[Aspettando] Zaharia, il GDR italiano di ambientazione mediorientale

[Jon Irenicus]

Update#6

The concept of city in Zaharia

In this update we will explain how we want the cities in Zaharia.

We don't want them to be only huge quest hubs, cities must be massive places where the player get lost and meet infinite possibilities. In Zaharia the economic and political power dwells in the biggest cities of the Empire, cities are full of opportunities of any kind and they will be the starting point of most players' adventures.



We begin to create a city from its history. Why does this particular city exist? Why did it become so important? Each city has its own, unique history in our world and in Zaharia it will be the same, the history of a city defines its features, affects its inhabitants’ culture and creates a lot of peculiar realities.



We aim to create living cities, heavily influenced by their history and by the culture of zaharian people. The player will go through crowded bazaars full of spice merchants, only to reach a traditional zaharian tearoom where a mysterious employer will give him more details about a shady but well paid work. In Zaharia the player can't just enter a tavern and find the obviously important rich woman, an exclamation mark above her head, he will need to talk with people instead, to obtain fragments of information that may lead him to the right person.



We won't have the budget to create full, real cities: Ashantir, the capital city, hosts more than a million people, it would be impossible to fully recreate it. We will divide cities in different districts, like in Baldur's Gate 2, and each district will have remarkable features. This choice makes us avoid the two things we don't like in games: absurdly small settlements and big settlements full of building and districts all looking the same. Seeing only 20 buildings in what should be a huge city is ridiculous, but a massive city full of copy-pasted neighborhoods is even worse. That's why we chose to divide cities into districts: we will be able to focus our work on little parts of the city without misleading about the city extension. As you can see in the concepts, we worked on the architecture of different historical phases. No city was built in just one day, that's why the player will see ancient buildings, built in a simpler style, and recent buildings showing more modern shapes. If the game tells the player a temple is 1000 years old, the temple must be really different from a modern building, because of both the technological advance and the evolution of tastes.

[Ashgan83]

Gli artwork mi fanno cagare, ma il concept del gioco mi affascina. Purtroppo hanno sparato troppo alto, e un po' mi dispiace in quanto probabilmente è una delle poche (o forse l'unica) realtà italiane che poteva far uscire qualcosa di decente/notevole.

[Jon Irenicus]

Update#7

What now?

The Kickstarter campaign didn't go well, despite all the positive feedbacks we received we weren't able to properly spread the word about Zaharia.

What will happen now? We don't know yet, we're currently searching for an alternative solution and, if we find something, we'll let you know through our social pages (Facebook and Twitter). We knew that Kickstarter was a risk, so we're not unprepared for this scenario.

We worked a lot on Zaharia, so we can't simply cancel the project, but we don't want to ruin the project with a cheap development that will only lead to cheap results. It would be horrible to cut most contents to release a soulless, anonymous game, both for you and for us.

We want to thanks all the backers for the support, we loved to share Zaharia with you and we hope you will continue to follow and support us.

[arxangel]

Niente ha chiuso, peccato il progetto era promettente.

[Darkless]

S'era già capito dopo una settimana