It’s been awhile since we posted anything here. We’re sorry for the silence, but it has been a bit of a tumultuous time to say the least.

Good news first! We’re super excited to announce that Monsters and Medicine is finally out on Steam! Not only can you now own it on Steam, but we’ve also updated it with a complete overhaul of the art style courtesy of Cowabunga Industries, a new soundtrack by Pieter Smal, and finally a plethora of small improvements all over the place. If you’re keen to save some cute monsters from certain death, you can find it over on Steam, or on Humble. Check out the new trailer below:

And then on to some bittersweet news. It is with some sadness that we have to announce that we won’t be tackling any new projects as Clockwork Acorn in the near future. We founded Clockwork Acorn more than three years ago with the goal of making video games we would like playing ourselves. Since then we’ve learned a lot, we’ve made a mountain of prototypes, we grew, we shrunk, and we even managed to release some games (see above). Now we find ourselves at the end of the line. It’s been a crazy ride, and all our lives have been enriched through what we did here.

But as this era ends, a new one begins. Monsters and Medicine is now released on Steam, and we’ll continue to work on Jetstream until it’s ready for release too. After that, who knows where our paths may lead us. We sure are excited to find out.

Our undying gratitude goes out to our amazing team, everyone who played our games, gave us feedback, collaborated with us, provided moral support, or actually read this blog. You’re all awesome individuals and it meant the world to us.

On behalf of Francois, Leon and Hilgard (aka Clockwork Acorn),
Adios

In addition we’ve started seeing our first reviews of the game. Such as these ones from SAGamer and LazyGamer.

First off, we’re proud to say that our first full game, Monsters and Medicine, will be launching on the Humble store on the 7th of October. In addition, we’ve started a Steam Greenlight campaign for the game, so please go vote for it!

With the release of the game, we’ve updated to the final version of the game, which is already available now to people who have pre-ordered. The final version of the game includes three new level sets, a colour palette rework, a bunch of bug fixes and more music and sound effects. We really want to thank everyone who supported us on our first big project, we learned a lot over the past couple of months and we’ll always appreciate it. You guys rock!

Our second piece of news is that one of our prototypes, Agent Unseen, will be showing at rAge this year as part of the home_coded booth. So if you are in Johannesburg during the 10th-12th of October and you want to come check out the South African game development scene, or you just want to say hi, come drop in!

Going forward from Monsters and Medicine we have decided to change the way we approach deciding which game to work on.

When we were deciding on our first project to do as a company we started with three weeks of prototyping. During this time we developed around ten prototypes. From these we chose, based mostly on some internal criteria, to develop the game that finally became known as Monsters and Medicine.

In retrospect, we have decided that this was not the best way to find the best project for us to work on. Which is why we’re shaking things up for the next round.

Going forward we aim to be much more transparent with our prototypes. We’re going to try to put out a new playable prototype every week for the next few months. Our hope is that by making these public and distributing them online, we can find a project that others are as excited about as we are.

On that note, we are releasing our first prototype today. Bacchus Bank is a text-based bank management game. We were playing around with the idea of emergent storytelling and how your actions as a bank (approving/rejecting loans etc.) change the lives of your customers. You can check it out here.

The new build has a bunch more usability and bug fixes, taking us closer to a final 1.0 build. In addition, we’ve added more levels to the full version of the game. Finally, we’ve added two new music tracks to the game courtesy of Francois and Simon de la Rouviere. Their tracks join the one we had previously which was made by Niel de la Rouviere, giving us a full set we are very pleased to have.

As stated, we’re very close to release. To get there, we will still be paying attention to adding more levels in the game as well as fixing the remaining bugs that are still in the game. Finally we hope to finish the mobile version of the game, which will be coming out on Android first, followed by iOS if the demand is there.

That’s it for now, those of you have already bought the game through the Humble widget should be able to download the new version already.

Have fun!

It’s been a couple of weeks since our last public build. The good news is that we’re very close to being done with the game. We’ve been hard at work finalising the UI/graphical overhaul, adding levels, animation, music and sound effects.

Everything is not there yet, but we thought you guys would enjoy a look at the new game. So without further ado, here you go. As always we look forward to hearing any and all feedback from you guys.

Download Links
Play online
Download for Windows

Now that we have a theme, we have also decided on a name for the game: “Monsters and Medicine” (replacing the working title of Hospital). If you want to get a look at the first version of the new visuals, the best way is to play the current build:

Play Online
Download for Windows

We showed this build at the Make Games meetup last week and we got some valuable feedback on the game and our plan forward. Stay tuned for a new build that incorporates some of these changes, and as always, we welcome any feedback you may have.

Links:
Play online
Download for Windows

We are getting very close to the point where we feel satisfied with the mechanical aspects of the game. From this point forward we see a lot more of our focus going into level design, art and sound integration and overall polishing and bug hunting. So hopefully the next build we show you guys will look and sound a lot better than this one.

Until then, enjoy playing the game!

Our focus for the last week of development was to improve the usability of the game. So you’ll find a ton of UI changes designed to present you with information important in the running of your hospital.

We’ve also added a tutorial to introduce new players to the game. Hopefully, this along with the usability changes, should make for an all round more understandable and enjoyable experience.

You can find the latest version of the game here:
Play online
Download for Windows

This launch also brings us to approximately what we consider to be the halfway mark of the project. As I’ve stated in the past, we are trying to make this game in what most would consider to be an extremely short time frame. So far we’ve been a bit surprised with how accurately we are sticking to our time estimates. Here’s to hoping that things continue in this fashion.

And so it came to pass that Clockwork Acorn entered the world in 2014. A mighty behemoth, based out of a tiny, sweaty office in Stellenbosch, South Africa, set to turn the gaming world on its head through the design and development of small indie games. Truly our ambition knows no bounds.

When we were planning how best to approach our new, the idea was to launch three or four full games within our first year. This in an industry where indie developers are often polishing and iterating on the same idea for years. We don’t have that luxury, we are doing this full time and we were broke university students even before we started. As such, we decided early to only release games that would be fun to play while maintaining a small scope.

Now here we are, announcing our first full release, with said ethos in mind. I would love to scream the name at this point, but sadly we don’t have one. What I do have are (somewhat) pretty pictures!

In all seriousness though, the screenshot I showed you above is from our first public build and has about five days of development time behind it. It is a very specific style of building/puzzle game in which we task the player with building their hospital in smart and efficient ways.

Anyway, back to the game. In it, players are building their hospitals step by step, placing and upgrading rooms, building hallways and curing patients in order to cure an ever growing number of patients waiting in the queue. Our patients are super polite however and will never queue hop. So if the patient at the front of the queue can’t find a place in the hospital then the patients behind him will wait until those in front of them are served, even if their politeness results in their own death. Silly patients, they must be Canadian or something. And so it is up to you to continuously build your hospital, while keeping those patients in the queue from dying and causing incident.

So that’s about it for now, thank you for dropping by and showing interest in our game and/or company, we hope to see you here again soon. Continue dropping by (or subscribing to our mailing list) as we plan on publishing periodic new builds here.

Download:

Before I forget, here are some download links for our current build, try them out and let us know what you think. If you happen to be playing the windows build and experience crashes, keep trying. If crashes persist, please let us know, we’d love to talk to you, as we have been experiencing some issues with the platform.

For the Flash build, we’ve had some bugs with text display, in which case just refresh the screen. To seed a level in the flash build, simply pass the seed as a get parameter. So for example to use the seed “potato”, append “?seed=potato” to the end of the URL.

Windows Build
Flash Build

One last thing, we need a name for this game. Any ideas you’d care to share? If so leave us a comment!