Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire announced

Peter Castle writes in to announce Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire, an upcoming episodic strategy RPG with smooth, rotoscoped animations being developed by Australian indies Whale Hammer Games.

The premise:

When the Astral Empire disintegrated into civil war, thousands of worlds were cut off from one another. One such world, Ma’abtik, fell into a medieval dark age.

A thousand years later, rumours that the long dormant empire is stirring are confirmed as an army wielding devastating weapons from the past marches across Ma’abtik. Tahira, the last princess of a small kingdom called Avestan, finds herself tasked with leading the remnants of her people to safety as they attempt to escape the devastation.

There’s a teaser trailer up showing off the game’s lovely graphical style and giving a very vague sense of its mechanics:

Ooooh, those animations–so smooth! And there’s more on the way, it seems.

In addition to fighting turn-based tactical battles, the developers promise that you’ll have the ability to customize your fighting forces via an upgrade system, and develop relationships with your traveling companions. The first episode will feature four unique hero units, mixed together with generic troops drawn from four different character classes. The devs refer to a “large and eclectic cast who travel with you through multiple episodes”; in so doing, I can only assume that their cast is going to grow significantly from that initial foursome in later episodes.

Tahira is being developed for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and its initial episode will be getting a Kickstarter campaign starting early next year, with release tentatively scheduled for late 2015. (Castle assures me that development will continue regardless of whether the game meets its funding goal.)