SheltRPG Devlog 1 - Introduction

Awoo, mates.

Raus Vuffski here. The founder and CEO of Knotsoft, the videogame studio.

Long ago, long before Knotsoft grew into the massive furry business conglomerate employing literally a number of people as you know it today, I started my journey with big dreams and humble goals.

Like many of us, I loved stories and videogames growing up. What a life it would be to make one for a living, I thought! To create characters, worlds, and moments that touch people the same way I was touched by the stories I fell in love with when I was a child. To invent engaging, unique mechanics that will entertain others and fill them with the joy of discovery, the same way my favorite RPGs did for me.

When you grow up in a poor and secluded small village environment with a slave mentality systematically taught from an early age, you are expected to eventually grow out of dreams like that. However, a chain of extreme circumstances in my life, some turning to be blessings in very dark disguises, made it possible for me to shelter those dreams long enough to finally let them blossom. Now, I built my life around being able to keep working on my dreams, because I love it.

Because I think those characters and those ideas deserve to exist.

Through comics, I learned to draw just well enough to show those characters in ways words fall short.

Through Shelter the VN, I got my first real exposure to writing prose, in a foreign language no less! In case you didn't know, I'm Polish, and I never visited an English-speaking country until I was 25. English language wasn't a free perk for me.

At the same time as I practiced English prose on Shelter, I had my fun with music, audiovisuals in a videogame environment, and I coded a bunch of random stuff into the game, just because I found all of that fun, and also to gain some programming exposure for the future.

There's still a bunch of work left on Shelter the VN before I can put the final THE END on it, but we're slowly getting there. In the meantime, we've already been working on the next step. The next dream.

A turn-based RPG. We gave it a work-in-progress title of "SheltRPG". We've been building an engine for it from scratch in Unity for over a year now, and I waited to share details about it until we had a bit more work ready to show. I believe we're finally far enough in the development of the battle system that I can finally start talking about our game. Both about the elements we already have, and everything that's still being worked on.

You saw the magic system of Shelter and the comic INU. In both of those stories, I used that magic in preparation for actually putting it into a turn-based RPG-style game. I thought it all up for that purpose specifically. I wanted a JRPG magic system in a furry setting where differences between species play a role as much in lore as they do in magic. With an element of randomness encouraging flexibility and experimentation, both during battle as well as during character customization.

I'll start going into more details of the game in the future devlogs. For now, I just wanted to at least tell you what kind of game it is. Since a bunch of the future devlogs will contain WiP assets, those will be available to LVL2 Patrons, with WiP tier, at least initially.

I'm particularly inspired by the PSX-era Final Fantasy games, and I always found the tagging mechanics in Breath of Fire IV super cool (FFX took it later, but it also discarded one important element from the original that I really love, and decided to expand on). I hope you like those kinds of games. They are my favorite!

It is a huge project. I'm trying to keep the scope as small as possible for the first iteration of it, but both my coder friend and I are still learning as we go. As much passion as we have for it, it is definitely going to be longer and more challenging than any estimations, and even then there's no guarantee that the final product will be without its problems. Right now it's going amazing and I truly believe that we're turning it into something really special, but only time will tell. I'll continue working on Shelter the VN until it's finished, and then join my team on SheltRPG fully. I hope that, as we recruit more good people into our team, we'll get closer and sooner towards that ideal vision of the game.

I hope you will love it even more than Shelter the VN.

Next Devlog:

"Story: The Setting"

For Shelter!(pg)

Your Dog,

Raus Vuffski