Welcome back, dear adventurers! We hope you're ready to enter the fantasy world of Exorder. The game will be out on Monday, March 19th. In just three days, the epic story of battling factions fighting for their heritage and magical mischief unravels before your eyes and engulfs you in a tactical turn-based struggle. There is laughter to be bellowed and there are tears to be cried and after the story ends, there's a ton of multiplayer content to enjoy. Skirmish with your friends or combat your AI rivals to your heart's content!
For the last few weeks, we've been working super hard, giving Exorder the finishing touches, debugging the game and adding the last bits of content. We're exhausted but extremely happy that we could bring you our vision of the easy-to-pick-up-hard-to-master strategy game. Not to mention that all your feedback from the beta test build has proven to be exceptionally precious and fruitful.
We wanted to cordially invite you the world premiere. We promise you magical confetti and a whole lot of fun! To be sure that you won't miss the release of Exorder, please add our game to your wishlist.
See you on Monday!
Attention! Open beta starts today!
This is not a drill!
We need you, soldier, to conduct a reconnaissance of the game and come back to give us your feedback! Four story missions are available at your disposal. Check every nook and cranny of the maps, battle the enemies forces and have a taste of main campaign's story.
After you finish your mission, visit the Facebook group and let us know about your experiences on the battlefield.
Tests will last until the game's Steam release. After that your beta key will self-destruct... I mean deactivate!
Unit to know about our not so obvious inspiration!
Tristan Contrary to the first impression, it's not Johnny Bravo who inspired the appearance of Tristan, but our graphics designer -the same guy who pitched the concept art for the hero and designed him from the ground up. He is quite self-confident and aware of his good-looks, and not without reason! He's probably the most handsome, most muscular graphics desinger in the whole city. Tristan's origins are not as fairy tale as his name might suggest, though. Our friend has a cat named Tristan who's a total dick and we figured it would fit the character.
Beetle He's a slow hardhitter - like a tank. He was kind of inspired by the Mammoth Tank unit from the Command and Conquer series , which was one of the most menacing vehicles in the game. We wanted his looks to bear a bit of a resemblance to a Japanese kaijū monster.
Architect We based this character on two renowned scientists: Dr. Neo Cortex from Crash Bandicootand Dr. Robotnik / Eggman from Sonic the Hedgehog. Architect is a genius who holds a grudge against the entire world because of some traumatic events from his past. His mechanical armor helps him compensate for his complexes regarding his height and old age.
Stay tuned for more news and remember to add the game to your Steam wishlist!
Evolving style, evolving play. But everything's in (Ex)order.
Did you know that Exorder started as a 2d mobile game? Today's picture
lets you take a look at various stages of the game's evolution.
We're developing Exorder to support three different input methods. The first is keyboard + mouse, a standard method of all PC gamers. For those who prefer to sit and relax on a couch, we're also addimg gamepad support. The third method is touch input and caters to those who prefere gaming on Windows tablets. This versatility allows to please all kinds of PC gamers and enables us to potentially release the game to other platforms in the future. Currently we’re fine-tuning the gamepad input. It’s not yet perfect, but we’re getting there ;)
Stay tuned for more news and remember to add the game to your Steam wishlist!
You wanna know how to advance your wars? It's quite simple
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!
World of Exorder: Beyla & Tristan
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!
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!
Solid9 Studio and Exorder: A Story of Perseverance
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.”
