We’ve been working on Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire for coming up on 4 months now. That’s four months of pre-production, where we’ve been developing the world, the art style and the combat prototype.

The continuing challenge that Peter S and I face with the art and writing,  is to develop a believable world that mixes science fiction with medieval elements.

In the world of Tahira, the Astral Empire spanned the galaxy, utilising advanced technology to roam the stars and to colonise far flung planets. In the time period our game is set, the Empire is in the distant past, society has been in decline for years and technology levels have regressed to medieval levels. But an Empire doesn’t just disappear. There are relics of the Empire’s glory days scattered across the world and some of them are still functional.

The interplay of the advanced technology with the more rudimentary tech has been really fun to play with and has given us a great deal of scope within the story to present the player with interesting stories and scenarios.

On the programming  and game design side, Tom has been working away at developing our combat system. We have a system worked out on paper and he is busy implementing the fundamental parts of it so we can test it in practice and start iterating on it.

A couple of pieces of early concept art that explore the Science Fiction Elements: