 The story of Paragon is a sad one, a great game with a truly devoted fan base that was ruined. Not by failings with the game itself, yes it did have its imperfections, but the overall experience was superb, no, those failings came from corporate influences that had little to do with gameplay. Unfortunately this story isn't as unique as you may think. While we lament the loss of Paragon, so too do the fans of Gigantic, a game that came and went so quickly that many of us never knew it was there. But much like Paragon, there's a glimmer of hope peeking over the horizon. Gigantic has its own dedicated fans that refuse to let it die. Fans who have picked up the fallen torch and trudged forward against the odds with the flame held high. Enter Project Stamina. Before I get into explaining what Project Stamina is, I wanted to let you know that I did an interview with the producer and it will be his voice you sometimes hear clarifying things in this video. Project Stamina is a fan driven effort to use their own intellectual property to create a game heavily inspired by and pays direct tribute to Gigantic. If you have never played Gigantic, it's a hard game to explain as it really doesn't fall within the constraints of any one genre. As best I could tell it was MOBA style heroes in a third person environment with the goal of capturing points to some unhelpful NPCs and power up your core which was a living behemoth that fought alongside you. Project Stamina aims to revive this game using the same art style with their own heroes and many of the mechanics found in Gigantic. For instance, each hero has a resource called Stamina that can be used for movement and invincible dodges. Stamina is designed to create meaningful decision points throughout the game. You could use all of your stamina to get into a fight but then you're left without defensive options. Conversely, if you only ever use your stamina defensively, you'll never be able to win the game. Not everything from Gigantic will be brought forward by Project Stamina. As I mentioned, the game had its imperfections and the team plans to address them. For instance, armor values in Gigantic were linear. One armor reduced 1% of damage which forced Botica, the developers of Gigantic, to implement an armor cap. We're saying goodbye to Gigantic's linear armor proration which had one damage or one point of armor reducing 1% of damage and stop me if I'm getting too technical and gritty here. But we're using a diminishing returns curve like it's found in a lot of traditional MOBAs for our armor stat which gives us more freedom to tune different armor values without having to put in say an artificial cap on armor so that you don't reach 100% damage reduction and that was the thing in Gigantic for those who didn't spend countless hours in practice matches. This isn't the only change they plan to bring to the game. Project Stamina's game will introduce variable stats for each hero that will increase when you level. They also plan to polish up some of the mechanics introduced to Gigantic that were never fully fleshed out during the game's lifespan. So one of the things that we're adding is a stats per level system. So in addition to having like base health and armor where our characters have unique values that their stats increase as they level up. So this gives us more ability to tune for characters that are strong in the early game or the mid game or the late game based on how their stats are laid out. And we think that just putting a little bit more polish on the systems that Motiga had to stop working on so that they could work on things like Xbox and Windows exclusive compatibility all of a sudden rest in peace Motiga. Project Stamina is an LLC that currently consists of 23 members. I should also mention at this time that Project Stamina is not the name of the game. They haven't yet made that public but assure me that they have gone through all the proper legal channels to copyright the name that they have chosen. This highlights what impresses me the most about this project. They are extremely well organized. They're crossing all the T's and dotting all the I's. I asked several questions of them that, in all honesty, were designed to see if this was in any way a scam. I'm happy to say they exceeded my expectations. There is zero doubt in my mind that the team at Project Stamina are nothing less than a group of gigantic fans that are dedicated to bringing the joy of their favorite game back to the players. This is a company with a clear goal and well defined plan to reach that goal. They understand that they need to make a sustainable game that could grow with the community should they be successful. They aren't neglecting considerations like resourcing servers, system requirements and all the assorted back in management required for the game to succeed. The big question of course, when and where can you play it? They plan on their closed alpha in the near future. Short answer is pretty soon. The engine is already in a state that technically, like in terms of its technical capacities, we could call it an alpha. But based on feedback from our testers, there's a few more things that we want to see in the game. And our own benchmarks want a few more characters built. And we're just going to go ahead and do that, get a couple more pieces in line and with a little polish on them before we make the announcement of that date. But it is coming up really soon. So no set date, but it does sound like it will be soon. The current plan is to develop the game for PC. However, they will tailor the development to whatever platforms have a fan base that want to play the game anywhere, anywhere the players demonstrate they want to be is is our bottom line. We're running in Unreal 4 and my engineers tell me that system compatibility with what they have set up is as easy as a drop down menu and a checkbox. You say, I want to build for Xbox one. You hit that box, you hit compile, you have a working bill. The tricky part is platform certification. There is no way to not make that cost a lot of money because when I was working there, it costs like five to $10,000 just to get someone to look at your game and tell you whether or not your pause menu was laid out right to be allowed on the store. Oh, wow. Yeah. So yeah, platform certification is tough. And that's why a lot that's why a lot of platform exclusivity deals get signed is because it comes with flexibility on some of those standards. But our back end is built for built to be compatible with pretty much any modern console and should permit cross play between them. The question is mostly whether or not the consoles that we would like to be on have the players based to justify the cost of being there. Like I would love to be on all platforms, but I'm not going to spend $10,000 on certification so that 40 people can play it. It's not sustainable, making choices like that. And if they if if the platforms allow cross play, it'll work. It's entirely on the platform holder side. And that's kind of a we have to punch up out of our weight class at Sony at Microsoft to make them play nice to get nice together. But if they let us do it, we can do it. The same goes for their storefront. They have their own working launcher. However, they are willing to use Steam, Epic Store or whatever in order to meet the community's needs. If this project is something you feel you wish to support, there are several ways to do so. If you think you have a skill set that the team needs, you can apply for a position with the company. While most of their needs are filled, they still look through the applications in search of talent. In particular, they're currently in the market for a VFX artist. They also have a Patreon. If you want to support their efforts monetarily, Patriots are awarded the access to various articles written by the team and the ability to influence the development of certain elements of the game. If you are in a position to support them with money, then you can still cheer them on and help shape the game's direction about becoming part of their community on Facebook, Discord, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch or Twitter. All of them will be linked in the video description below. In fact, they will have a state of the game stream soon on Twitch, October 30th to be exact, so be sure to follow them and check it out. If you can't catch it live, it will also be uploaded on YouTube so you can watch it whenever you damn well please. You can also check out some videos from other YouTubers that are far more dialed into Gigantic than I, like Sappy Dude, The Dusty Gullet and Lord Squidious. Before I move on to my own thoughts of the game, let's check out a message from the game's producer. I mean, I could say I love you to my fans all night. It wouldn't get old. But I think the only thing that I haven't said already is a very specific thank you to the Motiga team. If any of you are out there, your work has inspired what is now two years and 20-some people of dedication and effort and creativity and none of this would have been possible had you not given everything to bring such an amazing game into the world. And it is it is our honor and our privilege to be able to follow in your footsteps and carry a torch that was lit by the spark of your inspiration. Projects like these shows a new trend in the gaming industry. For the longest time, we've been forced to be content with whatever Bullshit producers decide to feed us. And when we do find something we like, we have to stand by powerless as we watch corporate greed leave decision-making and ultimately destroy the beautiful games we love. However, with development tools and knowledge becoming increasingly more available to the public, companies like Project Stamina can stand up for us and say, fuck your bullshit. If you won't give us what we want, we'll just make our own damn game. Man, go.