Back in the dawn of time, in mid-2010, I, like many of my peers faced a choice: namely what to do after I had gotten my university degree. Like so many of those same peers I felt inadequately prepared to face the real world. So I decided to continue studying and avoid my decisions. Three years and one and a half post-graduate degrees later I found myself, once again, facing the real world. Luckily, my post-graduate studies had introduced me to two people who I found, shared my trepidations. And so, in September of 2013, we together decided to continue shirking social and economic responsibility and delve into the wonderfully exciting world of game design – especially wonderful and exciting when compared to the alternatives of content management systems design.

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!