Sauropod building Castle Story through Kickstarter

Castle Story
 
It looks like Minecraft and plays like Warcraft, but Sauropod Studio believes the PC game they’re currently working on, Castle Story, will weave a unique tale of its own.

Sauropod was founded by François Alain and Germain Couët, a pair of Université de Montréal game design post-grads, who built the original Castle Story prototype as part of their final assignment. They had been working on it as a hobby for about a year and a half, until this past January, when they felt that fleshing out Castle Story’s mishmash of real-time strategy gameplay and unlimited building and landscape possibilities warranted their full attention.

In Castle Story, players direct little yellow bipeds named Bricktrons. The idea is to manipulate the terrain around you and build a strong enough castle, made up of rectangular blocks, to withstand a barrage of nightly paranormal assaults.

“We like to call Castle Story a creative strategy game,” says Couët. “The whole world is made of blocks and you can deform the landscape around you. It’s all very dynamic and the player can influence everything around them. We want to make a game that’s very basic in the mechanics but has endless possibilities.”

Minecraft made voxels en vogue, but Castle Story has an important distinction: instead of cubes, the Bricktrons will be dealing with rectangular bricks. It’s a subtle change that dramatically affects the strategy behind castle building, points out Couët. “With a wall of cubes, if you break one at the bottom, the cubes are affected by gravity and the whole column will topple, whereas rectangular bricks will still stand if the one below them is broken.”

Sauropod is looking to work on the game for another year, but like Minecraft they plan on releasing it as early as possible for people to play while routinely updating it and adding features afterwards. They’re completely independent, so starting today they’ll be turning to Kickstarter to help cover a year’s worth of development costs. The $60,000 they’re asking for is the bare minimum, Couët says, adding that even if they don’t reach the target the Castle Story dream won’t die.

Contributing $15 to the Kickstarter will entitle players access to the beta this fall and subsequent updates (meaning you’ll get the finished product once it’s done), while tossing another fin in the cup will net players a super-early prototype to take for a spin.

“Neither François or myself felt like we would fit in at a big studio,” says Couët, who’s pleased with the feedback from fans and peers. “We decided to try it out and see if we could survive on our own, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.” ■

Check out the Castle Story trailer and Kickstarter info on the Sauropod site.