I’m very proud to announce our first game – Heritage.

In Heritage you control the last surviving noble house of a sea-faring people. Forced by need and honor, you have led them half-way around the world chasing their ancestral foe. Upon landfall you all made a solemn vow – you and your people would turn their backs on the sea until this quest was complete. The spirits of your ancestors were listening… and have heard you.

Heritage is a hybrid RPG / strategy game that jettisons inventory management and meaningless busy-work in order to focus on epic scale storytelling. In Heritage, you will be responsible for guiding the heroes of this noble house through several generations in their quest to finally bring an end to their foe and allow their return to the sea.

Heritage will be coming out for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and available digitally.

Starting next week, Graham Sternberg (who will be introducing himself in a post sometime in the next couple days) and I will begin blogging the development of the game.  We’ll be focusing on the nuts-and-bolts decisions we face in making what we think is a pretty ambitious game on a short timeline.

Speaking of timelines – our goal for Heritage in 2009 is to enter a strong beta into the Independent Games Festival in November.  Before that, though, we’ll be showing off a prototype demo of the game at the first Independent Game Conference East on May 7th, here in Boston.  By “prototype demo”, I mean “it will hold together and look decent and play, but don’t ask to see my code.”  Our goal is to take the player through the introduction, character creation, and the first several turns of the game.

We’ll be putting more info into the blog about the gameplay, design philosophy, art, and everything else about Heritage – so stay tuned! Please let us know what you’re interested in discussing.  You can contact us via the blog comments, our forums, or over email.

As you might guess, this is a really exciting day for me.  This announcement is the public start of a dream I’ve been chasing for about ten years: starting my own game company and making games people enjoy.  So far it has been a crazy ride worth of learning, hard work, and the support of fantastic people.  I’m hanging on tight.

Welcome along for what I hope will be a very interesting ride.