The two founders of Clockwork Origins, Daniel Bonrath and Sebastian Frenzel, already worked together on several of the best Gothic modifications including Xeres’ Return. We are experienced in different genres like RPG, strategy, action and plattformer and completed small and really large scale projects. Besides this we collected experience in other areas like marketing, programming, game engine design and more. In the meantime we also released Elemental War, our first standalone game. See our full list of highlights in our history.
Our Credo
The team behind indie developer Clockwork Origins stands for outstanding games for PC and consoles. We work on innovative game mechanics and interesting stories and don’t let you down in case of problems – support and the direct exchange with the players is immensely important to us. Our promise: No game will be released until it is 100% up to our expectations.
Our Values
Here we want to share our opinions on some topics that seem important to us and we want to take care of.
Community Based Development
Already during our modding time we tried this experiment, e.g. with our Left 4 Gothic modification. Also Xeres’ Return was kind of community based as we involved our testers and their feedback into the development. We made the mistake with Elemental War to develop the game for years behind closed doors and only got real feedback when starting into Early Access.
We don’t want to make this mistake again. So our goal is to share our games way earlier to get feedback. This doesn’t always mean you’ll get access to an alpha, but you will get screenshots, gameplay and other stuff when we have something to show off. This way you can see if the game is interesting for you and share your feedback with us so we can improve the game already before release.
Support and Feedback
This point is kinda connected to the Community Based Development but targets the time after release. Even after the 1.0 release we want to support our games and take care of your feedback. We won’t implement everything and won’t add updates forever, but we want to take care of our games and fix and improve everything possible as long as it’s worth it for us. That means as long as people play our games, the costs for fixing/improving aren’t too high compared to the returned value (player satisfaction, revenue) and it fits the game.
Feature Parity
What does this mean? Well, Elemental War already has been released on three operating systems (Windows, Linux, OS X) and in three different stores (Steam, itch.io, Kartridge). And Xbox version will come somewhen in the future. That are a lot of combinations and some platforms support features others don’t, like achievements on Steam that aren’t available (via an API) for Kartridge and itch.io.
Our goal is to provide the same features on all operating systems and distribution platforms. We have a good server backend to handle this stuff on our own so we can provide cross-platform achievements and leaderboards and even multiplayer. So no matter where you want to buy our games, you will be able to play with all other players that own the game.
This includes cross-play for multiplayer with consoles as long as technical and policy based (previously consoles prohibited cross-play, now they allow it) possible.
Of course we won’t be able to provide the same graphics quality everywhere (e.g. PC and mobile if a game is released on both) and some features won’t be possible everywhere (splitscreen on PC, not splitscreen on mobile), but everything possible should be the same.
Microtransactions & DLCs
That’s a delicate topic. Personally we don’t like microtransactions and DLCs. They can be fine (e.g. addons), but there are so many bad examples out there (e.g. pay 2 win stuff) that it has a bad flavor.
We don’t want to add unnecessary microtransactions to our games. If we add something to pay for, this will be optional content like addons or skins, but never something you get a real advantage over others. And the prices will be reasonable to what you get from the content.
Some of our games will also target the mobile market. The bad thing there is that mobile players don’t want to pay for apps but happily pay for stuff ingame or watch ads. Personally we don’t like both things, so we will keep them to a minimum. But of course when publishing for mobile we still need to somehow make money. We will experiment with mobile in the future and see if pay 2 play can work there and if not, how to monetize the games in a fair way.
Our Experiences
During our time as indie devs and previously modders for the Gothic series we collected plenty of experience in different fields:
Development on different platforms
As of now we released projects on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, Xbox One (both XDK and Universal Windows Platform) and Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 is coming soon. So we covered all major platforms and have knowledge about all processes involved developing and publishing for them.
Web development & Multiplayer
We collected plenty of experience in web development and multiplayer already. During university time I worked on a complex networking library that teached me all principles required for it. Today we have Spine running that provides a lot of online features besides the option to easily download projects through it like achievements, scoreboards and friends.
Elemental War also contains coop and a competetive multiplayer on PC. We have no cross-play there as we learned the requirements for that too late. Now we are setting it up for the next project to also have that feature covered and do a last step towards feature parity on all platforms.
During the development of Tri6: Infinite we left online multiplayer out, but learned how to properly handle splitscreen multiplayer.
Genres
Already during our time as modders even though we just modded for Gothic 2 we jumped from genre to genre. Our experience there covers RPG, Platformer, Tower Defense and a Pokemon like game, call it turned based strategy with RPG mechanics.
As real games we released a Tower Defense and an Infinite Racer so far. Even though we will keep up these genres our goal is to enter the RPG market and play out also our strengths in story-telling there again that suffered in our last games.