Hello Travelers!

In this devlog we would like to introduce you to another cool feature we've implemented into Warlocks 2: God Slayers - the Warlock Altars.
You'll see them rarely scattered across locations of all three of the game's worlds. Upon usage you'll be both granted a buff and will be subject to an immediate activation effect.



Raziel, the Fallen Angel is, like all the other altars, a character from our previous game (Warlocks vs Shadows). On activation you'll be healed and receive a health regeneration buff.



Rainer, the Guardian gives you a shield on activation and his buff improves your dodge chance for a few minutes.



Lissy, the Robot Girl is a trickier one. Upon activating her altar you will receive one out of these three random effects: medium heal, poison or resource refill. Additionaly her buff applies poison to your attacks.



And for the last one Iezabel, the Blood Mage. This one is a trade-off that you might not always want to take. On activation she strikes you for 1/3 of your HP. On the other hand her buff gives you a nice Life Steal aura.
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If you like what you're seeing add the game the your Steam Wishlist to stay updated 

For the newest updates on the game's development outside of this community you can also follow us on Facebook, Youtube or Twitter.

Frozen District Team

Hello Travelers!

Recently we've spent some time working on the evolutions for familiars that you can have in Warlocks 2. 



And today we want to share some more info on their first and second forms. There are also third forms but we'll keep them a secret for now.


Left to right: Grimbo, Aygoon, Trovy

Aygoon, the Drake
He's the only one with an attacking spell in his base kit. In his initial form he can also buff the HP of his Warlock. Later on he evolves into Goonay, the Dragon and gains an ability to increase his own Casting Speed as well as his Warlock's Attack Speed.

 

Grimbo, the Sloth
In his basic form he can heal and buff the armor of his Warlock. He has the lowest Casting Speed of all familiars but his buffs last long. When he evolves into Grimboire, the Sleeper he learns a buff that increases his Warlock's Casting Speed.

  

Trovy, the Shroom
Starts with a spell that grants his Warlock a temporary shield and a buff increasing Attack Damage. Trovar, the Mushroom is his second evolution in which he gains a buff to his Warlock's total health.

  


Their 3rd forms are where they obtain their most interesting abilities though.
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If you like what you're seeing add the game the your Steam Wishlist to stay updated 

For the newest updates on the game's development outside of this community you can also follow us on Facebook, Youtube or Twitter.

Frozen District Team

Hello Travelers!

We're currently focusing on the enemies of the third world and we'd like to share some of the progress we've made so far.

Below you can see one of the neutral creatures that'll inhabit that world. It only becomes aggressive when attacked by a player in which case it transforms into a terryfing beast.



The non-neutral enemies of this planet are Fallen Warlocks, they once were the members of the famous Warlocks Order but recently followed their wicked leader along an evil path. Here's one of them, Warlock Witness:





What are your thoughts on these guys? Any idea on how to call the transforming critter?

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If you like what you're seeing add the game the your Steam Wishlist to stay updated 

For the newest updates on the game's development outside of this community you can also follow us on Facebook, Youtube or Twitter.

Frozen District Team

Hello Travelers!

We have a big news! Recently we signed a publishing deal with Fat Dog Games. Thanks to this we’ll be able to polish up the game more before the full release. Following these changes we also moved the planned release date to Q3 2018, so we can deliver a better product for our players in the end.


As for the development progress we’re currently in the concept stage for world 3 and its inhabitants, you can see some of the sketches and concept art below.





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If you like what you're seeing add the game the your Steam Wishlist to stay updated 

For the newest updates on the game's development outside of this community you can also follow us on Facebook, Youtube or Twitter.

Frozen District Team

The third Monday of January is claimed to be the most depressing day of the year. We call it the Blue Monday. 

The concept of Blue Monday was first introduced in 2005 as a result of a complicated math equastion, which uses many complicated and abstract factors such as weather conditions, debt level, time since Christmas etc. That's why it's generally percieved as a pseudoscience.



Nevertheless we wanted to use this occasion to remind you about the severity of mental health issues. Depression is a serious illness and one that shouldn't be ignored. If you have any suspition that you or one of your loved ones is experiencing depression, reach out for proffesional help as soon as possible. Don't ignore even the smallest of symptoms.

Remember – even if you fell like everything around is falling apart, there's always hope. With enough love, care and proffesional help above all. depression can be overcome.

Hi All,

The Indygo reviews have been quite positive and it makes us proud. Reviewers have praised the graphical style and the music and have acknowledged the importance of speaking about depression. 

"Don’t miss out on this because it helps to highlight what can happen when you feel you have nowhere left to turn. There’s always help, and this game helps you realize that," writes Chris White from GodisaGeek. According to Chris, Indygo is "incredibly effective, making you empathize and relate to the pain [the main character is] suffering".

"I genuinely feel that Indygo is an accurate - and more importantly – a grounded portrayal of what it’s like to live with the black dog. It never feels preachy or overly dramatic, instead opting to provide a realistic sense of the monotony, loneliness, despair, and meaninglessness that people with depression feel on a day-to-day basis," writes Andrew Wowk from GameGrin.

Thanks guys, you’ve really felt what the creators were trying to convey.

Indygo is out now and for the sake of better immersion, it's available in 7 languages.

It's high time to tell you in detail about what gameplay of Exorder is about! If you ever played Advance Wars or Ancient Empires II, you'll feel right at home. Exorder is a turn-based tactical strategy game. 



The goal of the player is to kill the opponent's commander. To do so, the player has to recruit units. Each player starts with a castle, which serves as a recruitment building. Money to recruit units is acquired by capturing houses that are already on the map. Captured houses grant the player some amount of money each turn. Houses already captured by the player can be recaptured by the enemy, so the player should remember to defend their buildings.



TLDR: capture houses -> recruit units -> destroy your opponent!



Stay tuned for more news and remember to add the game to your Steam wishlist!

When the ruler of Cerulean dies, a competition is held to select the successor to the throne from among the royal children. The competition challenges fighting skills and strategic thinking of the participants. This time, after their father passed away, Prince Tristan and Princess Beyla duel to determine who'll become the next ruler of the kingdom of Cerulean. Who do you think will win the fight?



Here is a work-in-progress peek at our first campaign mission. The mission is crucial to the story of Exorder and serves as a setup to all the events that'll unfold during the entirety of the campaign mode.



Beyla, a daughter of the late king of Cerulean. Her whole life she's been overshadowed by her older brother, Tristan. Her contrasting personality to that of her outgoing brother didn't make her particularly popular at Tristan's numerous parties. It's always been assumed that she wouldn't be able to win the competition to the throne.



Tristan, a son of late king of Cerulean. Tristan's always been favourite at court. His lavish lifestyle of a young prince and outgoing personality made him liked and popular. His lack of discipline never bothered him, since everyone's always been telling him that he'll become the successor to his father. But is he really going to win the competition to the throne?

Stay tuned for more news and remember to add the game to your Steam wishlist!

Welcome to the world of Exorder! We'd like to present you our work-in-progress map of the game world. The map will be used as a mission select screen. It depicts three neighboring kingdoms: The Federation of Clans, The Vermilion Order and Cerulean. During the campaign you'll take part in the story of a conflict between the kingdoms and experience it through the perspective of Cerulean.



Exorder will feature a 12 mission singleplayer campaign mode. The story and its gameplay exposition are still being fine-tuned to make it as fun and enjoyable to experience as possible! Today you can take a quick peek at a fragment of our internal summary of the Exorder's story.



Stay tuned for more news and remember to add the game to your Steam wishlist!

Written by Rafał Belke



Once upon a time in a land far, far away two brave Knights of Coding decided to create a tactical fantasy game. They set off on a journey and survived many adventures, including an encounter with a stranger bearing a poisoned apple. This is the tale of Solid9 Studio and their game, Exorder.

Level 1. Let’s code the game!
It all began in 2012 in Warsaw, Poland. Sebastian Sztangierski and Dawid Członka, two young programmers working for Samsung’s mobile division, decided they would rather write games. They came up with a mobile platformer called Kentucky Robo Chicken. The game had to be simple because they could only work on it after working hours. Both Sebastian and Dawid were coders so they started with mechanics and outsourced graphics to a mutual friend.

“At the start we were writing the game for Android in Java,” Sebastian says as we are sitting at the studio’s headquarters. “Then, we decided to make our own engine from scratch.” And that was, so to speak, a level 1 idea, noble but very time-consuming. The studio needed to develop.



Level 2. Middleware and time/resource evaluation
Working on their own engine gave the team a deeper understanding of its inner workings. Very valuable experience - but it was time to move on. “We wanted to make the game, not the engine,” Dawid says. The KRC game development moved on to the early version of the Unity engine. Luckily, the transition from Java to C# went smoothly. The team learned to evaluate their time and think further ahead.

Health Points lost: Self-publishing without promotion

Kentucky Robo Chicken was ready in June, 2013. The Solid9 Studio guys decided to publish the game on Google Play and Apple’s App Store - on their own. What could go wrong, right?

“That was our huge mistake,” Sebastian says. “We were working on KRC trapped in a basement like some Gollums. We didn’t do anything to promote the game, no one knew about it. The game was free, but at the last minute we implemented optional in-app purchases and just - released it. Eventually, we reached one hundred thousand downloads and that was only thanks to the help of our friend, a home-grown marketing wizard. After a year we had earned enough to buy four beers.”

But no tears were shed. Lessons were learned, experience points for finishing the game were gained and it was decided to keep making games. It was time to get to another level.



Level 3. A bigger game and the first investor
At the end of August, 2013, Solid9 Studio came up with an idea for a clever tactical turn-based game for mobile platforms. Set with a fantasy backdrop and beasts and knights. They named the game (ahem) Beasts and Knights but eventually changed it to Exorder.

It was going to be one of those “easy to learn, hard to master” games with a two player skirmish mode played a little like chess. Once you got acquainted with all the units, as well as their skills and the mechanics of buying them during the game, you could start thinking on how not to waste any of your turns.

Sebastian took a four-month unpaid sabbatical to devote all his waking hours to the new game. The move was risky but it gave the project a nice starting boost. It also gave the team a taste of what it would be like to work full-time on the game. At that point they just knew they needed to attract an investor to go pro.

And they did! “Thanks to the investor we were able to hire two artists and change Exorder’s graphics from 2D to 3D,” Dawid says. They could also start thinking about making it a PC game with an additional single player campaign. The latter would make Exorder somewhat similar to X-Com games. It was in late summer, 2014, and the prospects were looking good.

Health Points lost: Poisoned apples

Unexpectedly, the project started to derail creatively due to some advice from a friendly games industry insider. He convinced the team that Exorder had to be fresher, more unique - the original idea was too simple. “This stewed in our heads. We started to come up with unnecessary additions to the game: rogue-like mechanics, a hack and slash flick... We lost over a year for that,” Sebastian says.

The studio ended up with a lot of new elements which didn’t stick together. At some point they spread themselves too thin and the project started to drift without direction.

On top of that the investor suddenly stopped paying and there was no way to force him as the team had nothing on paper – just an oral contract. Repeat after me, people: thou shalt conclude written contracts!

“We already gave up our jobs to work on the game and we had no money to pay our artists,” Dawid says. Eventually, in 2016, those two crises smothering them at once, Sebastian and David decided to lay off the artists and put the game into sleep mode. They needed to rest and to think everything through. They needed to regain their vision.



Level 4. A contract with a publisher
For months Sebastian and Dawid regenerated their HP by writing applications and software solutions for various customers. And then, in 2017, a mutual friend put them in contact with Fat Dog Games, a Polish indie publisher (and my employer) willing to invest in promising projects. And the idea of Exorder was promising – the original, I mean. “We decided to cut off all those strange additional elements and to go back to our original vision,” Sebastian says. “We didn’t want to be the gaming revolution anymore. We wanted to make something we would like to play. Something nice looking, simple and well-proven.”

To say the contract was a game-changer would be... a horrible pun, so let’s start again. Thanks to that move the team could afford to work full-time on Exorder, hire a couple of freelance artists and invite a game designer to join the project. Said designer, Michał Sroka, took care of the story and the campaign progress, also balancing the gameplay and creating new units.

Michał is also the guardian of the vision. “Not having a person who cares about the overall shape of the game is a huge mistake. That’s why many games made by only programmers have poor ratings,” Sebastian says. “Sometimes you concentrate on the small elements so much you have no time to look at how these elements fit into the whole,” Dawid adds.



Level 5. Profit?
So what’s the current vision of Exorder? It’s still a fun and seemingly simple, yet deeply tactical, turn based game with a single player campaign and two-player skirmishes, both online and offline. It doesn’t overcomplicate things with dozens of meaningless attributes, statistics or charts, but engages the player with simple mechanics that encourage strategic thinking. And it looks just lovely and bright, still holding on to that fantasy setting.

The team learned a lot during the last five years. What advice would they offer to those who are thinking about making games? “Do it progressively,” Dawid says. “First write a code for something like Tic Tac Toe, then create a simple walk-and-shoot game, and then - The Witcher.”