Women In Game Dev: Celebrating the History of ARPG Kristala ✨
Hello there, our dearest of Travelers!
As you likely already know, March is Women's History Month! And as a women-led game studio, we're celebrating by taking a look back at our own history as we reminisce on the epic journey we started nearly seven years ago.
If you're new to our wonderful community—welcome!—you may not know that we've been working hard since 2018 to bring Kristala to life. While we're incredibly proud of where we're at now and the successes we've been able to achieve thus far, we truthfully wouldn't be here today without taking that very first leap as a fresh-faced, fledgling studio all those years ago.
Back then, we were just a small, volunteer team of hungry creators and noob developers fresh out of school and looking to get into the gaming industry. Despite the unforeseen challenges that would arise from tackling a robust and expansive ARPG like Kristala as a first title as an indie studio, we certainly didn't shy away from swinging big.
Looking back now, it's honestly hard to believe that we ever found the time to do things like hand-paint promotional posters or somehow create an initial prototype (completely from scratch and using 100% custom assets we made ourselves, mind you) while simultaneously holding down full-time jobs and caring for little humans.
But even then, it was our unwavering passion and dedication to creating something both unique and inspiring that kept us focused on seeing this distant dream slowly transform into a very real and tangible reality.
After a few years of expanding our skills and getting down the base skeleton for Kristala's story and gameplay, our rag-tag team of volunteers began reaching some exciting milestones, ultimately allowing us to attract even more creators who shared a deep love for dark fantasy games (and cats...we definitely can't forget the cats 🐱).
We were truly humbled to see our initial prototype for Kristala make waves at PlayNYC (our first convention way back in 2019!) and weren't fully prepared for the warm reception our first demo would receive from players just two short years later (with a ton of work packed in between, trust).
By the time 2021 rolled around, we were fortunate enough to unexpectedly receive some of our own personal funding, which immediately pumped into the studio and Kristala's development. This blessing allowed us to not only quit our day jobs, but to also further expand the dev team and enhance the overall quality of the game and its graphics as we made the terrifying leap from UE4 to UE5.
Suddenly, we were no longer just a group of friends trying to make a game...we were a team of experienced developers who were (and still are!) hard set on establishing legitimate careers out of creating immersive, narrative-driven fantasy games.
By 2023, both Kristala the game and our team as a whole really began to find our footing and carve out a legitimate spot for Kristala within the competitive Action RPG and Souls-like space.
After literal years of pitching our asses off and pushing out our newly polished demo, we were able to streamline our overall development process and apply the critical feedback we'd received from both publishers and playtesters to the game.
We've got A LOT more to say when it comes to altering your game solely to please publishers who still end up rejecting you anyway, buuut we'll save that for another day. Thankfully, experiencing this vicious cycle ultimately ended up paying off once we recognized that the only people we need to please are our players.
With the weight of creating for someone else off our shoulders, we were able to get back to our roots: just having fun. And sure enough, larger creators soon began to notice us as additional interest piqued for Kristala, which gave us the confidence to pounce on some of our most exciting milestones yet...
A new-found excitement surrounding the game and our overall confidence in realizing we might actually be creating something worthy of interest and praise brought us to August 2023, when our growing community helped us smash past the funding goal for our Kickstarter campaign (THANK YOU, BACKERS!!! WE 💗 YOU WAY MUHCO!)
At this exciting juncture in our history, despite the continued interest but overall lack of support and buy-in from investors (which is still super frustrating to this day, not gonna lie...did we mention we have a lot more to say about this topic?! 😹), we finally felt like we'd done the damn thang, even if only in some small way.
The overwhelming support from our backers and amazing communities were the final push we needed to get Kristala to its most impactful milestone yet: releasing the game into Early Access on Steam—and continuing to regularly push out kickass new content while consistently improving existing content to this day.
Don't get us wrong, Travelers...there are still so many more mountains for us to climb (lookin' at you, console ports!), but we couldn't let Women's History Month pass by without reflecting on and celebrating our humble beginnings and achievements.
More than anything though, we want to take this time to thank YOU for being here with us. You are, unequivocally and without doubt, the driving force behind Kristala and why we continue to fight, every single day, to get this game to the finish line. We are infinitely grateful to have you along for this crazy, wild, ongoing ride.
Thank you for believing in small developers and supporting diverse creators like us—you truly have no idea just how much it truly means.
Stay tuned, friends...Kristala's history may already be set in stone, but the future's most definitely looking even more FIERCE than ever before. 😼⚔️
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