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!
]]>Clockwork Acorn is searching for a seasoned game developer to take lead on the final stages of our 2D puzzle game, Jetstream, which needs to be ported and launched onto mobile phones and tablets. We are looking for someone to specifically focus on the iOS port, although assistance with Android would be a great bonus. This is a short-term contract project. Jetstream is currently available on Steam.
About Jetstream
Jetstream (jetstreamgame.com) started life as Streamline, an abstract puzzle game developed as part of the Ludum Dare 34 competition in December 2015, where it placed 8th overall and 4th in the fun category. With that bit of external validation and our own love for the games potential we took the leap to work on it as a full blown release title. After many months of work, a new name, and a fresh coat of paint, Jetstream took to the skies. We were fortunate to partner up with Noodlecake as a publishing partner, and we’ve since launched the game on Steam. We kept working on it with a mobile release in mind, adding unreleased features like procedural daily levels. Now we’re in the final stretches of the project, with a big update and mobile launch planned before we can finally label Jetstream as fully off the tarmac.
About Clockwork Acorn
Clockwork Acorn is a fully-remote independent game development studio based in South Africa. We make timeless games with chunky design. As a studio we take a long term view and at our core we seek to be a force for good in the world, with an immediate focus to foster the South African game development ecosystem. We’re a small team with big dreams and the drive to make them happen, and we welcome any contribution you can bring to the table.
Current state of the project
Base Game – Jetstream is feature complete and fully launched for PC, with Windows, Mac and Linux builds.
Android Port – The Android port of Jetstream is mostly complete, and requires some last effort to get it across the line. This is work we can handle internally, but it would be great to hand it over as part of this project.
iOS port – The iOS port is close to being done, but has some last small issues and hurdles, like some graphical artifacts and SDK integrations.
Summary of work required
On a high-level the work required involves updating the underlying frameworks, fixing outstanding bugs, integrating platform-specific SDKs, and creating and distributing all builds required for testing and eventually launch. All the general (not mobile-specific) functionality (like achievement system) is working on the PC version.
Requirements
- Seasoned game developer — must have worked on at least one shipped title.
- Experience working with Haxe and the OpenFL framework.
- Experience developing iOS games.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to self-direct and work independently.
- Fully set up on all hardware and software to build and test for iOS devices
- (bonus) Experience developing Android games.
Project Process
Phase 1 – Application
Are you the right person for this project? Submissions are closed We review all applications and will get back to you within 5 working days. The initial application process consists of the questionnaire and a short follow-up interview.
Phase 2 – Project scoping, including cost and time estimates
This phase of the project is to enable you to work with us to determine an accurate total fixed cost for the project, as well as estimates on the total amount of calendar time required for delivery.
To this end we will ask you to review and assess the existing codebase of Jetstream to accurately determine the scope of work required.
This phase of the project is paid work, regardless of if we continue to work together for Phase 3.
Phase 3 – Full project
Develop and test a launch-ready iOS port of Jetstream, for both phone and tablet, ensuring it meets reasonable quality and performance standards.
(bonus) Finish off the development and testing of a launch-ready Android port of Jetstream, for both phone and tablet.
Potential for future work
Although not part of this project, a successful launch on mobile could warrant a future retainer agreement for post-launch support on iOS and Android, specifically to deal with any updates needed due to OS updates.
]]>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:
- Mockups of the proposed design we can review and iterate on with you.
- 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
- Careers
- 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:
Contact Information
Submissions are closed.
]]>Clockwork Acorn is looking for a South African game artist to join our new growing team. You will create new art for games like the highly successful environmental sim, Terra Nil, and our (unannounced) roguelike deckbuilder, Enter the Titan. You will work closely with the rest of the team, with the support to learn and grow as a game artist. We’re still a small team and there is a wide variety of work, including 2D and 3D, so a generalist with a speciality or two will fit right in.
What we’re looking for
- Game artist excited to join a new growing team.
- Junior to senior (role, responsibilities and pay will be adjusted for experience)
- Some experience working on games is required. Game jams are perfect!
- Candidates with at least 1 year work experience are preferred, but we will consider promising graduates or similar.
- Based in South Africa.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Bonuses (not required):
- Experience working with Unity or similar game engines.
- Experience with 2D game art, including illustration and concept art.
- Experience with the 3D game art pipeline: modelling, texturing, rigging, animation.
- Experience with low poly 3D techniques.
- Other useful skills like writing, audio, programming, …
- Diverse candidates are especially encouraged to apply!
What we’re offering
- Start date: as soon as you’re available.
- Pay: R 20 000 – R 60 000 per month, depending on seniority and experience.
- Remote work: work from anywhere in South Africa.
- Flexi-hours with no crunch.
- Opportunities to learn and grow on the job.
- Work on interesting new games!
About us
Clockwork Acorn is a South African game studio that strives to be a force for good in the world, and we want you to be part of this! Our vision is:
- Timeless games with chunky design
- Systemically interesting and thought-provoking design
- Games that don’t age
- Great place to work
- Fully remote work with flexi-hours
- Safe, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ+ friendly space
- Diverse team
- No crunch
- Impactful on the South African game industry and beyond
You can learn more about how we like to do things by looking at our team handbook.
Interested?
Send your CV/resume and portfolio to us at [email protected], by no later than Sunday, 15 October. Please send links, NOT large attachments. Please highlight anything that makes you a good candidate.
]]>
The Industry
Getting some perspective, the South African game development industry is still quite small, and will probably be similar for the next five to ten years or longer. Most of the people working in the industry are entrepreneurs or part of a very small team. Many are not yet making a sustainable living from their work on games. This can make it very hard to find a job in the local industry, especially for an entry level role. If this is what you’re trying to do, you’ll need to keep your eyes open for new positions and be able to quickly jump on them. You should also consider looking internationally for remote positions, especially in the same time zone, at places like this — more remote work jobs is one of the rare positives from the recent pandemic. If you have the resources, you can also consider starting your own team — although the industry is difficult and fickle, so seek out guidance/advice and don’t put all your eggs into that basket. Alternatively you can look for a job in a different industry where you’re able to more easily earn a living and develop your skills, potentially on the side in your free time — this is a great way to get going and a surprising number of people start their journey this way.
Make Games!
If there’s one thing you take away from this post, it’s that you should be making your own games. Wait, that’s why you’re applying for an entry-level job, how are you meant to make games without a job and the experience? Maybe you’ve even completed a tertiary education programme in game dev, isn’t that enough? The answer is that you need to be making your own small games as part of game jams and/or in your free time, to develop your skills and build up your portfolio. The industry is very competitive, so if you’ve never opened a game engine and got something to be playable, you haven’t put in the minimum effort to get in the front door. If you’ve only ever made games for student assignments, it probably also won’t cut it either — your peers are doing more.
Your games don’t have to be big commercial releases, small game jams are often preferable. When looking for entry-level positions, I generally look for quantity of games before looking at quality. Have you only made one or two? You’re probably still making mistakes that you’ll solve like second nature after your fifth game jam.
This isn’t a thing you can do once or twice and be done with it, making games and getting better at it is a life-long learning exercise. Even if you’ve studied games at a tertiary institution, you need to be putting in more time into making games than the course requires of you. If you don’t, you simply won’t stand out from your peers. I personally wish there were more entry-level positions that didn’t require this of you and allowed you to learn more on the job, but at the moment it is pretty much a hard requirement.
Besides, making small games and doing game jams should be fun! It’s the best proxy for what making a bigger game is like, so you should also use it as a test for whether this is what you want to make your career. It’s also okay if you decide you want this to stay a hobby for you — it’s a great hobby!
Your Portfolio
For most game roles, your portfolio is probably the most important thing for getting you a job in the industry. This is how you demonstrate your skills that you’ve learnt from making games. Honestly, your portfolio is probably more important than your qualification, if you have one. This can be a bit discipline-dependent — I think for more technical positions like programming/engineering, a tertiary qualification can be valuable, but it’s not a requirement and isn’t a substitute for the experience of actually making games.
What do you put in your portfolio? There are many roles in the industry, so your portfolio should be focused on the role you are trying to specialise in, but a breadth of skill is very valuable and can help set you apart. The best portfolio piece for a game dev role is always a game that demonstrates your skills. For example, if you’re applying for a writing role, a small game that shows your writing skills is usually much better than a non-game story — it shows that you’ve thought about how to integrate your writing with the interactive medium of games. This also applies to programming, art, and especially game design.
When you put your portfolio together, pay attention to its presentation as a whole. How easy is it for someone to play your games? Do we have to download your source code and try to get it to run? Or can we just click a link on itch.io and play your web build? Do we have to guess what part of a team game you worked on? Or is this clearly identified? Are you sending me a huge email attachment (RIP my inbox)? Or do you have a link I can share with the rest of the team?
Your portfolio doesn’t have to just be only your best work. In fact, showing how you’ve put in the time to make many small (bad) games and how your skills have been growing and developing is very valuable, especially for entry-level positions. Feel free to highlight the best stuff, but include as much as you can. A portfolio with 10+ janky game jams will usually be a lot more attractive than one with just one or two medium polished games.
Applying
So now you’ve got a kickass portfolio and you’re regularly improving it with game jams and little side projects. That’s great! Keep doing it! You’ve seen a job listing that you think you’re a good fit for, and it’s time to apply. If you’re unsure if you’re a good fit for a role, just go for it! Let them decide whether you’re a fit — that’s their responsibility and you’ll miss 100% of the chances you don’t take.
How do you make the best possible impression? Read the entire job listing. Every part of it. Don’t just skim it and fire off a generic email, it shows! Now carefully craft your application as requested. Put your cover letter in the body of your email (unless the listing says otherwise) and write/customise it specifically for this team and role. You don’t have to write a novel, just a couple of sentences that show you’ve understood what the listing is looking for and why that’s you — clear communication skills are a serious plus in any role. If they ask for your CV and portfolio, make sure you are including them. Export any documents to PDF so they look the same for everyone. Getting a friend to quickly proofread your application is always a good idea. Then send it off! Make sure you’re using a reliable email address that you have easy access to. Hopefully this is the one! 
Bonus Tips
- Game design isn’t the same as visual design for games — we see this confusion a lot. Game design is a broad discipline itself, but encompasses things like designing game systems, rules, mechanics, level design, balancing, etc. Think of it as the industrial/product design of games. On the other hand, visual design for games is usually called game art (game artist) in the industry, and also has many sub-disciplines like 2D, 3D, concept, animation, tech art, etc.
- Honestly, we don’t have time to download each applicants’ project source code, find the right engine version (if it’s even still available), and hope it runs. If you want to include it in addition to a build, that’s okay, but also please don’t include the huge Unity Library folder.
- Spend some time on your CV and distil it down to what is important. It’s fine to include a line on your hobbies — shows you’re a well-rounded individual — but we don’t need to know if you have a driver’s licence.
- Check your spam folder for replies. At least one person didn’t reply to my invitation for an interview and currently the spam filter is my best guess, cause why not?!
- Join the community (like here and here) and network with those around you — those contacts can help a lot in the future, you’ll be able to get a lot of valuable advice, and it shows that you care about the local community.
I sincerely hope this helps you on your quest to make games!
]]>Clockwork Acorn is looking for a game design intern to join the team on a part-time basis. You will primarily be using our tools to design and create new content, as well as assist with designing new projects we’re working on. You will work closely with the rest of the team, with the support to learn and grow as a game designer.
One of the projects we will likely want you to work on is Cave Cards (working title). You can get access to the playable prototype here: https://discord.gg/AXHEZBsb5V
What We’re Looking For
- Intern/junior game designer.
- Some experience working on games is required. Game jams are perfect!
- Based in South Africa.
- Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.
- Diverse candidates are especially encouraged to apply!
- Bonus: other useful skills like programming, art, writing, …
What We’re Offering
- Start date: flexible.
- Pay: approximately R5000 – R15000 per month, depending on exp and time.
- Part-time work, either daily or hourly, as it makes sense for your situation.
- Remote work: work from anywhere in South Africa.
- Flexi-hours with no crunch.
- Opportunities to learn and grow as a game designer, on the job.
- Work on interesting new games!
About Us
Clockwork Acorn is a growing South African game studio that strives to be a force for good in the world, and we want you to be part of this! Our vision is:
- Timeless games with chunky design
- Systemically interesting and thought-provoking design
- Games that don’t age
- Great place to work
- Fully remote work with flexi-hours
- Safe, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ+ friendly space
- Diverse team
- No crunch
- Impactful on the South African game industry and beyond
Our team members have worked on many games, including: Cozy Grove, Jetstream, Desktop Dungeons, Broforce, and others.
Interested?
Send your CV/resume and portfolio to us at [email protected] by no later than 13 December. Please highlight anything that makes you a good candidate.
]]>We’re looking to work with an artist on our exciting new game projects. We’re looking for someone mid to senior level or above, based in South Africa. We’re happy to work with non-game artists looking to get into games. We’re looking for someone who can join early in the process to help us explore ideas and find new aesthetics that’ll help our games stand out visually. In the short term we’re looking for someone to work on one or two projects, but there is room to grow into a long term art director/lead role.
One of the projects we might want you to work on is Cave Cards (working title). You can get access to the playable prototype here: https://discord.gg/AXHEZBsb5V
What We’re Looking For
- Strong visual style that can differentiate our games.
- 2+ years experience as an artist. This is NOT a junior / internship position.
- Bonus: game development experience. Game jams count!
- Bonus: experience working with Unity or other game engines.
- Ideal candidate is a generalist, with experience in many areas (2D, 3D, UI/UX, animation etc.), but we’re also interested in someone who is highly skilled in one area and interested in growing in other areas on the job, given proper support.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Timeline and availability: very flexible. If you think you’ll have time in the next 6 months, consider reaching out. Part-time or full-time can work.
- Pay: competitive market rates, depending on the candidate. Happy to work with hourly / daily / monthly / fixed cost depending on the arrangement.
- Location: South Africa, remote work. Cape Town is a bonus.
- Diverse candidates are especially encouraged to apply!
About Us
Currently the core team is primarily just me, Francois van Niekerk. I’m a game developer based in Cape Town, South Africa. I co-founded Clockwork Acorn in 2014, and I’ve been a Senior/Lead Engineer at Spry Fox since 2017. I’ve worked on games like Cozy Grove and Jetstream; and I often make prototypes. I’m building a new South African game studio with the vision:
- Timeless games with chunky design
- Great place to work
- Fully remote work with flexi-hours
- Safe, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ+ friendly space
- Diverse team
- No crunch
- Impactful on the South African game industry and beyond
Interested?
We will reply to all applications. For promising candidates, we may ask you to do a paid art test (at your normal rate), or join for a game jam or two, to see if we work well together.
]]>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
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
That was the only real down-side though. Showing Agent Unseen off to random attendees and getting feedback from them was a blast. As those of you who have played it will know, Agent Unseen is a difficult game, we designed it to be punishing, which doesn’t make it the easiest game to show at an expo. Between the difficulty and the placeholder art I think we scared off a couple of people. It was however a delight to watch those who got it play the game. Digital feedback and stats tracking is one thing, seeing a couple of dozen people play is quite another.
This was our first trade show as a company so it was also our first time talking to press in person. We talked to a bunch of people about Agent Unseen, the company and indie game development in South Africa. It was lots of fun and a great learning experience for us.
Last but not least, while I already mentioned we didn’t get much time to play the games on the floor, we did manage to sneak in a quick game of Evolve when the doors opened on Sunday. Such a great game. It might seriously help me kick (augment?) my Dota addiction when it hits in February.
Go check out the new build for Agent Unseen. We’ve added controller support as well as sound and music by Ivo Sissolak and Adam Linder, which they made as part of an MGSA sound challenge.
Find a couple of fotos from the event below!
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!
]]>Today we’re publishing a new build of Unseen, which has been renamed to Agent Unseen. It includes a lot of improvements and changes, including:
- Revamped level generation
- Upgrade enemy AI
- New item system
- Updated visuals and more colour variety.
- Added more information features, such as a minimap and guard state change alerts
The downside to all these changes is a significant knock to frame rate, which we will need to look at soon. While the game is still very playable, it has made the flash version quite clunky. As such we highly recommend you download and play the native versions instead of the online one.
Go check out the game here.
We hope you enjoy the game. As always, let us know what you think.
]]>NAG Feature
This month started off on a very positive note, with Clockworking Acorn receiving a two-page feature in NAG magazine, South Africa’s leading gaming magazine. The article was a very positive look at how we do things, and it was a great start to the month.
Caelum – Usability Update
Caelum had an update this month. It added a lot of usability improvements,played with the way the game was presented, and how your ship was controlled. Specifics on that update can be found in this blog post. Play Caelum here.
Unseen – Gameplay Improvements and Sound Challenge
We’ve been playing around with Unseen a lot in the past month. We pushed an update earlier this month that added a bunch of gameplay changes as well as some usability improvements. We are also currently busy working on an update in which we’ve switched over to a better way of doing level-design as well as making some significant improvements to the way the enemy AI works. You can go and play Unseen here.
Unseen is also currently being used in a local sound design challenge. We’re very glad to be part of it and you can go find a blog post on the topic here and the challenge thread here.
Vulcan
Vulcan was our first prototype of the week this month. It features an angry square swinging around on ropes and hitting things with axes. It’s an interesting game that does some cool things with its input scheme. You can check it out here.
Morpheus
Morpheus was our second prototype of the week in August. It was a cool experiment in procedural generation, generating the abilities the player gets access to in a wave survival game. It features plenty of coloured circles for you to fight. Find the game here.
Ludum Dare and the Peak of Prototyping
As you know, we spent the last couple of months working on making new prototypes, exploring specific game ideas and getting feedback on them. That process has come to a close for now, as we’ve decided to start focusing on implementing feedback and expanding on some of these prototypes.
To finish off our prototyping, we took part in Ludum Dare 30 this month, an international game-jam. We each tackled the individual 48-hour competition. Francois made an artsy endless runner called Neon Highway. Hilgard made a game about galactic conquest called Trading Strategy. Finally, Leon made a word game about exploration called SpellChain.
Website Improvements
Those of you who visited our website this month might have noticed that its been tidied up quite a bit. Francois spent some time cleaning up the flow of the site and adding some cool improvements. You can read a blog post on the improvements to the site here.
]]>We’ve previously taken part in the jam for Ludum Dare 26, for which the theme was “Minimalism”. That was actually the first time we made a game together as a group. It was during that weekend that we developed Loki (now Polygone), which you can still go and play over here right now.
This time around, we decided to each do the competition on our own. For those of you who don’t know, the rules of the competition are as follows: You must work on your own to develop a game over a 48-hour period that fits the provided theme. All code and assets must be developed during the 48-hour period. Publicly available programming libraries and tools are allowed, but all art and sound assets need to be self-created during the competition.
So yeah, we had a pretty busy weekend involving little sleep and a lot of work, but we do have three games for you to go out and play. The theme for this competition was “Connected Worlds”. Francois made an artsy endless runner called Neon Highway. Hilgard made a game about galactic conquest called Trading Strategy. Finally, I made a word game about exploration called SpellChain.
Go check out our games and let us know what you think! It was a fun challenge to do and I hope you enjoy the fruits of our labours. As mentioned last week, this brings our weekly frenzy of prototyping to an end, so we have more time to look at some of the more promising prototypes we’ve released in the past 10 weeks. Stay tuned for updates on those soon!
]]>You can check out the competition thread here.
]]>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!
]]>It’s an interesting challenge, and communicating what a new skill does to the player is a problem in and of itself. You can see how we tackled it here.
As always, we love getting feedback from the wide world in general, let us know in the comments!
]]>I’ve already lost way too much time playing this as opposed to actually working on it, which I think is a good sign…
I recommend you guys go play this for yourself. You can find its game page here.
Oh and a little personal tip for when you play: Go fast!
On a completely different note, Francois and Hilgard are going to be attending the A MAZE games festival in Johannesburg in little less than a month, which raises a very important topic for us, namely business cards. We’re thinking of maybe putting a small game on ours. So we have we’ve got a bonus game for you this week. Francois designed a very basic miniatures game he’s calling “Coin Wars” that you can play with just the stuff in your wallet. Check out the ruleset here and let us know what you think.
]]>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!
]]>A lot of these changes took the form of usability improvements, or changes aimed at more clearly communicating the core concepts in these games. Our aim here is to make the games more playable and more easily understandable to new players.
Some of the changes we’ve added include:
In Caelum:
- Automatic keybinding assignment to ship components.
- Added some linear and angular drag to objects.
- Changed the way rotation is displayed.
- Added a more specific mission structure with increasing budgetary rewards.
In Unseen:
- Changed the way sounds from guards are displayed on the screen.
- Changed sound assets.
- Added more indicators for when you are in light and when you are not.
- Added doors between some rooms.
- Changed walk and run speeds of the player and the guards to make more sense.
- Added more upgrades.
- Added ability hotkeys 1-9
We hope you enjoy these changes, and we look forward to more feedback from all of you.
]]>
So enough text for now, head on over to the game page here. Play it right now and let us know if you liked it and/or what direction we should go with it.
All in all it’s been really fun to get back to prototyping. When you start a new project like this, every line of code you write has so much more impact than with a more mature product. You keep wanting to do just a little bit more because of the significant impact you’re having, and overall it’s been a really nice change of pace after spending a couple of months fixing bugs and polishing on Monsters and Medicine.
In the past month we’ve shown: Bacchus Bank, in which you play a loan officer at a bank, Icarus, a small dog-fighting game for two players, and Polygenics, in which you breed shapes together for obscure reasons.
Today we’re adding to that list with Unseen, our attempt at mixing stealth games and roguelikes. This is actually our second attempt at this idea this year, but we felt that we failed to do justice the first time so here we are back for more. You can play the new version here. Personally speaking I’ve been having a lot of fun playing this, and I hope you all check it out and let us know what you think.
We’ve got some more prototypes currently in the idea/development pipeline, and we can’t wait to show them to you when they are ready.
]]>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!
]]>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.
]]>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!
See, doesn’t that look amazing? Okay, so you probably don’t have a clue about what’s going on here, so let me tell you. What you’re looking at here is a hospital. A hospital built out of state-of-the-art rooms and wards (the coloured squares) in an attempt to meet the needs of a modern world and its ever ailing populace (the little circles with numbers in them).
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!
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