A pillow brought to life, given weapon-wielding, spell-casting and monster smashing abilities on a quest to save the Realm of Dreams!
Gaming projects on crowdfunding sites are a huge thing at the moment as we begin to move forward and out of lockdown around the world. So today Game Geeks News are proud to bring you yet another amazing project currently running on kickstarter.
Kelly Eros from Alberta, Canada is the company founder of Alchemy Interactive as well as a game developer, programmer, systems analyst, artist, graphic designer, website developer, and computer technician with over 30 years of professional experience in a wide variety of multimedia and information technology faculties. It has been his passion and his dream to bring incredibly immersive stories to life with digital media, and he has built his life around doing just that. As the original creator of Sak (the character) and the world of SAK’D, Kelly contributes to nearly every facet of art and development.
Take control of Sak, a brave, adventurous, wise-cracking hero… a not-so-ordinary pillow accidentally brought to life, imbued with powerful weapon-wielding, spell-casting, monster-smashing abilities and sent on a quest to save…well, everything. Together, you will explore dangerous and vast environments, discover timeless secrets, and overcome deadly creatures to find the lost fragments of a magical amulet and restore the Realm of Dreams!
This hero faces numerous challenges including falling rocks, pits, lava, rocky spikes, environmental hazards, and a wide variety of monsters determined to make Sak’s life difficult and turn the Realm of Dreams into a nightmare.
Kelly and his team started this Kickstarter campaign to try and raise enough funds for them to speed up development and publish the game in October this year! (2021).
Sak packs some attitude and ability when it comes to monster-smashin’. A pillow with power and prowess, particularly in the department of weapon use and spell-casting, Sak will discover new armour and weapons, powerful artefacts and unlock devastating (and very useful) magical abilities. Kelly is taking the game a bit further than jump n’ punch! Explore the wonderful world of monster-slaying’ weapons and elemental magic.
Some of the key ingredients of the game include a Classic Platformer Feel. Drawing on inspiration from some of their favourite 16-bit arcade and console titles like Castlevania™ and Wonderboy in Monster Land™ they’re keeping it nice and classic, with familiar and comfortable gameplay smothered in a beautiful hand-drawn art style that immerses your imagination right into the world. Engaging Combat. Bring the fury of savage weaponry down on your enemies with brutal punches, and a variety of medieval weapons such as swords, axes, daggers and more. Level up and see what Sak can do!. Eye-Popping Magic spells. Hone your skills in the arcane arts and deal powerful damage to the kingdom’s worst evil. Elemental spells that come in handy for much more than just dealing damage.
Awesome Environments. Walk, crawl, swim, climb, vault, jump off or hoist up ledges as you traverse a dangerous and exciting realm brimming with elemental and environmental dangers. Inclusivity Options. Sak is a hero for everyone, so they’re putting options in the game to allow players to customize their very own ‘Pillow with Power’ with a variety of colours and specified pronoun identifier. Now you can personalize your pillow however you like to make it your own. Stretch goals may also include options for texturing Sak with a variety of cool patterns, or changing the accent colours of weapons and armor.
Sak begins as a simple and slightly confused pillow with a take-no-crap attitude. A mission to save a kingdom and a mind to slay monsters. Throughout the adventure, Sak must learn and discover useful and powerful abilities, find extra health and armour for defence, and earn deadlier weaponry and elemental magic that can be found by destroying certain bosses or special enemies or even discovered in secret or hard-to-reach locations in any of the levels. It is a straight-up classic platformer, but the team are packing it full of all kinds of role-playing fun, too.
Sak will also uncover important unique artifacts that unlock special abilities or features to help progress through the game, such as the lantern; used to light your way through dark and otherwise impassable areas. They’re definitely going to pack some weapon-wielding fun into this game, and if they’re able to hit their target, will be adding some stretch goals to include some additional new weapons!.
The Realm of Dreams has been invaded by monsters who threaten to tear the very fabric of reality apart, plunging the dream world into an eternal nightmare. Sak must unlock the secrets of the castle at the centre of the world, and gain entrance to lands beyond where dangers, rewards and clues wait to be discovered.
Hand-drawn animation and environments give SAK’D an original flavour, while harkening back to the gameplay feel of some of our favourite 16-bit and arcade game classics. The crisp art style, super-fun game mechanics and lots of places to explore everywhere, both above and below ground.
Challenging Environments:
Fight and use your cunning to survive 15 massive, beautifully detailed levels. As Sak, you’ll search through haunted forests full of hidden treasures, evade certain death at every turn, climb treacherous cliffs and precarious peaks, dive to the bottom of a massive and mysterious lake, and delve deep into caverns crawling with monsters.
There are secrets and dangers both above and below ground, with plenty of hidden locations throughout each level for Sak to find and explore.
There are several challenging puzzles for Sak to solve and traps to evade or escape, and ways to interact with the environment using attacks or magic spells that will reveal secrets, answers or even uncover new and interesting ways to progress through each level. Sak is just as much about thinking as it is about fighting!. Our aim is to make SAK’D an intensely fun and challenging platformer for the casual adventurer, the explorer/completionist, the speed-runner and the problem solver alike! Levels aren’t just long for the sake of being long; we’re about the details, so every part of Sak’s world has a story to tell and a part to play in the adventure of a lifetime.
Kelly and the team are targeting a playtime of around 8 hours for the Main Story, or with the Main + Extras 10 hours, or for completionists: a stellar 12.5 hours of coin-collecting, treasure-seeking, monster-slaying fun. They also have lots of ideas for additional content and level sections they would very much like to add if they hit the main funding goal. This additional content would extend the gameplay, and add a richer level of detail to the environments, additional sounds, and more levels.
Music composer and sound engineer Brandon Vix has created a compelling and enjoyable original soundtrack for SAK’D that will keep your ears entertained throughout this awesome adventure! Here is some of Brandon’s work on SAK’D: Rise of Maniakal (the 2.5D role-playing game also in production by Alchemy Interactive):
Kelly and the team are asking for your help to generate $48,620CAD so they can finish making this game to its intended level of quality, complete with gorgeous hand-drawn artwork and a brilliant original soundtrack, and of course to fulfil all rewards. All of that without over-extending the development timeline by anything ridiculous. The team still has to work regular jobs and take extra contracts to keep up with life during the process of development, so they’re maintaining realistic expectations about the development timeline. Achieving this Kickstarter goal will give them more time to work on SAK’D development.
Any additional funds they are able to raise for this project will go right back into making this game even better, with extended levels, more dynamic and entertaining environments, more treasures to find, more spells to cast, weapons to wield and more challenging monsters to slay!.
The $48,620CAD budget they have presented is for the full vision of the core game, but they have several ideas for stretch goals if they are able to hit their initial funding target. Kelly and the team will announce specific goals closer to that time. If all goes well, they’ll be releasing the game in October. But if things go really well, the release will take place a month or two later, with lots of extra content! You won’t have to wait that long to try out the game, though – they’ll be providing you with playable levels in August and an early beta-release version for backers as soon as it’s ready.
To show their thanks, they have put together some really cool rewards for backers, including having your name attached to a mausoleum plaque or graveyard tombstone, or even having our artists craft a custom statue or large monument dedicated to you and featured in a prominent place in the game. They have even added a very special reward for one lucky and very supportive individual who will have the opportunity to work with the artists to craft a terrifying and challenging boss-monster for the end of the second bonus level.
Why Kickstarter?:
The entire team have been working on this project in their free time, investing their own money and time into the development, art and sound. As their pet project, SAK’D is being developed solely by a small but very dedicated team. SAK’D doesn’t have a publisher, so their little studio continues to take on contract work to keep the ball rolling and the bills paid. They want to polish this game as much as possible, super-charge the fun, and include important things like accessibility features and additional language translations so more people can enjoy playing it.
Additionally, it gives the team a little buffer they can use to take more time off from their regular jobs and invest more time into the development game. Kelly wants to make this game as awesome as it can possibly be and needs your help to reach that goal.
And of course, they’ve got a sequel or two lined up. They couldn’t possibly fit all of Sak’s adventures into one game, so naturally, they’ve been working on two.
SAK’D is a 2D platformer with tons of hand-drawn art and is visibly ‘cartoon’ styled, with fast-paced fun and puzzles. This is the title they have been working on this year and the title for which this Kickstarter campaign revolves around.
The other 2.5D title the team has been steadily working on for much longer is called SAK’D: The Rise of Maniakal, and it is quite a bit different from its more 2D predecessor,. For those interested, you can see lots of materials for that on the official website. The environments and characters are three-dimensional, with an exceptionally higher level of detail and roleplaying features.
Since COVID-19 hit the planet, the team has had to work through some serious challenges and it was necessary to slow the development of Rise. If they achieve even a nominal amount of success with SAK’D, they will be ploughing much of their efforts and resources right back into SAK’D: The Rise of Maniakal to continue full-time development of what is sure to be a glorious addition to the franchise. Don’t worry, when Rise goes live in their next Kickstarter, they’ll let everyone know.
Risks and challenges:
Kelly and the team are aware that Kickstarter projects often come with a certain level of risk for the backer. It is their promise to every backer, that to the best of our knowledge and experience, the Alchemy Interactive team will always make sure the budget is aligned with the vision, that their vision is clear, shared by the team, technically feasible, and validated by players. The goal is to have SAK’D released in October this year. However, the team still have bills to pay, so development time and final release date rely heavily on this Kickstarter’s success, so for more information and to support this project visit their kickstarter page.
