[GAME] DARCO - Reign of elements

anonymous_user_b1be3178 · March 2, 2018, 9:21pm

Greetings Community,

We’ve been quite active on the German Unreal-forum for a while and decided to present our project here too.

Who are we?

We are a german team consisting of 14 hobby-developers covering all areas, such as graphics, blueprints, sound and so on.

What is our project?

DARCO - Reign of Elements is a survival multiplayer game, which is set in a post-apocalyptic steampunk world.
The world consists of huge ships, flying over an endless ocean. Each one has a unique environment with its own resources, dangers and creatures.
Your main opponents are hunger, thirst, other players, mechanical predators and rare hostile dragons.

Category: Action-Adventure-Survival
Mode: Multiplayer
Server: PvP & PvE (official & dedicated)
Plattform: PC (Steam) - Windows (later Linux and Mac)
Language: English (later German and Russian)

Alpha Access will start soon for Kickstarter backers.
Early Access will be in May 2018 on Steam.
Full Release is planned for the 4th quarter of 2019.

You play as a mechanic, who is one of the few survivors of the once great, now gone Victorian civilization. First you can choose our of a list which starter dragon will accompany you throughout the game, before you are thrown into the hostile environment of the main ship, a Redwood-like forest, which is full of mechanical monsters - like bears and wolfs. To defend yourself you have to build a base and workbenches, so you can craft better weapons and equipment until you will be one day able to create your own dragons!

So how do you like our idea? How is the recent in-game footage looking to you? Do you have any questions?
I’ll gladly answer everything!

We are on Kickstarter right now - so check it out, if you like, what you saw here!

anonymous_user_b1be3178 · March 6, 2018, 10:19pm

Today we set up our Steam site! We are planning on launching the closed Pre-Alpha this week - our whole team is super excited.

Also there were a few German articles written about us, in case you are interested:

Kinchie · March 10, 2018, 11:19am

Good luck with the game dev, Darco team - looking good so far.

anonymous_user_b1be3178 · March 12, 2018, 11:41am

Thanks, Kinchie! We are working hard to keep it that way.

A youtuber made suprisingly a nice video about us, where she included a lot of our old and new work:

Today we started a community challenge, where everyone can join. In case anyone is interested and wants to join, too, here are the details:

Community Challenge #1 - Fine Feathers make fine birds.
For our first challenge, we want to see steampunk clothes from you!

What?
We want to see cool steampunk outfits from you! You can draw, paint, paint digitally, cosplay/photograph or use any other media form to create an entry. You don’t have to create new content, you can use your old works, too. You can only submit your own work! Please do not submit over sexualized pictures or nudity.

Who?
Anyone can submit. Backers, Followers, people, who are just interested into Steampunk. Feel free to share this challenge to other platforms.

How?
Send a link to your entry via e-Mail to [EMAIL=“”]
Any entries submitted via DeviantArt will be added to our accounts favorites, as long as they conform DeviantArts and our rules.

Winners?
The outfits of the three winners will be included as clothing skins in DARCO.

When?
You have time from now, until Monday the 26th March 2018 06:00 a.m. EST (12:00 Mittags in Deutschland/Europa)

Feel free to ask, if anything is unclear!

TheTom89 · March 14, 2018, 1:41am

i just looked at your steam page. looks good!! I’m excited to try it out in early access. good job so far DARCO Team!!

anonymous_user_b1be3178 · March 14, 2018, 6:20pm

Thank you very much! We’re trying our best!

anonymous_user_b1be3178 · March 15, 2018, 11:04am

Yesterday 1 p.m. EST we gave out the first batch of Pre-Alpha keys to Youtubers and Streamers, which we contacted some time ago. So you will hopefully be able to see some gameplay videos soon of that very early game version!

For the ones of you, who are interested in joining the Pre-Alpha Access can do so by backing on Kickstarter and telling so, as the updates say!
You have time until Friday 11 a.m. EST to drop us a line!

We also created a Community Channel. Feel free to join, so you can talk about the game and in case you will take part in the Pre-Alpha or later the Alpha version, you will be able to report bugs there. We are still working on Channels and structures, so feel free to make any suggestions!

anonymous_user_40c7d5b2 · March 16, 2018, 3:10pm

I just really want that music in the game footage in the game.

anonymous_user_5de987d7 · March 17, 2018, 2:13pm

This looks, smells, and sounds epic!

FSapio · March 17, 2018, 3:46pm

You did a really good job!

Since you are in a developers forum, it would be nice if you could share some more work-in-progresses and/or some challenges you faced and how you overcame it.

Anyway, besides I’m considering myself supporting you on Kickstarter, I hope that the campaign goes all well, and that other developers here on the forum will help you as well.
Good Luck!

anonymous_user_b1be3178 · March 23, 2018, 8:27pm

Thank you very much guys! And sorry for the late reply. Since we launched the closed Pre-Alpha it has been completely stressful here!

@ In the German forum they always asked for in-game footage since it is an Unreal Engine forum, so I decided to show it here directly xD Guessed wrong! So what would you like to see? Some new models we are working on, texturing? Or more the programmers side of the project, talking about bugs and stuff?

joinplaygames · March 24, 2018, 1:20am

Hi guys! you did a awesome work. looking so goooooooood!!!

FSapio · April 10, 2018, 11:19am

I mean a bit of everything, people on the forum here are vary, and each one of them would like to hear more about one side rather than another. For instance, if you had a problem in running many AIs in the game, how did you solve it? Did you build a tool during the development (here is an example from the Unreal Blog) to speed up your development process? Maybe you had a particular pipeline to create a specific part of the world, or even you set up a very complex material for something and you can tell how you build it iteration after iteration. As a developer, I’m just more curious about these aspects, along with the game itself.

anonymous_user_b1be3178 · April 17, 2018, 6:19pm

Hi, thank you very much for the tip! Since I am only an artist it is hard for me to give such an input, but I’ll tell the programmers of our team to join in this conversation! I’ll take a look at your example right away.

On another note: We went live with a raw Alpha version today. There are 1000 keys in the moment, where you can obtain one of out website, I attached the link. In case anyone is interested you can join at least until the 29th of April.

Galeon · April 18, 2018, 4:47pm

In the trailer the ground textures looks bad and don’t have normal map or displacement, textures ground is what you see the majority of the game, this is very important a game need ground textures that looks beautiful when watching it.

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/2015/11/the_planets_of_star_wars_battlefront_teaser_grab.jpg

The game has good ideas , but the content looks minimal, it doesn’t look ready for Early Access.
Beware Early Access can break a game popularity when it’s too far from finished and buyers are disappointed.
When ARK launched in Early Access it already had gorgeous graphics and most animals and gameplay features.

The game is a great start, i hope content and textures will get better.