The Banner Saga Kickstarter Project Update #5, $352,000 and Counting

Stoic's Kickstarter campaign for The Banner Saga is sporting a fifth development update, in which they bring us up to speed on their evolving goals and the progress they've made on the strategy/RPG over the past week. More images next week:
'¢ Our top priority is to build on the work we've completed for the prototype. Basically this means hooking up everything that requires extra functionality; the combat interface, progression through each part of the game including character upgrades, building a party, hiring new units, the multiplayer narrative, the combat board itself and so on. It's a lot of foundation work you never really thinking about when you're playing a game.

'¢ We've started working on our final designs for characters in combat and their variations, color schemes and upgrades. This work includes sketches and designs that will all end up in the art book! We'll probably pop up an image or two next week to let you see what we've been up to.

'¢ We've spent a good portion of our time this week upping the resolution of our existing art to work on the Apple Retina displays for the new iPad, which is a much better step to take sooner than later. I suppose this is a pretty strong indication that we intend to port the game to iOS as soon as we can fit it into a schedule! That said, we won't let this take priority over finishing the game we set out to make on PC and Mac.

'¢ We're currently up to our necks in offers to help with the music and have some great leads! We're making a concentrated effort to sort through all the amazing submissions this week and find our best fit for the project. Just like sound, we would have had to scale back the scope of what we could do with our limited manpower. We now have to option to get a dedicated music house to do more than we could have achieved alone at the highest possible quality.

'¢ We've begun an honest-to-goodness production schedule with an animation studio who will help us complete all the frame-by-frame animations for combat and a handful of cutscenes that had previously been left on the cutting room floor.

'¢ We've also gotten some good leads on great professional help for quality assurance. Boring, you say? It's the most exciting thing we can think of!