As part of their stretch goal, Whalenought Studios’ had planned to create an expansion to Serpent in the Staglands since the beginning, but what they didn’t plan for was how ambitious their design ideas would be and how inefficient the retro-styled engine they employed for the base game was in supporting them. According to a new blog post on their Kickstarter page, Whalenought Studios’s has decided to run the expansion in the new engine they developed for Copper Dreams.

As we began designing the campaign for A Fool’s Banquet, we had a ton of ideas that we wanted to implement for the expansion and for future games set in this world. While we could have shoehorned some of these into the Staglands engine, we decided to do something drastic and create an entire new engine that was set up to handle all of the new really neat mechanics and optimizations we wanted to ad in. Thus decided, we started designing and have been spending the last few months building a new and improved engine that will have much faster loading times, better performance, has taken user feedback into account and will be able to support a lot of fun new features like larger maps and stealth systems as well as utilize the height of a 3d world. We have a feature list with some highlights listed below. The mechanics will be using a new ruleset that we think you’ll love as well, but the atmosphere, lore, items, characters and, most importantly, your saved games will still be there.

This change over to the new engine won’t affect the original game, since it will be completely separate from it. Though fans have expressed concern over the abandoning of the old style visuals, Whalenought Studios did stress that they are doing their best to retain the same look and feel in the expansion that made Serpent in the Staglands so popular in the first place:

Right off the bat you might notice a few differences, one being the game is 3d. While we love pixel art, the move to 3d is necessary to create the interesting tactics that come from height and stealth, and opens up a lot mechanics that aren’t available in a low resolution 2d game, like more accessibility in controls, UI and text. To keep the aesthetic as similar as possible and something we’ll continue to enjoy working on, we’ve chosen a 3d style that utilizes the same filterless textures as pixel art, and are really happy with how it’s turning out.

New images of the expansion and its engine will be posted on Whalenought’s official website, with the developers promising to keep fans updated throughout the year.