Hi everybody,

It’s been a while since we did one of these. If you’re an old fan of ours, you might notice that things look a little bit different around here. After 10+ years, we figured it was time for some housecleaning. And here we are! A brand new logo and a new website. We’re super happy with how it turned out!

Allow me to show you around our new place, update you on what we’ve been doing this past year, and share some of our plans for the future.

New logo, who dis?

When we started Clockwork Acorn we made the logo and website ourselves, and back then none of us had any real visual design experience. We loved how the logo reflected our bootstrapped, figure-it-out as-we-go-along origins, but over the years as we started making sense of this whole game dev business, the website and the brand felt stuck in who we were and not who we are now.

Last year we started working with Danielle Hitchcock to update our brand and build a new website to go with it. We wanted a more modern, versatile design that would look good wherever we used it, hence the monochrome design and limited yet fun colour palette. And we wanted our new website and brand to reflect our values of timeless and chunky. Danielle was amazing to work with and if you’re ever looking for a visual designer or web developer we can highly recommend giving her a shout.

We’re super happy with the new look, so poke around and let us know what you think. Anyone keen on some stickers?

Return of the Acorn

Way back at the tail end of 2017 we said that Clockwork Acorn had reached the end of an era. While we kept working on Jetstream, and released it on Steam in 2019, the company was on an indefinite hiatus. The band had split, going our separate ways. Francois continued making games at Spry Fox, Leon explored the wider world of South African startups at OfferZen and Hilgard eventually made his way to Norway, where he is still working on the upcoming Dune MMO.

In the background we also kept on playing around with new ideas and making small games, even hiring some folks in late 2022 to work on Cave Cards, a roguelike deckbuilder prototype we were particularly excited about.

Then in 2023 we were approached by our friends at Free Lives to help with post-launch updates for their hit environmental strategy game Terra Nil. It was an opportunity too good to pass up! So we quit our jobs and came back to Clockwork Acorn full time. We built a new team, and brought all the experience we had gained over the last few years to bear with a singular focus on our long-term vision of building a studio that can be a force for good in the world.

It sure has been a wild ride since then. We put out the Vita Nova update for Terra Nil, in which we collaborated with Free Lives to reimagine the way animals function in the game. We designed many new levels for the game, doubling the amount of content, and even added a shiny new 3D world map.

We’re also back in our old game jam groove, experimenting and exploring with new ideas, with a bunch of new prototypes to share with you:

• Beetlevania, a golf-inspired metroidvania game where you play as an adventurous beetle with a serious sweet tooth. 
• Mine Your Step, a puzzle adventure game we made for SA Game Jam that mixes match-3 and push-your-luck mechanics.
• Lizard with a Sword, an arena action game where you play as a blue-headed koggelmander.
• Golem Mechnician, where you have to scramble over giant robots on a battlefield repairing them while avoiding incoming fire.  
• Mech-anic, and earlier prototype on the same theme where you run a war mech repair shop,
• Tiny Tails, our entry for Ludum Dare 56, is a tactical puzzle game where you lead a brave band of tiny forest creatures against the tyrannical wolf king.
• Beeline, a cute hex-based puzzle/exploration game where you play a bee collecting pollen for your hive.
• Calico, a puntastic cat-pirate adventure in which Cat’ptain Calico must traverse the Sandbox Seas, searching for the lost Treasure of Pawtuga.
• Justice Derailed, a murder mystery in reverse where you need to make difficult decisions to keep the investigator off your tracks.

Two ideas really grabbed our attention, so we focused on building them out into fuller experiences. Cave Cards became Enter the Titan, a turbocharged roguelike deckbuilder where you destroy the invading titans from within. It has interesting tactical combat and some really cool innovations that make for faster runs and greater freedom for deck experimentation. The other is Upupa Bird Ninja, a fast-paced micro speedrunner with a novel core mechanic about a hoopoe ninja on a search for perfection. Both prototypes are available on itch and we’d love it if you played them and let us know what you think!

We’ve also been traveling a bunch in 2024. Francois and Leon made their way to Gamescom where we got to meet a ton of great people from the wider industry and show off our games. Both Enter the Titan and Upupa Bird Ninja were selected as part of the official Courage indie game showcase, and it was a blast to get to see people from all over the world enjoy our games.

We ended off the year connecting with friends and devs from across the continent and beyond at Africa Games Week and the Playtopia games festival. We showed Upupa as part of the official game selection for Playtopia and Leon gave a talk on how our team works together.

There is nothing quite like game events and being surrounded by other people that love this industry as much as we do to get you amped for making games!

We closed the year off with a long-overdue team retreat. As a fully remote studio, we are located all over South Africa. We speak often and have a lot of fun online, but hanging out together IRL is an important part of staying connected!

The road ahead

And so we get to the present moment. To say we live in an interesting time is a bit of an understatement. The world at large feels uncertain and if you are at all connected to the games industry, you will be aware that “times are tough right now” has become a bit of a mantra.

We’re pragmatic and know that people need safety and security to do their best creative work, and so we’re set on making things here as stable as possible. To that end we’ve decided to open up our client book and we’re looking for opportunities to collaborate with others. So if you’re looking for creative partners on your project, and you think our services might be of use to you, let’s chat!

Despite the world being scary right now, we’re excited about what the future holds! We’re doing jams and prototyping many new ideas, while refining our existing games. We’re excited to share plenty of updates and releases in 2025!

If you’d like to be a part of that journey, the best way to do so is to sign up for our newsletter, we promise we’ll never spam you. Or you can come and hang out with us on our Discord where we share all our earliest prototypes and would love to get your feedback.

That’s all from us for now. Thanks for making it this far and for giving a damn about what we do here! We appreciate each and every one of you rad people!