Hello explorers!
The year is coming to an end, and thus comes the ritual of reflecting on the past. As many of you have been following us loyally, we would like to share our thoughts with you! But first; some Godhood news!
Godhood Update 1.2 Coming Soon!
We’ve been working on a new update for Godhood, scheduled somewhere early 2021! We’re not going to give away much here, but it will include some new community ideas to add your religion! One important feature that has often been requested is the “Excommunicate” action. Soon it will be much easier to remove an unwanted Disciple from your roster.
Of course, sending a faithful Disciple away will impact morale a bit. But only the best get to serve you!
Reflecting on 2020
Just like most people on this planet, we had a pretty crazy year. In January, we were at the point of calling it quits. Because of the disappointing Early Access track of Godhood and general mismanagement, we were at a total low point with no viable business left. Up to that point, Godhood development had been a true ordeal. We had two separate burn-outs in the team, and the quality of the game only improved at a slow pace. By the start of 2020, we had to let go of all of our employees and friends (You can follow a few of them at Roost Games!) whom we shared so many beautiful memories with. We, Maarten, Manuel and Adriaan, were the only ones left of our original team of over 10 people.
However, we thought Godhood to be in an unacceptable state. It was our duty to deliver you higher quality before we called it quits. So we set on a journey to release 1.0. After that, we would reevaluate our situation.
In that period, we re-learned a lot about making games. We had some critical moments where we compared the production of Godhood with that of Renowned Explorers and Reus. In the process, we found our joy back, and the ability to increase quality at a much higher pace. We couldn’t have done it without the support of the community - it was at one point literally the only thing that motivated us to move forward! We’re very grateful for all your kind words, constructive criticism, and all round fun interaction! In particular, we would like to thank the good folks on the Abbey Discord. It has been a joy. We’re proud of the results!
Lucky for us, this increase in joy and quality also changed our fortunes on Godhood! The game welcomed a lot of new players, and we’re happy to see many more people having fun with it. Because of that, we’re now in the position to look at the future!
The Future
This newfound joy has motivated us to take a look into the future of the Abbey. We’ve started with cutting down some of our ambitions to focus on bringing better quality games. In the past 5 years, Abbey Games was very busy trying to manage a democratic and safe work environment. However, it seems we went too far. Too many of us were more busy managing and doing HR work instead of bringing you quality gameplay. With the 3 of us, we’re going back to our times during Reus and Renowned Explorers. That means more time developing, less time managing. We’re also saying goodbye to our engine AbbeyCore. It was a fun and enriching project, but we want to focus on our game quality. We hope to use more industry standards to make it easier to deliver our games faster and to more people.
This means we will fully devote ourselves to deep and thematic strategy-likes. We’ve received quite some requests for a sequel to Renowned Explorers and Reus. We have a lot of love for these games, and are exchanging interesting ideas about them! We are also very excited to try new themes, too!
So what does the future bring? We’re going to keep you guys in the dark a bit longer! But know that we’re working on deep and thematic strategy-likes, in the spirit of Reus and Renowned Explorers! We hope to use some of Steam’s new features to bring our new prototype to you as quickly as possible. We believe that together, we can make a really high quality game!
Best Wishes
Finally, we want to give you all our best wishes for your (a)religious festivities! We hope you can leave the chaos behind you for a while, and focus on the things that are truly important to you. Be it family, friends, health, or just some really good games! Thank you for reading, and we hope to see you in 2021!
Best wishes,
The Abbey