full time jobs, we kept pushing forward, and now the demo is in a strong place where we can see the light and the end of the tunnel.
We’re excited to be steadily moving toward the release of our free-to-play demo for Kickstarter on Steam, along with the cinematic, prologue, trailers, and everything else, while beginning to build our community around Varadia. As you can imagine, there’s always more to share, but this is our story in a nutshell. If you have any questions or want to talk more, feel free to join our Discord!
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