Fluminus Announcement October 2021

Hey Patrons,

First of all, we hope everyone is doing okay. Here in the Netherlands, where I'm writing this, we've just entered the second wave. Due to the new harsher Covid measures, we sadly had to end Laura's internship early, so for the coming while community updates will be coming from me instead of her as previously announced.

Secondly, we want to thank all of you for sticking with us even if we had to delay this announcement slightly. A lot of hard work has gone into making sure we can announce everything we want today, and to make sure we can deliver on these promises. Without further ado, let's get into it.

So, let's start with Flumiverse. Not only the name of the shared universe between our games, but also the name of a new service we've been preparing. This new service will let you find all Fluminus content in one place, from games, to books, comics, and even movies and series. Now, that sounds ambitious for such a small team, we know. That's why we've teamed up with many smaller creators to develop all this content. With so many different things, there'll be interesting content for everyone. And, although all content takes place in the same universe, it's absolutely possible to only follow the content you're interested in. Now, lets talk about the price to access all this. The website will have two tiers, a free tier and a paid tier. Free will get you access to most of the website, however, a lot of the larger scale content (like the main games) will require a subscription. Every Patron at any tier currently supporting us, even if no longer a Patron at launch, will be getting a subscription from us for free for the first year as a thank your for helping us get our company of the ground. Here's a further breakdown of the tiers and what content can be accessed:

Look forward to an official Flumiverse announcement that goes further in depth on the launch date and content later this month. We are also looking forward to hearing any feedback on these tiers, feel free to discuss them in the comments below or in the official Discord's Patron channel.

We are still first and foremost a game development company. So, let's talk games. For 2021, we have 2 games planned for release, the first in June and the second in November. When starting Fluminus, the goal was to push boundaries, explore newly available tech, and create something truly amazing. Therefor, I'm very pleased to announce both of these games will have full VR support, including roomscale support. As VR is getting better, the games for it also start needing higher end computers. We however want to keep non-VR available for as many people as possible. We're developing and testing on a machine with a GTX 760 graphics card, and an i5-4440. If those words don't mean anything to you, that's a midrange 2013 computer. We've even got VR working on that PC, so that's 7 year old hardware running our game in VR on a Vive! We're extremely proud of that, and though minimum and recommended specs will be changing as we head towards a launch date, rest assured we're keeping all sorts of computers in mind.

Ofcourse our most ambitious project is Isle Vatra. With a 16km² open world, we believe this to be one of the largest VR open worlds to date, coming in just under Rockstars LA Noire VR with a 21km² map size. This becomes an even greater task with our game taking place mostly underwater, with the ocean being over 300 meters deep in areas. To put that in perspective, divers usually only go to about 40 meters. And, although we've had a little bit of a delay with the ocean and weather systems as we were waiting on some new tech, that tech is now finally here and we've in the meantime been working on the island itself. Though we'll keep the actual ingame stuff for a later reveal, here's a first look at the new ocean and weather systems:

The other of the two releases will also take place in Flumiverse, and will have some obvious links, although both games follow separate stories. This game will be an episodically releasing game, with 2 new openworld maps releasing every year, along with smaller (and community-created) content throughout the year. We'll keep most of this game secret for a later announcement, but we're very happy to already tease that the first map will be our head office's hometown of Amsterdam. This game will also be fully available in roomscale VR in addition to "pancake mode" (what VR users call normal flat screen gaming) and has already been worked on quite a bit in greyboxing and alpha testing stages, with most of the first map already greyboxed. More on greyboxing, what it is and why it's done, will come in the next writeup later this month.

In the words of Steve Jobs, "one more thing", and we've saved the biggest for last. In short, Misc. A Tiny Tale will from now on be developed and published by Tinyware Games. That statement will need some explaining and some further info though, so let's move on to the long version. Michael, who is our lead developer on Misc., will be developing and releasing Misc. A Tiny Tale through his own company Tinyware Games. Since before Fluminus, he's the one who got our team together during development of Jurassic Explorer, and he has all the know-how to develop this game into the best version it can be. In the team also has Bernard, our music composer, and I'm still programming. So the team stays the same, but on paper it's a different company. We've made this difficult decision for a bunch of reasons, but the most important thing is that updates on the game will now come from Tinyware rather than Fluminus. If you've wishlisted the game on Steam, you may already have noticed the developer and publisher changing there. On other platforms, these are the new channels to follow for Misc. specifically:

Website - https://www.tinywaregames.com/ 

Discord - https://discord.gg/DHA59G5 

Twitter (Misc) - https://twitter.com/miscatinytale 

Twitter (tinyware) - https://twitter.com/tinywaregames 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/tinywaregames 

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjry1bNIS5T_K4d1APJKb7g/

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/miscatinytale 

We also realise that a new month has just started, and that most of you will have been already billed for this Patreon even if you'd have preferred switching over to Misc's Patreon. If this is the case, please reach out before November 1st, and we'll give a refund and you'll also still receive the Flumiverse free year. We hope this is a good way for us to meet in the middle.

So, that's everything we have to share today. It's a lot, so we've had to summarize some things, but we hope you're all up to date now on our current progress and changes. Please let us know if there's any questions, and we'll have another post on here detailing the greybox stage of our workflow later this month.

-River, Lead Developer at Fluminus