Community Meetup - Gamescom!
over 8 years ago – Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 09:41:06 PM

Hello all!

A quick update for you today. We're taking RSVPs for a Fan Meetup at Gamescom. If you will be in the area or at the event, we'd love to meet you!

We will be meeting in Cologne on Saturday, August 20 at 1900/7:00pm. We're finalizing the location details, but if you are interested in attending, we would love to meet you. 

You can send us a message here if you can attend, or you can send a PM to me (Danicia) on the Mandate Forums.

See you in Cologne!

Community Drop: Game Vision
over 8 years ago – Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 12:28:28 AM

Hello all!

In the last update, we promised that we would share our plans for Early Access and the vision for the game with you. If you already saw that update, you’ll know that we talked about some changes in the scope of the game and a new focus for the initial release. We’ve had to take some tough decisions and we’ve taken a hard look at what we pitched, what you wanted and what we can deliver.

So, we will start with the overview. We will release The Mandate as an Early Access title in 2017. The Early Access version will introduce you to the story and give you the opportunity to explore the universe. We expect to have the opening arc of the main story and several hours of side-quests as hand-crafted content for you to explore. In addition, you will be able to explore fringe clusters and experience the sandbox.

We will have trading, combat, customization, and crew management. You will be able to find your own role within the universe. You can be a trader, finding rare and valuable cargoes and matching the lowest prices with the highest bidders. You can hunt pirates in the lawless fringes or become a pirate yourself and prey on fat traders scurrying from port to port. You can fit your ship with a variety of modular ship sections to optimize your vessel for different roles. Finally, you will be able to interact with your crew. They will progress along with you and you will have choices to make about their specialization as well as potential replacements. Crewmembers will have their own stories to explore and personalities that might impact the way that you choose to explore the game.

Let’s take a closer look at some of those systems.

First, the story. The Mandate has a huge and branching plot that’s already fleshed out and that will take a long time to play through. The story is branching based on your decisions - which faction you choose to support as well as which enemies and allies you made.

This means that you will be able to replay it several times and get a different experience each time. The Early Access version will introduce you to the first act of the story and give you a chance to take your first steps in that journey. As well as the main story, there will be crew missions, side-quests, and all kinds of discoverable content waiting for you. Your relationship with your crew is important to the game and we’ll have some of that in the Early Access version. Your officers have skills that affect the performance of your ship and help you in other areas such as diplomacy, trade, and science; skills can be learned and officers can specialize as you journey through the galaxy. In addition, your officers will impact the story as a result of their personal stories and their personalities.

We’ll release significantly more content after Early Access; you’ll get to advance further along in the main story as well as finding more things to do along the way. The story is a central pillar of the game and you’ll be thrust into the very center of galactic politics and intrigue with the opportunity to change everything. As we previously mentioned, the Early Access version will be a single player experience. The story is designed around a single captain and their crew.

The first sandbox cluster will comprise 3-4 systems. These will be filled with NPCs to interact with, resources to find, trade deals to make, pirates to dodge (or hunt!), and an opportunity to make your name as whatever you want to be. More fringe clusters will be added after Early Access with a different mix of content and new opportunities to explore. What we call Fringe cluster is the wild region outside the mandate space. Everything is possible here and they can be dangerous for the unwary. As you progress, you’ll find greater rewards in more remote areas - if you are prepared to accept the greater risks.

When we looked at your expectations for the game, a common theme was customization. You wanted the opportunity to adjust the way that your ship and your crew worked together so that’s an important element for us, too. Ships are modular; different sections can be fitted together. Different subsystems and weapons can be added to really specialize your vessel for the task at hand. Whether you want a fast trader, a science vessel, or a heavily-armed warship, you’ll be able to adapt your ship as you want. Your crew is also central to your plans. Your officers will progress and have the opportunity to improve and specialize. You will be in control of how they develop so that your crew and your ship together form a perfect tool to carve out your place in the galaxy. The crew are also part of your experience in other ways. They will have their own motivations to explore, loyalties, and personality traits which can affect the way that you progress through the game. You’ll have choices to make about your crew. Will you replace difficult members or work through their problems? When the Early Access launches, these systems and options will already be in place, more choices and further opportunities will be added after launch.

Exploring and chasing danger implies the chance to get into combat. We have come up with a different approach to most space games. We wanted a system that was about resource management and planning, which also emphasized command rather than one that was about twitch play or reflexes. We want you to be a commander rather than a fighter pilot. We want you to make the decisions that matter and then watch your crew make them happen. We’ve built a system that runs as asynchronous, turn-based battle. You’ll plan your actions, provide orders to your crew and then watch those actions play out in slices of real-time. You can adjust your plans and react to new information between each turn as well as run simulations of the next few seconds to check your strategy. We will be able to give you a detailed look at this later on.

The center of your experience is the bridge of your ship. You will see your officers working away at their stations, as well as the holo-projector which lets you plan your journeys around the galaxy. It also runs your battlespace simulations. A large viewport shows you a variety of camera angles outside your ship as well as a series of options when you are docked in a station. This is your command center and you can run everything from here. You can zoom in for fine-control and closer inspection or you can issue general orders from the default view. Later on, there will be an opportunity to have your own base of operations as well as to lead your crew in daring boarding combat operations. Boarding combat will be developed after the Early Access Launch. We have a list of features that we hope to have ready to roll out between Early Access and final release and we will be able to give you a more complete view of those plans closer to the time. For now, we are concentrating on what we know we can deliver and avoiding the trap of over-promising.

All in all, we have a solid design and framework to build upon. We are busy making all of this work at the moment and we will be sharing development updates with you all the way up to Early Access and beyond. Look out for videos of the team at work, feature and art showcases and gameplay videos as we get closer to release.

Developer Spotlight - IainC
over 8 years ago – Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 12:11:57 AM

Hello everyone! My name is Iain and I’m the Design Director for The Mandate. I joined the project back in May - you might remember that Michael mentioned some new people in his last producer’s letter - and I’m very excited to help bring this fantastic universe to life.

I’ve been working in games for almost 20 years now, I started off at Games Workshop as a designer for tabletop miniature games and, over the years, I’ve worked on everything from AAA MMOs and FPSes to mobile games. Most recently I came from Wargaming.net where I worked on a couple of different projects and I recently moved from Kyiv to Kosice so that I can work directly with the core team in the Perihelion offices. As a keen photographer, I’ve been spending most of my free time roaming around the Slovakian countryside trying to capture the incredible scenery of this part of the world. I’m also fortunate enough to live right in the heart of the historic town centre so I’ve been happily snapping the gorgeous gothic architecture that Kosice boasts. I’m originally from Scotland, so I didn’t learn any Slovakian at school. While all of the team here speak excellent English, I often need to fall back on my bad German and terrible Russian outside the office.

When I joined the project, I spent a long time reading all that I could about the game, I went through the Kickstarter page and the website, looked through all of our documentation and tried to understand what was happening in the development process. I could see how much potential there was in the game and that there were many exciting possibilities that we could explore as a team. However there were also some big disconnects between the way that we were working and the result that we wanted to produce. On top of that, we had a lot of different conflicts between the expectations of our community. We talked about this in the team and worked through the problems with some experts and, eventually came to the conclusion that we needed a new approach to building The Mandate.

So, as well as introducing myself, I’m also introducing the vision for the game to you. We know that you’ve been waiting a long time for something from us, and our plan is to deliver something soon. We aren’t going to take another three years to build a whole new game. We expect that we will launch Early Access in early 2017. You’ll get a roadmap of our new plan and a more detailed overview of the new game vision in the next couple of updates, then we’ll be answering some of your specific questions once you’ve all had a chance to read those.

As you can probably imagine, some things are going to be different. The scope of the game has become more focused and we’ve had to take a long, hard look at our feature list. We’ve been collecting feedback from the forums, Kickstarter comments, and other sources to understand what you wanted from the game and we’ve distilled that down into a set of core principles. There’ll be a longer article in next week’s update giving you more detail, but for now, I can tell you a little about what to expect.

Firstly, most Early Access games are basic, bare-bones affairs that will be built on and polished until the final release. Ours is no different. The game that we will release in the new year will not be the full game, but it will be a playable slice of the final product. We’ll have exploration, combat, the opening arcs of the story, customisation and the opportunity to discover our universe. It’s also going to be a single-player experience. We looked hard at what you told us that you wanted and a strong story was one of the most commonly discussed features. We want to do that right and we want to give you an amazing adventure. That can be done best in a single-player environment. We haven’t ruled out the possibility of specific co-op content in the future but we aren’t going to develop any for Early Access.

The story won’t be the only content in The Mandate, you also told us that you wanted an interesting sandbox to play in and so we are building a game that rewards exploration and discovery as well.

Once we have launched the Early Access version, we’ll be adding new features, new content and polishing the game based on the feedback from our players - from you. We expect that we’ll be pushing out updates to the game every couple of weeks once we are live so there will always be new things to explore and new adventures to find. As we get closer to Early Access, we will release another roadmap describing our plans for after the launch.

We have a strong core team here in Kosice and we have some great people working alongside us in other locations too. Michael and I have looked hard at what we need to produce and we know that we have a steep hill to climb. The team is confident that we can build a great game. We are confident that you will be excited to play it.

All the best!

IainC

New Community Manager & UX Survey
over 8 years ago – Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 11:27:43 PM

Greetings all,

I'm Donna aka Danicia, your new Community Manager! I've popped in here and there on chat and such, and wanted to make a formal introduction to all of you. First, if you haven't seen it yet, I posted Kickstarter Update #58 yesterday and created a forum thread for it which you can ask specific questions. I've already started getting questions in the chat about my role and what attracted me to the project. (Thanks to Sugeng Raharjo!) So, here's a bit about me!

I'm a huge gamer, from video games to tabletop games, and also miniatures wargaming. I've been working in Community Management for nine years, working on both large and small projects. I've spent time working on Guild Wars 2, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising, and all manner of games from what used to be Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak). While I am a huge Star Wars geek, my favorite games to work on have been the smaller ones. I love working with indie development and small studios; they attract very passionate and involved players.

In my spare time, I am a tabletop nerd, leading many groups locally to Seattle, teaching people how to play analog games. I founded my own games convention, called OrcaCon. I'm about to start playing in a new Journeyman's League for Warmachine/Hordes, as a new ruleset just came out. My main Warcaster is Magnus, the Traitor, and I like poking fun at serious color schemes.

If you want to know more, feel free to ask anything here or you can follow me at http://about.me/Danicia if you like to bribe your CM, I'm not into candy or sweets. I'm a big beer geek. I hope that you can all recommend your favorites from your country, and I'll do my best to try them all and tweet about it.

Let's get to know each other. Drop by this thread to say hello!

User Experience Survey

Our UX (User Experience) Designer wants to know more about you and created a survey for backers and potential players. If you have a few moments, we would appreciate it! Go to The Mandate Questionnaire. Thank you!  

Cheers,

Donna

The Mandate Producer's Letter
over 8 years ago – Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 12:58:27 AM

Dearest patient Backers, ahoy!  

First off, let me introduce myself; my name is Michael I am the executive producer for The Mandate and I arrived in the team full-time about 4 months ago. My role is to oversee the production, ensure we are actually building the game that will deliver the experience we envisaged, and I negotiate with our publisher.  

Originally, I was only working as a consultant but I fell in love with the universe, the game itself and the talented people building it. When they asked me if I could join full time I didn’t had to think twice. It is not the easiest project but all of us are fighting for making it the incredible experience we all want it to be.  

First off, let me apologize to you on behalf of the whole Mandate team. We read the forum and tweets regularly, we know you are waiting for at least news and we know our communication was very timid, skittish and lately almost frozen. Today finally we have news worth sharing, this means positive news.  

The team and the project went through a rough patch last year. We iterated and changed and fell short while building the grand vision of the game we had, we struggled to communicate our intentions within the team, we faced difficulties with our heads down.  

One of the decisions we made early on was to relocate the team and work mostly from our office in Slovakia. This helps a lot as it improves communication and gives us much faster iteration cycles. We also worked on sharpening the game vision, and organized the teams differently. We convinced amazing people to join the team – I am super happy that we found Iain and Charles as game designers, Amelie as UX/GUI designer and Donna as our Community Manager (you might have already met her).

In this global world we learned that communication needs to be easy and instant and that humans -- even the nerds we are -- benefit from being next to each other to make quick and better advised decisions.  

Many of you have been supportive enough to write "take your time and don't screw up this game" that's exactly what we intend to do, to continue to do until we get it right.

Decisions and changes were made to the team and to the game so that by bringing the pieces together we could find the internal logic we were missing so far. Now we need to flesh things out so that the dream we had 4 years ago can stand on its strong base.  

Let me now give you the details of what we’ve achieved so far and the issues we have encountered.  

World building  

We are putting the Galaxy together. The first Cluster, which consists of a four star system, is done and it was very needed to have the core systems in place for fast iteration and to have a quality benchmark for level design -- now it’s much easier for us to expand and build the rest of the “world”. It was a major step and we’re much relieved now that it’s completed and that it works as we imagined it.  

We wanted something rich, we have it, next for us is: build on it and use it up to its full potential.  

Missions  

We are starting to populate the Clusters with missions. This includes both tutorial missions and advanced missions.  

Since the relationship with the crew is our focus, personal missions will be included, like requests from your very own officers. You will dive into their Background and learn about the world you live in through their own experience. We know precisely the experience we want to create but it ties into a lot of game Systems. We are looking at how to integrate this at the moment.  

As of today, the entire story for the first Cluster is completed, we are currently designing the crew missions, additional side missions and faction specific missions.

Story  

Some of the delay can be attributed to the narrative. When we put everything together, we felt, that it was too weak. Of course our universe stayed the same and, but we have now achieved the internal consistency we needed and a way for the player to create his unique version of the story.  

There is a much deeper and richer narrative, which ties into you as a captain on a personal level as well as your crew, while still retaining all we have promised before story wise, like the conflict between factions for example.  

Events  

Events are situations that happen during play and require a response from either your crew or your captain. Basically every event has a clear cause and effect, but there are a couple of events that are triggered randomly, to act as some kind of surprise element you need to take care of.  

For now, events are split into two categories: Interior Ship Events, affecting the interior of the ship and Space Events, relating to situations that occur outside of the ship, such as rogue asteroids, pirate attacks, etc. This is one of the things we had right, so we kept it and are working on integrating it to the missions.  

Exploration  

Exploration will be a big part of the experience when you are roaming the universe. You will encounter different Points of Interest (POI) -- You can unveil them by ordering your Astrogation Officer to activate the ships’ scanners. There you might find lore, items, events or other types of activities, such as special combat encounters. This is part of the things we decided to add as we looked at how we could make our adventure mode the most interesting we can. We will confirm several more aspects as we move forward.    

User Interface  

For our internal test purposes, the UI did not have to be very user friendly or pretty, so let me tell you, it made Amelie’s eyes bleed. But slowly but surely we are changing this, replacing placeholder art with real art assets – she is thankfully already recovering. Of course this process needs a lot of iterations, but hey – we are getting there and moving towards playtest in the next 3 months!  

Control Scheme  

This is one of the things that nobody notices if you get it right, and everybody complains about it if you do not. During the last months we iterated on the control scheme for the Adventure Mode. Currently you can decide how to navigate your ship, you can also set a desired camera angle to enjoy the universe either top down or more from a third person view. We need to pass the validation test in a few months and iterate to make it smooooth.  

E3  

We wanted to use E3 to reconnect with the press and the user base. Garret, our art director was joining our publisher in L.A. this year.  

It was great for us to talk to the press and showcase what we have in a transparent fashion, it was great to talk to the curious and the fans, to collect feedback, to get to know our audience better.  

These events have the power to ground you, you work all year long on your thing and then you remember bluntly who the people are you’re making this game for.  

Our motivation got a big boost, we’re just as excited and impatient as you are to be able to share more of the stuff!  

The rough patch I was telling you about in the intro  

Well, it’s no news that objectives and priorities change during production, systems have to be altered or extended, to match new needs and wants from the community. Code and art have been refactored, designs have been updated and extended. We were ambitious, we took risks and tried things. Trust me we still are, but some of the stuff was just not working and we had to fix it before going further down the line, even if going further down the line is somehow reassuring because then you ask no questions. 

We have finally reached a stage where we feel the ground work has been laid for the game that we want to make, there is still a lot of work but we have the solid base we needed. Now we are building on it, careful to check, test and iterate we are still making the game that got us started.  

Once again, I want to thank you for your support, for your understanding, for believing in the same game vision we do. Making good games is a challenge but it’s the one we chose and it’s the one you trusted us with. We’re getting there.  

Michael

Stay up to date with The Mandate: 

• https://www.facebook.com/mandategame/ 
• http://www.mandategame.com/ 
• https://twitter.com/mandategame