At Project House, Leeds over 40 games will be demoing, along with 300+ developers, game industry publishers, investors and platforms in attendance for GaMaYo 26! Join us on the 21st of May for a day full of demos and round tables, networking and more.

This event is brought to you by Game Republic along with their Official Partners Red Kite Games, Double Eleven and Xsolla, with event sponsors Plus Accounting, Kudos Games, Steel City Interactive and Escape Technology.

Today we are looking at ‘The Ascendance’ which is confirmed to be at the event, from Noctal Games!

The Ascendance, by Noctal Games

What would be your description of your game?

The Ascendance is a first person narrative-driven dark fantasy RPG. Climb a towering monument of trials and horrors, uncover its buried truths, and content with a voice in your mind. Trust it, or don’t. At the summit of ascension the choice is yours…but the truth may not be.

How did development start? (Were there any key inspirations or ideas that drove you?)

Development started during our masters’ course at the University of Bolton. We made similar projects for our modules and eventually stumbled into turning a previous project into the very first and earliest prototype of “The Ascendance”. It received good feedback and praise as well as directions and possibly a future for it when we took it to events and showed it off at exhibitions/showcases. We then finished our masters’ degree and decided to begin turning it no a fully publishable game. Some of our key inspirations/ideas was the idea of making an indie studio from this and leaving our own mark in the industry. Fromsoft games, the success of other indie games around us and then the energy and passion of indie developers at events all made us want to chase this dream.

Tell us about the team behind the game?

The team behind the Ascendance consists of a fair variety of faces. We have on our core team:

Alex Zlotea – environment artist

Matthew Cowley – Enviroment artist

Ben King (me) – Level designer/producer/Ceo

Ben Stott – Technical Designer

Courtney Bernard – Character Artist

This is our core team from our masters degree course where we first began the studio! We’ve attended events since and all went though our respective versions of undergrad games courses. However, since then…we’ve looked into additional aid in other areas or faces that can help everything become the best it can be. In that we’ve since had help from Joe Newstead who is a Generalist Artist doing odd bits of VFX work and concept art. We’re all united under the vision of making our own studio and putting our creativity/style of things into the world, whether that’s our work culture or our creative output. We want to make sure that vision comes to fruition.

What kind of experiences do you hope to bring players?

With this game and any other projects, we want to leave them with an impression. Not just something like every game wants to make them return or spread word. But a genuine thought process afterwards that they think about for a while afterwards, our main goal is to do this through narratives, create stories and worlds that linger in minds. But more than that, we want them to realise the value and creativity indie games can bring and the uniqueness that comes with that by combining different personalities and passion in all aspects. We hope to do so and get better at it with time.