It is time! We now open the gates of Broken Alliance to the public! So excited to get people playing the Early Access version of our game that we have been working on for a bit over 3 years and will continue the development with the players feedback!
If you are not sure whether you would like to get the game; try out the demo, it is not a fresh one - so some things have already been fixed in the EA release version but it gives a good idea of what you might expect from the main game!
I think our team members experience of working on games like Death and Taxes, Disco Elysium, Pentiment and Heroes of Might and Magic series etc, have come together in a beautiful story filled fantasy world quite well and I am very proud of what we have achieved thus far!
If you would like more info about our Early Access release, you can take a look at our last blog post.
Enjoy and if you have time, please give us feedback in the forums or in discord, you can be in direct contact with our indie dev team members there: https://discord.gg/QBSxsgrHep Would love to hear your thoughts!
Again, we are excited for this big milestone for us!
Thank you for your support - whether it be buying the game or giving us feedback in our community discussions or discord! ♡
Leene
Preparing for Early Access
Good day Commanders, Ramiro here.
Before the release of the game in Early Access next week, Wednesday the 15th of January, we wanted to provide some information and set expectations, answer some questions, and give you mini-roadmap of things that are coming soonish.
How much of the game will be playable? When the game releases on January 15th, Players will be able to play the prologue for free as in the demo that is available right now in the store with several updates and improvements, and the beginning of Act 1 out of 3 for our first Released Faction: Anchorage. Players will be able to recruit all 5 Champions from Anchorage, and proceed with the beginning of the story against their first enemy faction: Phobos. This already provides a several hours of gameplay, fighting, exploring and unraveling the story of the Anchorage faction. There will be 6 recruitable champions, 4 from Anchorage (You start with the loyal Teles the Siren in your army already) and 2 Neutral ones as well as multiple main and side quests.
How often do you intend to update the game? In the beginning, very often. We are a very small team and while we have been playtesting the game, we are absolutely certain that there will be a lot of problems that either we didn’t see, or we just didn’t have the time to address before the release. Our plan is to provide quick fixes to any major issues that pop up after release, while we work in the next major updates. In practice, this means that hotfixes may come even daily, while quality of life improvements and content additions less frequently. Our plan is to release one major update every 2 months or so, but this will be heavily dependent on many variables. While that is our plan, we can’t promise that for certain, but we will definitely try.
When will the other factions arrive? Phobos, the faction you fight against in the beginning of act 1 of Anchorage is almost done, so we would like to release it 1 month after release. This will include roughly the same amount content you get for Anchorage, but for Phobos this time. Their own questlines, cards, Champions, town screen and so on. For the other 2, Paradise and Forge, expect similar timings as well as a significant chunk of the Act I map becoming available whenever either of these 2 factions are added.
To emphasize again, this will be heavily dependent on a multitude of variables, so take these with a grain of salt, or two.
Is there any major feature missing from the game? Sadly, yes. We are missing a progression system for both the Commanders and the Champions. We have already the skeleton for that system to exist, but we didn’t have the time yet to fully implement it. Both Commanders and Champions will be able to level up and become more powerful, but that will come in a future update.
Artifacts exist in the world and can be equipped already for some minor bonuses, and sometimes some game altering mechanics, but to be honest, they are not doing what we would like them to do. Sometime down the line we will be releasing an update that will be changing most artifacts with more game altering mechanics. We just simply didn’t have the time yet for the system to meet our desires. Adventure map exploration. While Players can explore, fight and gather resources, the Adventure Map exploration needs to have more weight into the Player experience and the way the Commanders and Champions develop. This is heavily tied to the progression system mentioned before, so when the progression system comes online, expect an overhaul of the exploration of the world map, with new buildings that support that system and that will help you sink those extra resources you have in improving your army.
Champion Upgrades: This is related to Champion Progression. We have designed Champion upgrades for all Champions, but due to time we couldn’t put them in yet. During a normal playthrough, Players will be able to upgrade their units visually and mechanically while completing their specific quests, changing the cards they have access to, as well as changing the stats. This will come later on when the progression is ready.
Voice Over: Due to lack of time, money, and the writing finishing than we planned, we couldn’t schedule the actors for the full voice over yet. We have the casting done for most characters in the game and we will be bringing them in in a future content update.
AI: At the moment, our AI is functional. They move, they attack and some specific units can perform their special abilities. However, their targeting system is not fully developed yet and we need to add many more abilities (cards) for them to use. AI is something we will keep upgrading until the very last patch. This will result in higher challenge once they start performing more special abilities. Because of these, it’s important to bring the following point.
Will my save game work with future updates? In the long term? Probably not. While we are going to be careful not trying to break save games when we deploy patches, there will be moments where because of the addition of certain mechanics, or features, the save game will probably be affected, potentially rendering your save games obsolete. However, the reason for it will be because we added significant changes to the game, so it’s an encouragement to play again with new content and features. Having said this, I will reiterate that our goal will be to try to make the savegames as backwards compatible as possible. But we want to be very clear about the expectations here already.
Will the game have multiplayer? We have gotten that question a few times already so we want to be open and clear about it. The answer is no, but with a caveat. While it’s not planned to make the game work in multiplayer, we have thought of ways that maybe players could play battles against each other. This idea lives only in our minds for the moment but depending on how the game is received, we might consider it bringing it to life at some point after the 1.0 release. Our one and only focus right now is to provide a meaningful narrative and gameplay focused experience in singleplayer.
Does this game play similarly to Heroes of Might and Magic?
No.
While we are huge fans of the HoMM series and we even worked on the IP before, we didn’t want to make a copycat game, but just take the adventure-strategy or HoMM-like genre as inspiration. If we had to compare it to any game in how close it is to gameplay, it would be much closer to King’s Bounty and Disciples than it is to HoMM. However, we believe our game it’s its own thing and can exist together with all those classics, we simply want to elevate on what came before. Those games remain there are as the incredible that they are jewels and we just bring a twist to some of the ideas those games presented.
This covers all the points we could think about for the moment. There will be more information coming the day of release with more specifics and also some Known Issues. We are looking forward to share the game we have been pouring our love and our hearts for the last few years with all of you and we hope you join us on January 15th when the game releases on Steam. Have a nice day and see you in Eol!
Much love, The Broken Alliance Team
Broken Alliance Gates Will Open In 1 Week!
Hi!
Leene, the art director here!
THE EARLY ACCESS RELEASE IS IN ONE WEEK??? Aaah I am so excited for the fantasy to come alive! We will post more solid information about it in a few days but I wanted to share some art of our first faction, Anchorage, because our Early Access release MOSTLY focuses on that with a glimpse to all of others too!
As the Art Director I am so proud of our small indie team and what we have achieved in over 3 years of working on the game. This game is our love letter to pixel art and fantasy. Happy to share parts of it here:
ANCHORAGE faction is all about water and the humans/mermaids(who we have character creation for) and creatures that live around it. Its designs take inspiration from Japanese and Nordic European archidecture and mythology.
We have Svein (the frog/fish people), Hroswal(yea.. a walrus with horns, you are absolutely right), a Gigant/Troll, Valkyrie warriors and Mermaids.
The blue colors and brown warm wooden elements can evoke calmness and reflect stability and tradition as the folks in Anchorage are resistant to change and the usage of magic that is ruining the environment.
And you can customize your very own Anchorage character, Human or Merfolk. Here's some merfolk on horses, unicorns and bisons(the last one there looking very much like highlands cow.)
Part of our(very international) team is from Estonia which means we know love our swampy environments. Anchorage environment is the most calm and cosy for me at least. :)
Also the UI is inspired by some old Estonian knitting patterns. See that star ("eight heel") pattern on the background of this UI in the bottom? My granny makes mittens with that kind of patterns. It is so cool that people made pixel art into folky carpets and belts hundreds and thousands years ago!
Also all the factions have their own main resource and Anchorages one, Blackrock is inspired by honeycomb reefs in Ireland. (Bottom right one on the picture)
Anyways, I don't want to keep this too long, but here are some card designs....
and the Anchorage town!
So... ONE MORE WEEEEEK! More specific info about it soon!
Oh and ofc thanks everyone who supports us with wishlisting! Shares with people who like shiny fantasy worlds with mythical creatures are really appreciated! Every wishlist counts!
Looking forward to talking about all the other factions too!
Take care and enjoy!
Leene ♡
Early Access Release Date announcement
Hello everyone, Oak here.
I have some not-ideal-but-still-kinda-good news to share with you. We decided to postpone the release of Broken Alliance's upcoming Early Access release until 15th January 2025.
Why?
I'm horribly burnt out
We were close to hitting our Early Access quality and content standards, but far enough to be concerned
We need more time to test the game
That's pretty much it. It really is as simple as that. I've been leading this project for about 3 years now, and we've had delays here and there, due to the project taking its shape and such. But it's been quite difficult lately. I've been ill for almost an entire year now, and only a month ago I found out what was actually the problem. I have had no time to recover, and while we've made great strides as a team, the whole production has suffered because of my illness and the lack of energy thereof.
Thus, we decided to delay the Early Access release of the game. We decided upon January, because this would give us enough time to readjust to the level of polish we want to achieve (thank you for those of you who have given us feedback so far!) and to make sure that we are giving you the experience that you might expect from a project such as ours. The next months will be spent on making sure that we have something memorable to offer you from the get go. Something that you can play around with for a longer time. Something with more variety. I know I'm being vague right now, but it's mostly just to try and tease what's in store for you ^_^
The delay is something that's not ideal for our team. To be fully transparent with you, we've had to ask some members of our team to move to a revenue share agreement instead of a full salary. Even though the people we have asked have been very supportive of that idea, it's not an easy thing to ask. This game has taken longer than planned, far longer in fact, but that's something that we have been taking into account as time has gone by. But even taking it into account, things have taken longer to finish. We will still be releasing the game in the best state possible, with the most amount of polish we can give it, but for now, you will have to wait a little bit longer, and I'm sorry for that.
I hope that we can at least build up some more excitement towards January starting from now, as we do have quite a lot to share :)
Much love, -Oak
Early Access Release Date announcement!
Hi everybody! Oak here ^_^
Broken Alliance will release in Early Access on October 24th 2024! Very happy to finally be able to announce this, since it's been a heck of a ride. We will release the game in Early Access with a base price of $14.99, and plan to increase it by around 20% for the full release.
I hope you've already seen that we have now finally released our public demo here on Steam! Do try it out if you haven't yet, any feedback about it is more than welcome!
Without beating around the bush anymore, let me get into the reasoning of us deciding to go for Early Access.
As is sometimes the custom in game development, the vision and the scope of the game can change. Such was also the case with Broken Alliance. We started it out as a more casual, shorter, smaller experience, but we quickly realized that in order to make something unique and more aligned with the values that we have as a creative studio, we needed things to be different.
Our lead writer Märten came up with a brilliant storyline for the world going deeper into the conflict that we wanted to initially showcase in the game. Instead of making something that would resemble a regular skirmish map setup in, say, Heroes of Might and Magic games or Age of Wonders and such, we wanted to give a more focused narrative experience. This ended up with the game taking an approach closer to the King's Bounty or Disciples series. We came up with a whole world for you to explore, wherein you can play as one of the four factions in the game, and have a different experience with each one. All the factions will be played on this one large world map, but with quite different starting conditions and very different questlines and narrative experience.
As the idea was fleshed out more and more, we realized that we're definitely going to need more time to realize our new vision. We're very happy with the direction that we took, because we didn't see any point in trying to emulate the masterpieces that came before Broken Alliance, but rather forge a completely new path. This is also the point where we agreed that we would have a form of deckbuilding in the game, not as complex or vast as dedicated deckbuilder games, but something that could have the intuitiveness of such games with the strategic and tactical depth that adventure strategy games are known for. One of our core focuses on this game has been to try and make it easy to pick up, with depth being added the more you progress in the story. Which brings me to my next point...
Making games is hard, yo. We knew that we had bitten off a big piece once we adjusted our vision, but we didn't really exactly know how much time it would take to take it across the finish line. Now, we have come quite close to it. However, to make sure that we make a game for you that both you as players and us as creators can be happy with, we decided to open it up for Early Access. This way we can get your feedback as we take the final steps together to create something awesome. We are going to launch Early Access with the Prologue (that you can play right now in the demo!) and with one faction, Anchorage, being playable throughout most of Act I. In total, we plan to have 3 acts for the game, with Act I and Act II making up most of the game and Act III serving as the final climax.
As we update the game, we will bring you the other factions available to play, and also unlock progression systems step by step, so we can get your feedback on both the content and the balance of the game. We want the game to be challenging, but not impossible! So, any criticisms about that is going to be extremely valuable once we launch into Early Access.
We want to be in EA for at least 6 months, so we would have time to react to your feedback and also take our time to polish Broken Alliance as much as possible. We have launched our dedicated Discord server for the game, which will also be our main channel for gathering feedback. So if you're interested in that, you can join right away ^_^
The hope is that we get a strong initial following as we launch into Early Access so we can get a lot of valuable feedback and much needed scrutiny about the game. If you feel like you want to participate on this, honestly, once in a lifetime launch with us and join the Early Access process, I would appreciate it immensely. This is our biggest project yet, and will probably stay as the biggest project we undertake with our studio for the foreseeable future.
If you want to know a little bit more about the decisions that led us to Early Access, feel free to browse the "Why Early Access?" section on our store page.
For now, I hope that you're as excited as I am for the initial release. I can't wait to show you what we have in store!
Stay tuned for more blogposts like this one soon, where I give some details about the four factions that we feature in Broken Alliance.
Thank you all for your support so far and I hope we can create something you have a lot of fun with!
Much love, -Oak
Broken Alliance Demo is now live + patch notes!
Hola everyone, Wisak here.
First of all, thanks to everyone who has downloaded and played the Broken Alliance demo so far. We have been monitoring the feedback and we have been hard at work identifying problems, and trying to solve some of the most common issues players have had since the demo release.
From now on, we want to try to make the communication with the community as open as possible. For that reason, we want to start sharing patch notes whenever we update content moving forward.
These last 3 days we have been hard at work and we have made some fixes based on your feedback. We are committed to improve the game, and while some of these fixes address some of the problems, we will probably revisit some of those solutions once we have better ones.
• We have improved the visibility of interactable objects in the adventure map. We realized that many players were having issues seeing them and was causing confusion in how to proceed with the demo. Here you have a glimpse of how interactable objects will look like when travelling the world of Eol.
• We fixed one problem with enemy units respawning in some of the combats • We fixed a bug where players couldn’t cross adventure map tiles which were previously blocked, like the doors and the bridge you repair • We made the Town Screen closing button more obvious and moved it to the bottom of the screen • We fixed a problem where units were still displaying health and stamina bars after being defeated • We added a voice volume bar in the options • We made the quest log and the first dialogue “next” button to glow to let players know they are there • We lowered the volume of the sound when a player hovers resources in the puzzle screen • We fixed the team colors showing all as white • We added a bunch of tooltips to help players navigate and understand some of the elements and mechanics of the game. From combat information about the units, to more information about how to use the mana refinery, to how to use the spell, to several more. • We fixed a problem where some texts were showing in Chinese • We fixed a problem where champions would not be usable in combat if they were defeated in previous combats and healed at the Alm. • We fixed a game breaking problem where the game would freeze if the player lost a fight, not allowing them to start the demo again • We fixed a problem where Mandy had only 1 health point in the fight to recover the Artifact • We added a gold pick up next to the Alm in the final area in case players didn’t have gold, so they wouldn’t have to backtrack. • We updated Prior’s combat SFX • Players will also now draw one extra move card per turn based on some of the feedback we got. • We disabled the view dwelling button from the army screen since players can’s see it…yet. • We fixed the army tooltip staying forever if you close the army screen with ESC • We fixed the unit bar not showing freshly added soldiers to the army • We increased the speed of the projectiles from the Siren and Puppet Master ranged attacks • We fixed a problem where sometimes damage display numbers would disappear
We know that there are still some issues out there that we want to address in future patches, but those will take longer due to the complexity of the systems associated with them.
For example: • Lack of general tooltips, like the artefact or units, or during combat to see the positive, or negative effects applied to units • We know the demo ends a bit abruptly and we are working on improving that • The voice lines from Yorick have lower quality than the rest • No save games yet • Ultrawide screen is not yet fully supported • It’s unclear what the AI is doing in its turn during combat, since there are no visuals provided for when they use special attacks. This can be specially confusing when they affect your units with status effects.
We want to close this by saying again thanks for your feedback, we were able to achieve all of this. We want to work with all of you to make Broken Alliance the very best version of what it can be. We are a very small studio with limited resources, so any and all feedback is extremely important for us and we will do our best to handle it, while trying to maintain our vision for the project as much as possible. At the same time, some things might take a bit longer because of it, so we ask for some patience.
Have fun out there and see you back in Eol!
Steam China Showcase Demo + Broadcast!
Hi everyone! Oak here.
We're happy to be part of the Steam China Showcase, and I have some exciting news for you! As soon as our demo page gets approved here on Steam, you will be able to play the demo yourself! Hopefully this will happen in the coming days. The demo will be available in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
Stay tuned, and hope to see you playing soon! ^_^
PS: This recording of the demo does not have the voiceover yet, so you have to bear with me there, but for the demo release, all of the dialogue is voiced :)
Broken Alliance at PixElated Festival!
Hi everybody!
Oak here from Placeholder Gameworks. It know we've been quite silent recently, but we've been hard at work with both Broken Alliance and CraftCraft, and we're getting close to the finish line ^_^
It will be a stressful time to get everything done and polished, but we're giving it our darndest to provide you with a memorable experience! Tune in to the stream to see a sneak peek of the demo we've been working on.
Join us now at the PixElated Festival, wishlist and buy games that pique your interest, and do give us feedback on what you see ^_^
Many thanks to our friends at Brave At Night studios in organizing this wonderful event, and a big thank you to them for including our little gem, Broken Alliance.
I hope to have more to share with you as we get closer to release. We will have an official announcement soonish about when the game comes out (it's this year!), and we will have a demo ready for you as well, starting from the middle of August for you to try. Just a few things left to finish (mostly the voiceover work).
Stay tuned, and give us a wishlist if you're interested in keeping up to date with our development.
Much love, -Oak
Broken Alliance -- Lunar New Year Sale
Hello everyone！
Broken Alliance is now participating in the Lunar New Year Sale 2024! Nice to meet you all, looking forward to seeing you again in the future!
Broken Alliance -- Lunar New Year Festival
Hello everyone！
Broken Alliance is now participating in the Lunar New Year Festival 2024! Please wishlist our game, looking forward to seeing you again in the future!
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