” And on the second day
I could have given it away
For tomorrow is cold
And death is never old.
Still, I stand strong and true,
Facing the day, coming through.”Anonymous Ilmari navigator
The 4th of November is now a birthday. This is when our team of four talented and ambitious game devs gathered around a crazy project, making a game in a universe entirely made of metal.
In Tales of Metal (ToM for short), you are the first pilot of a metallic ship able to travel across the frozen plains to gather fruits and resources from isolated ecosystems. Your findings will bring you wealth, glory, and will allow the Ilmari society to prosper and thrive. However, beware, for it is dangerous to gather and hoard without thinking. A mindless harvest could precipitate your city’s demise and yours.
The game is heavely inspired by Failbetter Games and Alexis Kennedy, especially by Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies.
During this first month, we did our fair share of work, and there are a lot of things to convey. Are you ready?
The team, and what a team
With ToM, we want to make a game, but not at any cost. We want to enjoy our creations, to be proud of what we are doing, to convey our values and hopes. One of our strength is our group. We may be professionals game makers, but we are first and foremost friends, who laugh and cry together.
Kémo is our main developer. During a game jam, I saw him blink, and the game code was done. He knows what he is doing and works with supreme efficiency. He is also the best at organizing our team and at keeping us on tracks.
Olena is our artist. She is a hardworking and passionate artist from Ukraine, with already two shipped games on Steam, Unroaded and The Silent Huntress. Please check them out!
Théodore is our Narrative Designer and Marketing genius. He wrote plays, novels, poems, worked as a community manager for Ubisoft, and has been a narrative designer on Firebird and Worlds of Aria. He is the one behind our communication.
Guillaume is me. I have a PhD in physics and plasmonic (cough, sorry), and now I want to make games that are bizarre, different, and politically engaged. Have you heard about climate change? The destruction of the biosphere? The rise of extreme parties? The extreme accumulation of wealth in the hands of few? Yeah, let’s fight that. Overall, I’m an ace of all trades and a silly poet.
Our team is set in France for now, and we plan to make ToM the best game possible!
Framing the ambition
Gathering a team is huge. Making a game with said team is huge too. Making a universe with it is… huger!
To not let our project crumble from the sheer heaviness of our ambition, we had to set, to frame, to define, to cut. We made a pitch. We talked about the story and the universe. We fought over the necessity of dragons in fiction. We debated the difference between fantasy and science-fiction (NB: ToM is SF). And when the dust settled, we (mostly Kémo) made a sensible definition of the project and a list of tasks to tackle.
Our first milestone is to make a demo version of the game by March 2025. It will last for around 15 minutes and will allow you to test the meat of our game alongside some story and ambiance, while allowing us to gather your opinions and advice.
Talking about meat, let’s talk about metallic plants! In ToM, you will go from the hot and secured town of the Ilmari toward the frozen plains, hoping to find useful resources and materials. For this, you have a magnetic ship and a harpoon. Your magnetic ship needs two things to travel: electricity to power magnets and ride magnetic waves, and vital heat so you do not freeze to death. You will have to keep an eye on both, heat being quick to deplete and to refill, while electricity goes down slowly but at a steady rate. During your exploration in the barren frozen plains, you will stumble upon beautiful ecosystems, full of life and potential profits. Here, you can use your harpoon to gather unique fruits and kill creatures for their corpses while you replenish your heat. Once your cargo is full, you can go back and sell your hold to the most offering. But when you will go back to the ecosystem, it may have changed. Be prepared, your actions will have consequences.
The story, the universe, and the rest
As you may imagine, designing a whole universe with a premise as strong as “everything is made of metal” is a colossal task. Nevertheless, we defined several key points for our story and our universe. I can not tell you everything decently without spoiling the game, but here is some context.
Everything is made of metal. Plants, creatures, the ground, everything (except for air, we set a limit on all gas being metal).
All living things depend on heat to survive. Heat allows them to move and thrive. As they get old or just cold, they turn into statues.
Living things eat metal to grow. All metals are not suitable for everyone.
The game is set on a frozen planet with heat points which concentrate life, like oases or hydrothermal vents.
We follow the Ilmari (from the mythological finish blacksmith Ilmarinen), humanoid, intelligent and social creatures able to shape their bodies to a certain extent as they grow.
Ilmari live in a city set around a heat well and are organized into different factions, each with their own agenda.
You are the first navigator able to pilot a functioning magnetic ship, the first one to discover the world beyond the frozen plains.
And the rest is for another post or will be yours to find in the game!
Keep your eyes wide open
We were unable to find a good example of a world entirely made of metal. We searched games, literature, theater, movies, science, and art without finding something close enough to our likings (okay, there is this Gliese 367 b, but it is not enough ).
As such, a big part of our initial work was to develop the visual identity of the project. We are still doing that, yet we already have strong concept art.
Here you can see some concept art for Ilmari, inspired from minerals:
And here for the ship and landscape:
Actual game development
SO! What about the game exactly? We have made a first storyboard of our demo and designed the rough edges of the gameplay.
In terms of pure code, we already have a moving and controllable ship equipped with a harpoon and able to fetch resources in a custom inventory. Do note that this is a prototype full of placeholders.
We still need a lot of iterations in order to make the game feel right and enjoyable, but this is the beginning!
We will work on our ecosystems, interfaces, and dialogue systems in the following weeks.
50 views per hour
We have high hopes for this project and the ones which will follow. As such, we started communicating about the game from nearly day one to reach our future audience (hello handsome).
We already have posts on Instagram, on Twitter, on Bluesky and on YouTube Shorts with plans for TikTok and LinkedIn.
We were quite lucky since on the 3rd of December 2024, our fourth YouTube short as been watched by nearly 5000 people (if you come from it, raise your hands)!
What is so great and interesting is to see how much people are hooked and curious about the concept and the design behind the Ilmari. We noticed several people coming from the TRPG community and asking to use this concept for DnD or homebrew, which is great and gives us ideas for the future!
Our plan is to maintain a steady flow of one post per week on every social media we have, so stay tuned!
That’s all metallic folks!
I now conclude our first official post! Feel free to follow us on our socials or check the rest of our website, and we will keep you updated about our latest releases! Heat and metal!
“ Should you confront death in the days to come
You will not fear, nor cry, nor run.
You will not give it any life, nor heat,
For it is the Great Frost, and you are the Chosen.You are to pierce the unknown, not crawl on the ground.
You are the one who flies, the one who goes farther.
And beyond the cold plains, you will discover
The thousand rays of light which awaits the braves.”Navigating instructor to a young recruit.
