We are excited to release the news of our new game, Burden of Kin over here under this devlog series. From now on the breakdown of the development and design ideas and the general development progress of the game will be notified via here and we will try to inform people in a consistent way as much as possible!

Burden of Kin is about a hopeless heir of a royalty, named Azy Ywarath, that happened to be in the middle of a conflict between two powerful gods, the Goddess of Death and the God of Life. In the end, Azy is there to solve this conflict using a holy scythe that grants powers of healingand taking souls. 

The chibi concept of Azy Ywarath

About the Game

The player has couple of powers that are relative to the scythe that Azy is holding. Basically the scythe is the main tool of the player in order to take and give lives to the creatures and nature elements. Obviously, this includes a morale choice into the gameplay since taking lives is not that easy in common sense. However that will be touched in later devlogs as the background lore will be improved and change many times. It must be stated that sometimes Burden of Kin can be stated as Reaper Project, coming from the times that the name was still TBA.

 Mechanics wise, the game will work in a linear level fashion, however the levels will feature different ways to be beaten so sometimes the player can have an opportunity to feel some of the morale choices as sometimes taking and giving lives to creatures can be optional. The scythe will be used to melee creatures, and thats how the player can manipulate lifestreams around. The bottom of the scythe will act as a wand that works the opposite of the sharp top part and will regenerate creatures. The healing mechanic will also be used for future puzzle elements in the levels, such as growing up trees or longroots to levitate for higher platforms.

The player is draining the lifestream of the nature life by stabing them, and healing it with a ranged interaction.

Game Design Decisions and Development

Obviously, our first aim is to finish a vertical slice in order to figure out the balance of the game mechanics and see if it feels fluent and fun. However, there are some upcoming ideas that will occur just to make the game flow in a better way. The whitebox has been ready from the first day of the development, so the idea of a level flow can be imagined for use more easily. With this, not only the combat, but the puzzle side of the game can be tested somehow. Of course many of these are placeholders. 

Some of the placeholder puzzle elements such as lever machinations and buttons for levitation.

The development phase is working as desired, as the aim is also to make the whole team comfortable on testing the game as easy as possible on different circumstances of the game, in order to figure out the verticle slice as soon as possible. For the UE4 blueprint codes, the team is trying to give extra effort on buildinig the game as practical as possible to make it easily testable on the go.

Of course this worked for our environment concept as well, so the level in the image can be created more easily on the visual side as well. Some of the remarks of some of the design ideas and decisions:

• The lifestream manipulative creatures can not be killed / drained if there is not enough soul storage on the player to make the creatures lifestream go to zero. Hence a manipulative can either have full or zero health, but not in between. 
• Simple creatures and nature life will have different types. Normal ones will be there to die and live basically. Some other mystical creatures will resist against the player, so we have to block / dodge their attack as well. These will be so called "the boss" of the level.
• There are still some tweaking needed to be done, to make the flow of the game more intriguing for the boss fight, as the boss will feature a stamina bar that needs to be drained before manipulating its life.

Brief showcase of the core mechanic with placeholder models and VFX with animations. It could be seen that the player can drain the number above the manipulative creatures (their HP) and give them back from distance if desired.

Art Style and Concepts

We are aiming to create a stylish game and rely on the post processing in the engine. However, obviously as a vertical slice, while the first build that we are visioning is getting together, there are many concepts that could help people visionize what we visionize as well.

•  Azy Ywarath and the Scythe: We wanted to create a character that is meant to resume a bloodline according to the lore, hence Azy Ywarath shall appear as a nonbinary character, as we want the player to relate our main character in an independent way from any kind of biological gender that Azy can be. So, we visionized the visual characteristics of Azy like in the following concept art picture. Also the scythe should have some mythical characteristics since it is basically symbolizing two mighty gods.

Some of the concept art of Azy Ywarath (top) and the Scythe (bottom).

• Manipulative Creatures: The creatures that the player can manipulate will be again, punitive beings, however they do not have to be realistic necessarily. Of course, the boss of the level and the other creatures around will have differences on their looks to point out the contrast between eachother

The concept art of three small creatures (top) and the mystical boss (bottom). 

• Environment: The conceptual art of the environement type has already been tested on a 3D medium in UE4 and things are going quite the well as the team desired it to be. With the following images, the process of the transition from 2D to 3D can give an idea of the current state of the visuals. Of course, it still is a work in progress

The transition from 2D concept to 3D environment of the environment.

Conclusion

This first part of the devlog was a bit longer than desired as team had a lot of material that has been piled up since the initiation date of the project. However, we feel like so far so good. This part of the devlog featured a lot of concept art but it must be said that the team is already progressing on the 3D environment in Unreal Engine.

We expect to update our devlog series once in a week if that is possible but of course we might need to wait for bigger updates on our project to launch bigger news on it, since this is also an academic project with a deadline. We are very excited to post more stuff over here in time and get any kind of feedback to enhance our game.