Welcome to our new monthly progress report. In this series we want to keep you informed about the progress on all our projects we worked on in the past month and give you an outlook for the upcoming month. This is the first of these reports and will cover July and give an outlook on what we’re going to do in August.

This report will cover our already released projects Elemental War and Spine, officially announce Tri6: Infinite, a new small project we’re working on, and tease our new main project.

Elemental War

July was a pretty busy month for Elemental War. Besides the update to 0.9.18 on 5th of July Elemental War also left Early Access and now is considered finished. On July 19th it was finally released on Steam, itch.io and Kartridge for Linux, OS X and Windows and the feedback was awesome. Compared to the first Early Access release the game now also contains an alliance system, a map editor and a multiplayer mode. Most people seem to really like the game which is very satisfying for us.

But the 1.0 release isn’t the end of our journey with Elemental War. Due to the feedback and the many new players we also found new bugs and a lot of new feature requests. In the first two weeks after release we already updated the game four times with the updates 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3 and 1.0.4. They fixed the bugs we found, added feature requests from our players and improved the game in general. We’ll of course continue this support in the next weeks.

And besides these maintenance updates we’re already working on a bigger update that will introduce co-op for our Classic and Survial Mode. That means you’ll be able to play these two singleplayer modes together with friends. The release of the co-op modes is currently planned for start of September.

For the release and also after that we captured quite a lot of gameplay videos of Elemental War that can be found on our YouTube channel. The videos show you all different game modes, both singleplayer and multiplayer, alliances and challenges and even the map editor. Therefore we created two playlists. One with all our own videos containing also some that show off our towers. That’s the Elemental War playlist. The other one is the Community plays Elemental War list. This list only shows real gameplay and therefore also contains the gameplay videos the community uploaded.

If you never heard about Elemental War before or you want to read more about it, check out our dedicated Elemental War website.

Spine

In the last months there wasn’t much activity on Spine. Due to the work on Elemental War, Tri6: Infinite and our new big project this won’t change in the near future. I’ll still take care of support requests and fix bugs you find like I did with Spine 1.14.13 on August 3rd.

I hope I’ll find some time in the future for Spine as I want to improve the UI for better usage and visuals and the whole download/upload handling for smaller and faster downloads/uploads and less errors during these. But I don’t have a release date for any changes yet.

The first thing I’ll target though is the login and profile page as these will be shared with all other projects we released. Then it shall be possible to reset your password, validate your account and other things in an easier way than now and do it both from within Spine and from within your browser.

Tri6: Infinite

If you’ve already visited our main page or the games page you might have read about Tri6 already. Tri6 is a fun racer playing in an arena and combining elements from Mario Kart with a Tron like scenario. You will drive a bike and later on other vehicles and use powerups to defeat your enemies. A special element is the light wall you can draw behind you and that will destroy your opponents when they hit it.

Tri6 started as a student project in 2011, I kept it running with a friend for a while, but put it on ice as it didn’t make sense to work on a multiplayer title alone without somebody to test and while working mostly on Elemental War. And as we now still have other projects, we reduced the scope of Tri6 and will first create a smaller game in the same universe we call Tri6: Infinite.

Tri6: Infinite is an endless runner. That means you will drive an endless track with randomly placed obstacles. Therefor you will have your bike. With “coins” (thse are currently placeholders, the currency still has to be designed) you collect while driving you can unlock the other vehicles and powerups. The goal is to survive as long as possible to reach a high score in the leaderboards which are split up by vehicle. While this will work for all target plattform, namely Windows, Linux, OS X, Android and maybe iOS, the Desktop plattforms (Windows, Linux and OS X) will also get an up to 4 players split screen local multiplayer. This will be like a last man standing and provide some additional powerups you won’t get in singleplayer as they’re meant to beat your opponents.

And the best thing: The closed alpha will start in the next days and if you’re interested, all you have to do is to join our Discord. All basic functionality is implemented and now it’s time to add content, polish the gameplay and add graphics and sound. So it’s the perfect time for you to give us feedback what you like and dislike in the game and help to form it to something being fun.

For a first look you can watch our “Dev Play” introducing the game on our YouTube channel.

Clockwork Origins goes back to the roots

Well, I can’t tell you that much about our new project yet, but there will be a lot more information in the following months. For our followers from the Gothic community the project will be very interesting as we want to go back to our roots with it. It won’t be a full RPG, but focus on some of the strengths of the Gothic series. We classify it as adventure, but not like a point and click adventure, more like Gothic with a turn-based figthing system and without a level and skill system, at least for the player itself.

Last Thursday, August 1st, we had our official kick-off meeting. We wrote a basic concept a few weeks ago and discussed some basic points then. Now the real work will start which means that we’ll create a prototype for the basic functionalities, to see if it works as we hope and is fun to play. While I’m working on the code side, Sebastian will work out details of the world (on paper of course) and shape the basic story line. We’re also working on some concept art to show you what we have in mind for the game.

If that sounds interesting to you, then keep an eye on our homepage, Discord and Twitter, as we’ll provide more informations there when we have something to share. And of course also check out the next progress reports in the following months. Of course you can also leave a comment here to share your opinions.