Last time the big news was that Poetic advanced to the grand finale of Slovak Startup Awards. So, how did we do?

Pretty good, I must say.

We didn’t win (the guys who can test water pollution quickly with a tiny device did), but our pitch was very well received, we made new friends and got in touch with potential investors. This is good for Sacred Fire.

Andrej explaining that Sacred Fire’s storytelling format can be used to adapt best-selling IPs

There’s another good news coming.

We’re expanding the team!

To accelerate the development, we’ve hired Matus “Blade” Koprda, an experienced Unity developer to create tools that will speed up the building of Sacred Fire’s many story scenes. This is a massive help and will allow Andrej to continue to focus on writing as the story and choices go more in-depth than we originally expected. We estimated the first chapter to take about 20 minutes to play through. Now it seems that it will be close to one hour.

Matus “Blade” Koprda, Poetic’s new developer

Matus has got in touch with us right after our Kickstarter post-mortem presentation to the Slovak Game Developers Association meet-up in late November (the event went very well, by the way). He is very motivated to make Sacred Fire a success.

Future plans

Andrej and I have spent time meeting and talking to investors to get additional funding so that we can sustain the bigger team on a long-term basis.

Together with more demanding writing, this means that we need more time to finish the early access preview. This also means that the full release will be delayed as well.

We will announce the new release date once the dust settles and new team members are up and running. Once again, we’re very sorry for the delay.

Text-based playable version delivered to backers

We’ve delivered a special treat for the backers who are eligible for the early access preview (Firestarter tier, $36+): a text-based playable version of the first chapter to collect feedback on the story and the choices. It offers a glimpse at what the Sacred Fire experience will be like.

We’re really excited about this and the feedback we’ve been receiving is extremely positive.

Thank you for a great year

This has been an exciting year for us and mostly thanks to you. By getting the support of 1,500 backers, we have made a giant leap towards making Sacred Fire a reality. We’ll continue working hard to deliver on the promise to bring you a new storytelling RPG experience. Thank you for being a part of this adventure.