Echoes of the Fey: The Immolation [FREE][FANTASY][GxB]

[storykween]

Echoes of the Fey - Episode 0: The Immolation, is now released for free on itch.io!

WATCH TRAILER:


INTRODUCTION TO EPISODE 0: THE IMMOLATION

"Echoes of the Fey" is a visual novel series following a flawed but forcefully optimistic heroine, Sofya Rykov, trapped amidst the conflict between Humans and Leshin (elves). For thirty years, the continent of Oraz has been wracked by the great war between its peoples. The East is ruled by the kingdom of the Humans, divided up into counties and family houses. Beyond the great forest of the west is the Leshin, undying men and women with a strong connection to the Fey, capable of powerful magic.

Humans cannot wield Fey magic on their own, but they know how to channel it into machines called Fey reactors and manipulate it for their purposes. Deeply offended by this use of Fey energy, the Leshin have been fighting for decades to disarm Humans of their Fey reactor technology.

"Echoes of the Fey: Episode 0 - The Immolation" is a short prequel to "Echoes of the Fey: Episode 1 - The Fox's Trail," already released. It reveals the origin of Sofya's strange abilities and how she came to meet Heremon ir-Caldy. Although Episode 1 is a commercial project, Episode 0 is now available FREE.

ABOUT WOODSY STUDIO

I (Jenny Gibbons) run Woodsy Studio along with Malcolm Pierce, and this is our fifth released visual novel. You can find more info about our previous games on our website, which include Serafina's Saga, Serafina's Crown, Quantum Conscience, and Echoes of the Fey: Episode 1. Although we're usually the sole developers of our projects, we hire out for voice acting in our games, and we occasionally recruit other people such as artists and sound designers to help us out.

DEVELOPMENT INFO

This is the first visual novel we've made in Unreal Engine 4, so it has been an interesting adventure! Naturally, it was difficult getting started setting up our own visual novel engine within UE4, but now that we've got the hang of it, we're really loving the engine altogether. There are so many exciting new things we can do with UE4, like set up dynamic cameras and 3D positioning in scenes. The biggest downside is that playing the game requires a decent graphics card (although even some lap-tops with integrated graphics can run the game at low settings).

The game has also been Steam Greenlit (thanks to everyone who voted!) and will available on Steam on February 7, 2017!

[JBShields]

Great! Played the first--looking forwards to it!

[storykween]

Thanks @JBShields! FYI it's out on Steam as of today!

Steam page link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/585990/

[JBShields]

Excellent work! Just played through the prequel.

[Mammon]

Nice game, nice world building and a war that seemed reasonable from both sides of the fence rather than giving humanity some big baddie to be the underdog to. The story was well written and I enjoyed reading it. However, I didn't play through it again for the other options and their route nor did I check out ep1 because of one big issue (because of the engine I assume): The lag. The game went so slow that even on the lowest quality I saw some animations go at less than a second frame rate and the text went awfully slow at times. Combine that with the horrendous errors that the 3D effect could cause, I wouldn't say that Unreal 4 is a real improvement to your game as it is used now.

[storykween]

@Mammon Thanks for your thoughts. I'm sorry that you experienced lag with the game. You should only experience lag and errors if you are playing on hardware below the listed minimum specifications (AMD 7500 or NVIDIA GT 555M video card), which we don't recommend. Was that the case?

I'm glad you enjoyed the story! Episode 1 is fully 2D (made in Game Maker) and has much lower hardware requirements for playing.