🔥 We're back in full force! 🔥

Thanks to the generous funding provided by the FFF Bavaria we're able to start developing a prototype for Fireside! In this article, we'll tell you about the history of our project, our roadmap, and introduce the team behind Fireside! Our goal is to develop a prototype (vertical slice) for Fireside by the end of September!

If you're a publisher or interested player, we encourage you to join our Discord, follow us here on itch, and on Twitter. You can follow the development of our game, get to know the team, and be part of our journey. Obviously, most of our resources will be tied up in actually making the prototype, but we're going to continue releasing one devlog a month and share some assets from our development process. Also, we're going to resume our weekly developer-coworking-streams every Thursday starting 10 AM CEST on our Twitch channel.

Pitch ya game

In case you're new - here's our current elevator(ish) pitch:

Fireside is a game about evenings at the campfire on a journey through the wilderness. The player experiences a wholesome atmosphere and meets a diverse cast of NPCs to share stories with and trade the loot from their latest adventures. We're focusing on a moment of peace that usually gets lost between the loading screens in most RPGs. If you're interested in the game's high concept doc, feel free to contact us!

Pitch ya team

We're a young team of college graduates who are making their first game together! However, during our studies we already worked on several projects between each other, for example, Aces of The Luftwaffe, Passing By, Reblob and Ruffy and the Riverside. Fireside is a big step forward for us but we're confident we can live up to the project's scope!

Carl-Philipp

Carl-Philipp (or CP for short) will be the main Unity developer and level designer for Fireside. He's the technical director at Emergo Entertainment and half of the founding team. His experience as a level designer at Handy Games as well as developer at Softec qualify him as a lead for this position! As a traveller, CP loves northern Italy, the bushy terrain of the black forest and urban landscape of London.

Ilona

Ilona will be the narrative designer for Fireside, working closely with Linus to create the dialogue & storyworld. She's definitely someone who likes epic journeys! Wanting to travel to Japan, New Zealand, Canada or even the moon! Ilona just recently won the German Young Talent Award: Best Prototype with Passing By! We're super excited to have her on board!

Linus

Linus is creating the visuals for Fireside! The visuals you can see in the game jam version were crafted by him. He was part of the team behind Ruffy and the Riverside and is developing Lost Drone as a side project. Linus is drawn to the northern hemisphere looking to travel to Sweden, Ireland or Canada.

Matthias

Matthias loves camping and hiking! One destination he wants to explore are the hot springs & rocky landscape of Iceland. He rounds out the creative part of the team as a sound designer and composer. Currently Matthias is working freelance and at Dynamedion. He already composed the soundtrack you can hear in the prototype here on itch!

Paul

Paul is the project manager for Fireside, co-founder of Emergo Entertainment and supports CP with some additional programming. He has initiated and is organizing Franken Game Jam and helped to develop Reblob back in 2018. Paul would love to find a remote hut in the middle of Norway and breath the legendary wilderness while writing songs.

History

We started making Fireside at Stay Safe Jam one year ago. At the time, we were pretty overwhelmed with the positive feedback we received from the community (as well as winning the Jury's prize out of 256 submissions). We were full of energy and wanted to kick the project into high gear immediately. However, we quickly realized that it would not be possible to do the game justice while we were still occupied with our studies.

Still, we were convinced that we could make Fireside happen eventually and wanted to keep the project alive until the time came. We decided to work 5h per person per week to explore technical challenges the project might pose and develop a solid concept for the game.

In December, after finishing up (most) of our university obligations, we pitched the game at the Games/Bavaria X-Mas pitching, where we once again received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community & experts. We then spent January detailing a game design document & funding plan and submitted an application to the FFF Bavaria on February 1st. One important learning from this intense month was to get rid of procedural level generation since it got more apparent to us that this concept (while interesting from a technical perspective) didn't fit the game's design.

In March, we got the great news that we're receiving 34.000€ from the FFF Bavaria to develop a prototype for Fireside. This journey starts now.

The Plan

As we've been very transparent with our development up to this point, we now want to share our roadmap with you. The goal is to develop a playable (and polished) prototype by the end of September. The first step will be to create a minimum playable product by mid-June. This will be an extended version of the game jam demo (althouth it's a new Unity project). Starting June we will be holding monthly playtests and continue polishing the prototype until September.

We'll use October and November for troubleshooting & bug fixing as well as marketing our prototype to publishers. Dear (potential) publisher; if you've read until this point, it would be great to talk about your project timelines in this context, so please contact paul.redetzky[at]emergo-entertainment.de to stay in touch.

The Reality

Is yet to come, but we're once again very excited to kick Fireside's development into high gear, and this time we've got the resources to commit! But with great transparency comes great responsibility. We're sharing all this info as an insight into our development process (since it might be interesting) but also so you can hold us accountable (if you want to :D). Mostly, this is a reminder to ourselves; let's see how this post ages over the next months. Journey start!