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!

Clockwork Acorn is a South African game development studio founded in 2014 that focuses on making timeless games. We foster a fully-remote team dedicated to our shared mission of being a force for good in the world.

Clockwork Acorn’s brand identity, including our website, has existed basically unchanged since it was originally put together a decade ago in our garage-startup days. It is in need of a rework to bring it in-line with modern standards, and to best reflect the organisation we are striving to build.

To that end we are seeking a professional to help us with brand design and web development. We want you to take charge of reworking our brand identity and associated collateral – most importantly our company website.

Ideally we are seeking a single partner to handle both the design and development of the website, but we will also consider working with two separate specialists.

Project Deliverables

This project is split into two sets of deliverables: a brand redesign, followed by the development of our new website.

Deliverable 1 – Company Brand Rework

The initial block of work deals with reworking our brand identity and associated essential collateral. To this end we are seeking:

• A redesign of our company logo
  • Incl. all common use case variants (display size, wordmarks, background colour, etc.)
  • Must be delivered in vector format (ideally SVG)
  • Other nice-to-have’s:
    • Common web and store banner variants
    • Common splash screen variants
• A short easy-to-reference style guide for internal use that can help us maintain consistency on our brand essentials. Our ideal solution will equip us with the building blocks and brand design principles we need to create a flexible, coherent design system over time:
  • Colour palette
  • Fonts and iconography
• Nice-to-have’s we also might want to explore:
  • Business cards
  • Writing / voice guide

Deliverable 2 – Website Development

The second set of deliverables we require is the production of a new deployable company website that we can use for the foreseeable future. We imagine this to be a two step approach:

1. Mockups of the proposed design we can review and iterate on with you.
2. Delivery of a new website in the form of a custom WordPress theme and collaborate with us on any required content changes.

Technical Requirements

• Website should be compatible with all modern web browsers on desktop and mobile.
• Website design/layout should be responsive to mobile devices.
• Deliver an easy-to-use and technically-robust WordPress theme that is easy to update and maintain.

Design Requirements

• Modern design reflective of our company, its culture and the games we make.
• Timeless design, like our games, our website should appeal to people far into the future.
• Playful and fun — we make games after all.

Website Target Audience

We see our website’s target audience as:

• Players
  • Interested in our released games.
  • Seeing our prototypes or following our development efforts.
  • Looking to join our community spaces.
• People interested in the game industry
  • Read our blog, sign up for our newsletter, or follow our socials.
  • People looking for full-time employment or intern opportunities.
• Potential development partners
  • Clients looking for someone to consult or develop a product.
  • Publishers and Platforms looking for games to publish.
  • Specialist service providers (such as sound designers, QA and testing, localisation).
• Game industry journalists and other press
  • Looking for information about us and our games.
  • Who want to reach out to us.

Proposed Top-level Nav

Below is a high-level conceptualisation of how we imagine the top-level nav, with some notes on the content there. While it should serve to help you understand our thinking, please feel free to propose changes if you feel it is warranted. We think a more extensive sitemap and misc links can be included in the footer.

• Home
  • Clear welcome blurb
  • Games front and center
  • Newsletter, community and social links.
• Games
  • List of full games and some prototypes
  • Dedicated page per game
• About
  • Company culture & approach to game development
• Work with Us
  • Careers
    • Why work with us?
    • Open jobs
  • Services
    • Client Services and Consulting
• Contact

Proposal Requirements

If you are interested in this work, please provide us with a high-level proposal that includes:

• Who you are – the people involved, your expertise, a link to your website and any relevant work or case studies we can look at.
• The work you are interested in – the brand redesign, the website development, both?
• Cost and time estimates – a high level idea of how long this work will take you with key milestones, and how much it will cost us.
• Anything else you deem relevant.

We’ll consider applications until 30 June 2024 although we might close this early if we find the right partner.

Other Considerations

We’re open to suggestions. We know we’re not experts on brand and web development. We have developed this RFP document as our best attempt at representing our needs as we understand them, but we are happy to hear alternatives and better approaches.

We’re developers and designers too. We have extensive internal technical and design expertise, and as such can help in the implementation of these deliverables if need be. Ideally though we want to offload as much labour as possible in this process.

Cost sensitive. While we understand the need for realistic budgets, we are a small business and we’d appreciate any attempts to keep the cost of this project to a minimum. Feel free to talk to us if some of our requirements or considerations add a lot of cost to this project. We are open to rethinking our needs, especially on nice-to-haves and non-essentials.

Flexible timeline. While this work is essential to us, and we want it done soon, we are open to a flexible schedule for the right partner.

Useful References

• Company Website – you’re already here!
• Team Handbook – why we do what we do, and how we do it
• Company Press Kit – outdated
• Clockwork Acorn Discord
• Some game industry websites we think are good references:
  • Gardens
  • Sabotage Studio
  • Digital Sun Games
  • Free Lives
  • Capybara Games
  • HyperBeard
  • Alkemi

Contact Information

Submissions are closed.

Way back in 2014 we spent a couple of months working on some game prototypes and Monsters and Medicine, getting to grips with the whole indie game dev thing. After just less than a year we ran into that most insidious of realities, money; more accurately, a lack of money.

So we did what a lot of game dev companies do, namely, work for hire. Since then we’ve done a bunch of really interesting work for clients, worked with a lot of awesome people and spent a lot of time getting to know the business and technical sides of developing games and software. We’re really glad we managed to do this while building a really awesome team that has come a long way with us.

We even managed to spend some time working on our own games while all this has been going on, which should hopefully soon be evident with the Steam release of Monsters and Medicine, featuring its new art, as well as the start of production for another game of ours, which will see the launch of it on Greenlight in early 2017.

In 2017, we’re going to be making the shift back to doing a bunch more internal game development. Which should mean that you’ll see a bunch more activity from us here and on social media, so keep your eyes peeled if that sounds interesting to you. We’re more confident in our skills and we’re excited to see what we can do with them in 2017 and beyond, here’s to hoping you are too! We’re excited to share more details on our plans closer to the new year!

Ciao,
Clockwork Acorn

While we still have ideas we want to test and avenues we want to explore, we’ve made the decision to refocus a lot of our time into working on improving some of the prototypes we saw people showing interest in.

However, before doing that, we will be doing one last prototyping session during Ludum Dare 30, a game jam taking place this weekend.

So, starting next week, and going forward for the a while we’ll be working on a couple of the more popular prototypes. This doesn’t mean you won’t be hearing from us, as we’ll be sure to let you know when we make significant updates to those prototypes.

This is an exciting time for us and we hope you are equally excited about seeing the prototypes you liked being worked on!

Let us know in the comments if there are any particular games you want to see us working on!

The biggest change we’ve made is the addition of comments to the game pages. We love getting feedback on our games from the people who play them. As such, each page has now been fitted with a shiny new comment section. Previously we were dependant on Facebook, forums and in-person conversations to get feedback from you guys. With these new comments we hope to get feedback from those people who don’t communicate with us via one of those channels.

Secondly, we’ve incorporated the flash versions of our games into their respective game pages. Less navigation and hassle for you guys. Just press the “Play Now” button and off you go.

Lastly, we’ve merged the blog into the main page and updated the way it looks. I really like the additional sense of activity it gives the landing page.

So yeah that’s it for now, let us know what you think of the change – that’s what the comment section is for. And don’t forget to go comment on the games you already played, the comment sections are still sparse for now!

When I got to university, I noticed that my C textbook had a chapter around halfway through that we weren’t going to cover in our course, entitled “Game Programming with the Allegro C Library”. I quickly skipped ahead and started going through this chapter, and it felt like I had discovered the holy grail (of game development). Allegro allowed me easy access to simple 2D graphics and proper keyboard and mouse input. After going through their example game of Pong, I immediately decided to make a clone of Jump ‘n Bump, an old favourite of mine. Very soon after this I started using SDL, another game development library, and coded up a horde of prototypes. In function, SDL and Allegro are pretty similar though. I can’t even remember why I switched to SDL from Allegro, but found some tutorials on using OpenGL with SDL and quickly jumped in.

At this point I started using Linux, and the problem of cross-platform development started revealing itself to me. To my delight, most of my initial SDL prototypes worked on both Linux and Windows. The projects I had made using OpenGL were more tricky though, and I had trouble installing the correct libraries and linking them all properly. Somehow, I managed to install and link all the libraries correctly, and some of the prototypes using SDL and OpenGL, I still want to polish into full games today. However, at some point I got a new PC and could never get things linked up correctly since, and I did not have enough time to devote to figuring out why at the time.

Later on during my studies at the MIH Media Lab, the three of us here at Clockwork Acorn (along with other lab colleagues) decided to participate in a hack day our lab was invited to attend. Naturally, we wanted to make a game, and one of the first questions that cropped up was what language and libraries we were going to use. This was where I first encountered Haxe, and we ended up using it along with the NME library. We were all inexperienced with both Haxe, NME, and hack days though, so we ended up with a dismal game, but an admirable respect for both Haxe and NME.

When we next encountered Haxe was when OpenFL had essentially replaced NME, and Clockwork Acorn (as an idea) was already in our sights. The three of us decided to participate in our first game jam together, Ludum Dare 26. We picked up Haxe again in no time, and OpenFL was similar to enough to NME to feel familiar. I was quite impressed with ourselves, that we managed to make quite a decent game (codename Loki) in the three days allotted for our first game jam, and we may yet complete and release the game under the new title Polygone.

Since then, we registered Clockwork Acorn and started our most recent project, Monsters and Medicine, and did not hesitate to use Haxe and OpenFL. Although we kept in mind that we want to release this game on mobile, we’re happy that we can play the game on our phones by simply changing the build command. I highly doubt that we’ll turn away from Haxe and OpenFL any time soon. As with any game library, it is inevitable to run into problems, but in the rare cases that we did we could easily trace the errors down into the code and either fix it or avoid it thanks to both being open source.

Finally, I have to at least mention Unreal Engine and Unity, despite my experience with them being lacking, or even non-existent. Unity is the one that I have tried, and I just ended up not liking it personally. I didn’t manage to dig into the systems enough to feel like I can do exactly what I want to do. That said, I’m constantly impressed with what people make with Unity, and they have to be applauded for how they empower people without a hectic technical background. Unity 4 also compiles to many platforms including windows, mac, linux, android and iOS. Unfortunately I can’t say much about Unreal Engine, since I haven’t used it yet myself. I am tempted to try it out at some point though, after seeing tons of pretty screenshots.

In conclusion, SDL and Allegro both seemed fine in terms of cross-platform development, and might even be better now since I didn’t keep up to date with their changes. It wasn’t until I saw Haxe though, that I considered the possibility of including mobile platforms in the term “cross-platform”, and I’m surprised at how well Haxe works for mobile. I no longer have delusions of whatever library or tool being the “holy grail” of game development, but I do feel that Haxe and OpenFL is about as close to it as we need it to be, although I still want to experiment with Unreal Engine 4.