Dusting off Marta

Welcome to Shellfall, a cozy artillery game about one old railway gun far behind the lines of a war you only ever see through recon. You pick the target, work out the shot and pull the lanyard. Then you wait most of a minute while the shell flies, the crew pours tea and Pip watches the sky, until a spotter radios where it landed.

What you can see today

• The handbook. Every part of the game is described in the Gunner's Handbook, from the shot to Letters from the villages. Each page carries a stamp that says how much of it you could already play. Today every stamp says Planned.
• The look. A watercolour war painted from high above, a soft clay gun yard up close, and a dive through the clouds between them. See Art direction: watercolour war, clay gun.
• The map. The map on the front page is the fog of war. Move across it and a recon plane paints the ground in, then leaves it behind as the faded map it remembers.

What comes first

The first thing being made is the shot itself: a plain test gun with real ballistics, the boom, the long flight and the crater. It has to be fun to fire fifty times in a row before anything else is added. After that comes the look, the watercolour and the clay, checked on a real Steam Deck screen. The road ahead shows what follows.

Follow along

A new dispatch goes out whenever there is something to show. Add the Atom feed to any feed reader. There is no Steam page yet; it opens later.