August has been a big month for us. We’ve been very busy in a lot of places and we’ve had some exciting progress on the game development and business fronts. We’ll definitely be doing these monthly round-ups in the future through our mailing list. So go sign up if you haven’t yet.

NAG Feature

This month started off on a very positive note, with Clockworking Acorn receiving a two-page feature in NAG magazine, South Africa’s leading gaming magazine. The article was a very positive look at how we do things, and it was a great start to the month.

Caelum – Usability Update

Caelum had an update this month. It added a lot of usability improvements,played with the way the game was presented, and how your ship was controlled. Specifics on that update can be found in this blog post. Play Caelum here.

Unseen – Gameplay Improvements and Sound Challenge

We’ve been playing around with Unseen a lot in the past month. We pushed an update earlier this month that added a bunch of gameplay changes as well as some usability improvements. We are also currently busy working on an update in which we’ve switched over to a better way of doing level-design as well as making some significant improvements to the way the enemy AI works. You can go and play Unseen here.

Unseen is also currently being used in a local sound design challenge. We’re very glad to be part of it and you can go find a blog post on the topic here and the challenge thread here.

Vulcan

Vulcan was our first prototype of the week this month. It features an angry square swinging around on ropes and hitting things with axes. It’s an interesting game that does some cool things with its input scheme. You can check it out here.

Morpheus

Morpheus was our second prototype of the week in August. It was a cool experiment in procedural generation, generating the abilities the player gets access to in a wave survival game. It features plenty of coloured circles for you to fight. Find the game here.

Ludum Dare and the Peak of Prototyping

As you know, we spent the last couple of months working on making new prototypes, exploring specific game ideas and getting feedback on them. That process has come to a close for now, as we’ve decided to start focusing on implementing feedback and expanding on some of these prototypes.

To finish off our prototyping, we took part in Ludum Dare 30 this month, an international game-jam. We each tackled the individual 48-hour competition. Francois made an artsy endless runner called Neon Highway. Hilgard made a game about galactic conquest called Trading Strategy. Finally, Leon made a word game about exploration called SpellChain.

Website Improvements

Those of you who visited our website this month might have noticed that its been tidied up quite a bit. Francois spent some time cleaning up the flow of the site and adding some cool improvements. You can read a blog post on the improvements to the site here.