Worship

Created by Chasing Rats Games

Blindly serve a dreadful god and lead its cult in a fresh multiplayer take on the roguelike genre inspired by Pikmin

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Development update #2 – Character animations and team expansion
over 2 years ago – Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 04:32:21 AM

It’s about time for another Worship development update! The team was very busy this summer, so we do have some things to share with you all. Without further ado let’s dive into these news!

More character animations!

We’ll start with the best part of the update: Animations! The art team is hard at work on character animations for the cultists and followers, so we have a ton of new animations done and implemented in-game. We have way too much to showcase them all here, but here are a few of them:

Grabbing idle loop animations
Grabbing walking loop animations
Grabbing stabbed idle loop animations
Attack animations
Death animations
Object lifting squetch animations
Object lifting animations
Carrying object walk animations

These are just a sample of the animations we now have for lovable heretics and their leaders, we spared you for now the gruesome stabbings of grabbed followers and many others. We are super happy with how they look in-game and we are eager to show them all to you later in development.

Development progress

Asides from art and animations, we made significant progress on Worship’s core features including networking. Things are coming along for the playable build we are working toward internally, so you might see glimpses of it in the next updates. Combat is one of the next big things we will be working on and we are eager to make An-Ansgaidh proud with the upcoming bloodshed.

To help with all of that, since the last update we welcomed 3 new talented people into the team! Here’s a quick introduction to the newest Chasing Rats team members:

  •  Antoine joined the team as a game designer and programmer. Since his arrival, he's brought a lot to the project with his experience in both design and programming.
  •  Gabrielle is joining the art team this week and we are super happy to have her on board for 2D art and animations.
  •  Marie-Blanche will be joining us next month as a 2D Artist as well as Technical Artist!

That’s all for this development update. We do have a cool An-Ansgaidh fanart to showcase and close the update!

Artist: CreepityGrimbo

Production update #1 – Art research and progress towards a playable demo
almost 3 years ago – Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 07:32:48 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Kessessa, Mother of the Coven - The community god awaken
almost 3 years ago – Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 02:29:11 AM

Time for our first post-campaign update! This one will be very substantial because it features the official arrival of the Kessessa, created with the community god event, into the world of Worship! We are also ready to start distributing the first wave of rewards which includes: Discord backer roles, digital wallpaper for desktop/mobile and Struggling steam keys! More on this later into the update, it is now time to prepare fresh blood sacrifices and bow before our new eldritch god: Kessessa, Mother of the Coven.


Kessessa awaits faithful cultists in Worship!

We are very excited with Kessessa joining the other eldritch gods of Worship. The community god event was a lot of fun for the team and we hope that it was also exciting for our backers and community! Our artists have adapted the selected concepts into the Worship artstyle and we have also seized the occasion to create additional lore around this newest addition to our universe! Finally we wanted to go one step further so our audio director composed an amazing new track for the game themed around Kessessa's arrival into the mortal realm! We hope you will enjoy all of the following content about the Mother of the Coven!

Bow before the Mother of the Coven in all her might and wisdom

Gameplay impact

Everything in Kessessa's many all-knowing eyes is research. Followers are rewarded for collecting experimental subjects, including unique materials, new types of unspeakable horrors, and her favorite resource of all: sentient beings. Having mastery over the secrets of the natural world, Kessessa grants her followers a keen eye for weaknesses. Her followers are stronger against types of unspeakable horrors they have previously defeated.

Persecuted for their pursuit of knowledge, followers of Kessessa have learned to turn their arts against their foes. Medicine and alchemy are twisted into rituals that cast disease and deadly poison upon enemies and grant extreme...evolution to her worshipers. It is all part of progress, of course.

Everyone knows of Kessessa's strong ties to the Coven and enmity with the Church, but what is less well known is the fear in which she instills in the Untamed. Often harvested by Kessessa's followers as test subjects for unsavory experiments, the Untamed have learned to fight fiercely in every encounter lest they be subsumed by the fanatical pursuit of knowledge.

But not all have cause to fear. When Kessessa's devotees encounter the masses, there is a chance of meeting those more sympathetic. Perhaps someone healed by a passing scholar, or a group unsatisfied by the tyranny of the church. These beings will more easily become allies...or followers.

Cultists and followers of Kessessa

We had to make some changes from the original design that was selected to fit better the art direction and make it reasonable animation-wise. We are pretty happy with the results and we hope you'll be eager to unlock these skins in game to worship Kessessa with style!

NEW SONG: Price of Progress - Kessessa summon theme!!

This update is a thank you to our amazing backers and we felt it was fitting to make an epic theme for this new god born from the will of the community! We don't want to spoil any of the good stuff so lets dive right into this beautiful piece:

With this unfathomable amount of knowledge, if the world is a battlefield, then her mind is the most potent army

Three artists in addition to Léandre Monette lent their talent for this music track and we couldn't be happier with the results! Tell us what you think about it in the #bard-rat-lair channel of the Discord server! 

Bonus lore

"The excruciating pain radiating from her untreated charred skin forced her to lean against a stone wall, barely still standing among the ruins she took shelter in. As the woman closed her eyes trying to recover some strength, the atrocities she endured haunted her mind. The pain was ever present, as if it had happened mere seconds ago, a vicious reminder that her world was scorched out of existence by the church and its inquisition.  

Her tribe of pacifist nomads never interacted much with the outside world, only sometimes passing through villages and small cities to heal the wounded and treat epidemics when a need for their knowledge arose. That was before the bishop declared their practices heresy. Everything she held dear was reduced to ashes. Their residual collective knowledge passed through oral tradition, now hanging by a thread, inhabiting her wounded mind and body.  

Dogs barking in the distance startled her out of her motionless sleep, petrified by the echoing voices of men in armor steadily approaching the ruins in which she found respite. As the nomad girl abandoned all hope, her gaze met a surprisingly intact altar among the rubble, adorned by an inhuman looking statue. At that instant, an uncanny presence crept in her mind, oddly reassuring, almost like a mother’s embrace. Kessessa spoke no words, but the woman understood the offer: her tribe’s entire knowledge in exchange for the means to avenge her brethren."

First wave of rewards: Wallpapers, Discord titles and Struggling steam keys

While waiting for some backers to handle issues with processing their pledge, we were putting the finishing touches on the systems that will enable the first wave of rewards. Discord titles and Wallpapers will be managed by a bot on our Discord server, while the Struggling steam keys will be distributed by email for those who pledge for this add-on. 

New Discord server emojis!

We have gathered a community of more than 2570 cultists and followers on the Chasing Rats Discord server! We are overjoyed with how the server keeps being wholesome even with its rapid growth. You all made it clear that you needed more server emotes to prove your devotion to the old ones, so we made more! This new batch of emotes will become available on the server soon after this update goes live!

We also have a new animated addition just in time for the new music revealed in this update, behold cultJAM:

Finally, due to a community suggestion, we decided to share the full sized emojis so that you can use them on your personal servers! Here's the link to download the zip, enjoy! 

That's about it for this update! We have a lot of work to do on Worship so the updates will be a lot less frequent, but we will keep you updated during the development process.  To close, here's a cool pixel cultist animation fanart:

Artist: Heretical Grinch

Campaign ended: Thank you!! - Next steps!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Apr 09, 2021 at 07:34:12 PM

What a month it has been! You are all, individually and collectively, amazing. From everyone at Chasing Rats Games, an immense thank you for making this project possible!

Even if the campaign is over, our journey together is far from it! There’s still a lot of work to do and we are eager to get back to full time development and share more about Worship with our passionate community!

For those of you who would haven’t joined our Discord server yet, please feel welcome to do so! We’re now a big and friendly cult of 2349  members and recently reached our Community goal of 2000 members. Obviously, we’re all big fans of Rats in the team, so we are very excited to include this critter-looking Follower skin to Worship.

Speaking of community goals, we decided to keep the remaining ones open even if the campaign is over! We’re currently sitting at 4480 wishlists on Steam and 1678  followers on Twitter. Here’s some links for anyone who would like to contribute to the remaining community goals!

Now, with more than 6 487  backers on Worship, we will make sure our fulfillment strategy is solid to ensure a smooth process of distributing rewards when the time will come. It is also important to have great communication outlets to reach out to the community throughout the development of the game. As we already mentioned, one of the reasons we went for the Kickstarter route was to connect with our (future) player base to get as much feedback as possible and make sure we develop a game in cohesion with an enthusiastic community! With that in mind, we will continue to share updates on our different social medias, including Discord, Twitter and, obviously, Kickstarter. (We’re even considering dev logs, who knows!)

Transparency is really important to us, so we want to give you an overview of the next steps regarding the Kickstarter rewards, development and release.

Step 1: Week off!

Everyone worked really hard before and during the campaign, so we’ll be taking the rest of the week off for some well deserved rest. Rest assured, we will be back on next week for the first waves of rewards!

Step 2: First rewards (Sometime next week!)

As soon as we’re back on duty next week, we will upload a new update and distribute the following rewards to backers:

  • Digital wallpapers of Worship via email
  • Kickstarter exclusive Discord roles
  • Steam keys for digital copies of Struggling via email.

Step 2: Platforms announcement and surveys(Early 2022)

At this point in development, we will be in a spot where it is safe to confirm the platforms and consoles on which Worship will be available on launch. This will be tied with other reveals and announcements about the game, so stay tuned! Additionally, we will be giving updates on Worship in between steps! Don’t worry, we will not go silent for the rest of the year, but we’ll be hard at work on the game.

Once the platforms are confirmed, we’ll send send out the official post-campaign survey in which backers will confirm the following information:

  • Backer tier and addons                                        
    • You’ll be able to confirm which add-ons your pledge amount goes to (if you haven’t done it directly in Kickstarter)
    • You’ll be able to pay for additional add-ons if you want to get more Worship physical rewards (physical copy, art and lore book, vinyl OST, etc.)
  • Platforms of choice for digital and physical copies
  • Shirt designs and sizes
  • Shipping information
  • Shipping costs and billing

This survey is really important to confirm your order, so make sure to double check your emails by the beginning of next year!

Step 3: Alpha and design rewards (Q2 2022)

The Kickstarter exclusive alpha for Worship is planned for spring 2022. Our goal with the alpha is to get first impressions from players on our core systems at the same time as having a small stress test to our netcode solution. Obviously, we’re expecting a lot of bug reports during the alpha, but we will also be sending feedback forms to measure your excitement and appreciation on the game and have open discussions with the community on Discord.

As for the design rewards, we will get in touch with all the Dark Confidants, Blood Artists, Occult Outfitters, Patrons and Elder Gods after the alpha. It makes more sense to us to wait until you get a good grasp of the game before starting design sessions with backers!

Step 4: Beta (Q3 2022)

We’ll take a few months to apply feedback and resolve a couple of bugs before launching the beta by the end of summer 2022. This time, we expect a little bit more people but also to get as many bug reports and stress tests to secure the best possible launch for the game.

More details regarding the beta will be announced closer to release.

Step 5: Release and rewards fulfillment! (Q4 2022)

Once the survey is completed and the game is out, the only thing left will be to enjoy Worship! All digital rewards will be sent at launch.

It is also at this moment that all the physical rewards will be shipped to the backers! If you happened to have changed your address since the initial survey, rest assured, you will be able to update your profile and preferences before we proceed to ship your rewards. We’ll send a reminder via email before we send everything out!

Step 6: Post-launch content (2023 and beyond)

Even if we do not have a concrete roadmap for our post-launch content of the game, we can safely say that we have tons of ideas for the additional content! Ranging from additional Gods to new alternate endings, there are a lot of possibilities for content patches or DLCs. We are waiting to see how well the game goes before committing to anything regarding this, but keep in mind that our main objective is to keep developing the game after launch due to its emergent nature!

That’s all for today, folks! Once again, from everyone at Chasing Rats Games, thank you very much for your support. This is far beyond our expectations and we will make sure the game will reach or surpass yours!

Now, time to rest a little! Then we come back in full shape to continue working on Worship!

Community god polls category #4 closes - Campaign almost over!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Apr 09, 2021 at 12:20:09 PM

Our community has spoken and voted for their favorite cultist and follower appearance for Kessessa's devotees! 

By popular vote, entry C by Carol2015 and Cult Mom is selected!

Congrats to the people behind the selected entry, it looks awesome! This was the last poll for the community god event, all 4 categories have been selected. Kessessa, Mother of the Coven was birthed by the will of the community and we've enjoyed seeing how much all of you were invested in the event!

Here's all 4 categories of the community god:

The polls might be over, but we have one last thing coming up about Kessessa! We don't want to spoil too much about this update coming a few days after the Kickstarter campaign ends, but we hope you'll look forward to it!


"Making of" the animated intro cinematic of Worship

If you are interested to see some "behind the scene" stuff about Worship, we made an Imgur post explaining the different steps for the productions of the animated cinematic! There, you can see some of our process and a couple a WIP of the Worship animated short.

Click Here to dive into it!

The campaign is almost over!

Only 20 hours left to the Kickstarter campaign! We can't thank you all enough for the overwhelming support you've shown towards Worship. We'll publish another update after the campaign ends to list an overview of the next steps for Worship!

Here is an adorable fan-made follower plushie to close the update

Artist:Baby_Dino2