Can you believe we’re already in the last week of November? This year truly has been a ride. To avoid dwelling on the little time that is left of the year, though, let’s rather talk about what’s been going on in the Clockwork Acorn side of the woods!

A few things have happened since our last newsletter in June, but here are the highlights:

• Our team grew,
• We went on a retreat, 
• We jammed a game called esCargo, and
• Upupu Bird Ninja is going to Playtopia!

I know the saying is ‘save the best for last’, but this time I feel like diving into the best bit first. So here’s a bit more about…

Travelling & Trading on the Snail Trail in esCargo!

You know what they say; you don’t choose the merchant life, the merchant life chooses you. And that’s essentially the whole premise behind our little game, esCargo!

Take on the role of a trader with an unusual business partner, a giant snail with a shell that doubles as a wagon, who journeys between villages and trades bits for bobs. Unpack your wares, trade wisely with the locals, and try to find the five baby snails out in the world to complete the final trade of the game.

esCargo was our attempt to capture this year’s Ludum Dare 58 Jam theme of “Collector”. While trading is at the core of our game, after playing for a couple of minutes you’ll come to understand that sometimes it borders on just hoarding

Out of 1391 submissions, esCargo ranked 73rd overall. Our best scores being graphics (8th), theme (12th) and mood (26th). We were secretly hoping to crack the top 100, so seeing a considerable improvement on the desired result definitely left us feeling good!

If you’re wanting to abandon your responsibilities (at least for a while) by running off to become a snail-based trader, you can play esCargo in your browser on our Itch page. Let us know what you think in the Itch page comments! We’d love to hear about your new antiquated life.

A New Team Got Away

From a small core team of 3 to a whole 8 members, the Clockwork team has officially expanded! We’re so excited to welcome Bracken, Daoyi, Jack, Austin, and Bianca into the fold!

To celebrate this momentous occasion, we set off on a little retreat in a two-pronged effort to strengthen the team bond, as well as make a game for the Ludum Dare 58 together. esCargo is our first game jam as a new team, and if it’s set the tone for the rest of our projects together then I think we’ve already got something great going.

We look forward to telling you more about what we’ve been creating together in the coming months, but until then all we can say is: we can’t wait for you to sink your talons into it!

Coming Up Next

Finally, we have some lovely news to cap-off this nearly end-of-the-year update. We’re excited to announce that Upupa Bird Ninja is a part of the official Playtopia selection of games for 2025! 

A few things have changed since you last saw Upupa: the game now features an updated movement system, new enemies, shiny new powers, and mysterious challenge rooms in the form of time rifts, among other things.

If you’re in Cape Town on the 5th & 6th of December, be sure to swing by the District Six Homecoming Center to not only check out Upupa on display, but also all the other incredible South African indie games and interactive art that’ll be a part of Playtopia! 

We’d love to see you there. But until then, it’s back to the grindstone for us.

Chat soon!

Allow me to show you around our new place, update you on what we’ve been doing this past year, and share some of our plans for the future.

New logo, who dis?

When we started Clockwork Acorn we made the logo and website ourselves, and back then none of us had any real visual design experience. We loved how the logo reflected our bootstrapped, figure-it-out as-we-go-along origins, but over the years as we started making sense of this whole game dev business, the website and the brand felt stuck in who we were and not who we are now.

Last year we started working with Danielle Hitchcock to update our brand and build a new website to go with it. We wanted a more modern, versatile design that would look good wherever we used it, hence the monochrome design and limited yet fun colour palette. And we wanted our new website and brand to reflect our values of timeless and chunky. Danielle was amazing to work with and if you’re ever looking for a visual designer or web developer we can highly recommend giving her a shout.

We’re super happy with the new look, so poke around and let us know what you think. Anyone keen on some stickers?

Return of the Acorn

Way back at the tail end of 2017 we said that Clockwork Acorn had reached the end of an era. While we kept working on Jetstream, and released it on Steam in 2019, the company was on an indefinite hiatus. The band had split, going our separate ways. Francois continued making games at Spry Fox, Leon explored the wider world of South African startups at OfferZen and Hilgard eventually made his way to Norway, where he is still working on the upcoming Dune MMO.

In the background we also kept on playing around with new ideas and making small games, even hiring some folks in late 2022 to work on Cave Cards, a roguelike deckbuilder prototype we were particularly excited about.

Then in 2023 we were approached by our friends at Free Lives to help with post-launch updates for their hit environmental strategy game Terra Nil. It was an opportunity too good to pass up! So we quit our jobs and came back to Clockwork Acorn full time. We built a new team, and brought all the experience we had gained over the last few years to bear with a singular focus on our long-term vision of building a studio that can be a force for good in the world.

It sure has been a wild ride since then. We put out the Vita Nova update for Terra Nil, in which we collaborated with Free Lives to reimagine the way animals function in the game. We designed many new levels for the game, doubling the amount of content, and even added a shiny new 3D world map.

We’re also back in our old game jam groove, experimenting and exploring with new ideas, with a bunch of new prototypes to share with you:

• Beetlevania, a golf-inspired metroidvania game where you play as an adventurous beetle with a serious sweet tooth. 
• Mine Your Step, a puzzle adventure game we made for SA Game Jam that mixes match-3 and push-your-luck mechanics.
• Lizard with a Sword, an arena action game where you play as a blue-headed koggelmander.
• Golem Mechnician, where you have to scramble over giant robots on a battlefield repairing them while avoiding incoming fire.  
• Mech-anic, and earlier prototype on the same theme where you run a war mech repair shop,
• Tiny Tails, our entry for Ludum Dare 56, is a tactical puzzle game where you lead a brave band of tiny forest creatures against the tyrannical wolf king.
• Beeline, a cute hex-based puzzle/exploration game where you play a bee collecting pollen for your hive.
• Calico, a puntastic cat-pirate adventure in which Cat’ptain Calico must traverse the Sandbox Seas, searching for the lost Treasure of Pawtuga.
• Justice Derailed, a murder mystery in reverse where you need to make difficult decisions to keep the investigator off your tracks.

Two ideas really grabbed our attention, so we focused on building them out into fuller experiences. Cave Cards became Enter the Titan, a turbocharged roguelike deckbuilder where you destroy the invading titans from within. It has interesting tactical combat and some really cool innovations that make for faster runs and greater freedom for deck experimentation. The other is Upupa Bird Ninja, a fast-paced micro speedrunner with a novel core mechanic about a hoopoe ninja on a search for perfection. Both prototypes are available on itch and we’d love it if you played them and let us know what you think!

We’ve also been traveling a bunch in 2024. Francois and Leon made their way to Gamescom where we got to meet a ton of great people from the wider industry and show off our games. Both Enter the Titan and Upupa Bird Ninja were selected as part of the official Courage indie game showcase, and it was a blast to get to see people from all over the world enjoy our games.

We ended off the year connecting with friends and devs from across the continent and beyond at Africa Games Week and the Playtopia games festival. We showed Upupa as part of the official game selection for Playtopia and Leon gave a talk on how our team works together.

There is nothing quite like game events and being surrounded by other people that love this industry as much as we do to get you amped for making games!

We closed the year off with a long-overdue team retreat. As a fully remote studio, we are located all over South Africa. We speak often and have a lot of fun online, but hanging out together IRL is an important part of staying connected!

The road ahead

And so we get to the present moment. To say we live in an interesting time is a bit of an understatement. The world at large feels uncertain and if you are at all connected to the games industry, you will be aware that “times are tough right now” has become a bit of a mantra.

We’re pragmatic and know that people need safety and security to do their best creative work, and so we’re set on making things here as stable as possible. To that end we’ve decided to open up our client book and we’re looking for opportunities to collaborate with others. So if you’re looking for creative partners on your project, and you think our services might be of use to you, let’s chat!

Despite the world being scary right now, we’re excited about what the future holds! We’re doing jams and prototyping many new ideas, while refining our existing games. We’re excited to share plenty of updates and releases in 2025!

If you’d like to be a part of that journey, the best way to do so is to sign up for our newsletter, we promise we’ll never spam you. Or you can come and hang out with us on our Discord where we share all our earliest prototypes and would love to get your feedback.

That’s all from us for now. Thanks for making it this far and for giving a damn about what we do here! We appreciate each and every one of you rad people!

That was the only real down-side though. Showing Agent Unseen off to random attendees and getting feedback from them was a blast. As those of you who have played it will know, Agent Unseen is a difficult game, we designed it to be punishing, which doesn’t make it the easiest game to show at an expo. Between the difficulty and the placeholder art I think we scared off a couple of people. It was however a delight to watch those who got it play the game. Digital feedback and stats tracking is one thing, seeing a couple of dozen people play is quite another.

This was our first trade show as a company so it was also our first time talking to press in person. We talked to a bunch of people about Agent Unseen, the company and indie game development in South Africa. It was lots of fun and a great learning experience for us.

Last but not least, while I already mentioned we didn’t get much time to play the games on the floor, we did manage to sneak in a quick game of Evolve when the doors opened on Sunday. Such a great game. It might seriously help me kick (augment?) my Dota addiction when it hits in February.

Go check out the new build for Agent Unseen. We’ve added controller support as well as sound and music by Ivo Sissolak and Adam Linder, which they made as part of an MGSA sound challenge.

Find a couple of fotos from the event below!

First off, we’re proud to say that our first full game, Monsters and Medicine, will be launching on the Humble store on the 7th of October. In addition, we’ve started a Steam Greenlight campaign for the game, so please go vote for it!

With the release of the game, we’ve updated to the final version of the game, which is already available now to people who have pre-ordered. The final version of the game includes three new level sets, a colour palette rework, a bunch of bug fixes and more music and sound effects. We really want to thank everyone who supported us on our first big project, we learned a lot over the past couple of months and we’ll always appreciate it. You guys rock!

Our second piece of news is that one of our prototypes, Agent Unseen, will be showing at rAge this year as part of the home_coded booth. So if you are in Johannesburg during the 10th-12th of October and you want to come check out the South African game development scene, or you just want to say hi, come drop in!

Today we’re publishing a new build of Unseen, which has been renamed to Agent Unseen. It includes a lot of improvements and changes, including:

• Revamped level generation
• Upgrade enemy AI
• New item system
• Updated visuals and more colour variety.
• Added more information features, such as a minimap and guard state change alerts

The downside to all these changes is a significant knock to frame rate, which we will need to look at soon. While the game is still very playable, it has made the flash version quite clunky. As such we highly recommend you download and play the native versions instead of the online one.

Go check out the game here.

We hope you enjoy the game. As always, let us know what you think.

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.

We’ve previously taken part in the jam for Ludum Dare 26, for which the theme was “Minimalism”. That was actually the first time we made a game together as a group. It was during that weekend that we developed Loki (now Polygone), which you can still go and play over here right now.

This time around, we decided to each do the competition on our own. For those of you who don’t know, the rules of the competition are as follows: You must work on your own to develop a game over a 48-hour period that fits the provided theme. All code and assets must be developed during the 48-hour period. Publicly available programming libraries and tools are allowed, but all art and sound assets need to be self-created during the competition.

So yeah, we had a pretty busy weekend involving little sleep and a lot of work, but we do have three games for you to go out and play. The theme for this competition was “Connected Worlds”. Francois made an artsy endless runner called Neon Highway. Hilgard made a game about galactic conquest called Trading Strategy. Finally, I made a word game about exploration called SpellChain.

Go check out our games and let us know what you think! It was a fun challenge to do and I hope you enjoy the fruits of our labours. As mentioned last week, this brings our weekly frenzy of prototyping to an end, so we have more time to look at some of the more promising prototypes we’ve released in the past 10 weeks. Stay tuned for updates on those soon!

You can check out the competition thread here.

While we still have ideas we want to test and avenues we want to explore, we’ve made the decision to refocus a lot of our time into working on improving some of the prototypes we saw people showing interest in.

However, before doing that, we will be doing one last prototyping session during Ludum Dare 30, a game jam taking place this weekend.

So, starting next week, and going forward for the a while we’ll be working on a couple of the more popular prototypes. This doesn’t mean you won’t be hearing from us, as we’ll be sure to let you know when we make significant updates to those prototypes.

This is an exciting time for us and we hope you are equally excited about seeing the prototypes you liked being worked on!

Let us know in the comments if there are any particular games you want to see us working on!

It’s an interesting challenge, and communicating what a new skill does to the player is a problem in and of itself. You can see how we tackled it here.

As always, we love getting feedback from the wide world in general, let us know in the comments!

I’ve already lost way too much time playing this as opposed to actually working on it, which I think is a good sign…

I recommend you guys go play this for yourself. You can find its game page here.

Oh and a little personal tip for when you play: Go fast!

On a completely different note, Francois and Hilgard are going to be attending the A MAZE games festival in Johannesburg in little less than a month, which raises a very important topic for us, namely business cards. We’re thinking of maybe putting a small game on ours. So we have we’ve got a bonus game for you this week. Francois designed a very basic miniatures game he’s calling “Coin Wars” that you can play with just the stuff in your wallet. Check out the ruleset here and let us know what you think.

A lot of these changes took the form of usability improvements, or changes aimed at more clearly communicating the core concepts in these games. Our aim here is to make the games more playable and more easily understandable to new players.

Some of the changes we’ve added include:

In Caelum:

• Automatic keybinding assignment to ship components.
• Added some linear and angular drag to objects.
• Changed the way rotation is displayed.
• Added a more specific mission structure with increasing budgetary rewards.

In Unseen:

• Changed the way sounds from guards are displayed on the screen.
• Changed sound assets.
• Added more indicators for when you are in light and when you are not.
• Added doors between some rooms.
• Changed walk and run speeds of the player and the guards to make more sense.
• Added more upgrades.
• Added ability hotkeys 1-9

We hope you enjoy these changes, and we look forward to more feedback from all of you.

So enough text for now, head on over to the game page here. Play it right now and let us know if you liked it and/or what direction we should go with it.

All in all it’s been really fun to get back to prototyping. When you start a new project like this, every line of code you write has so much more impact than with a more mature product. You keep wanting to do just a little bit more because of the significant impact you’re having, and overall it’s been a really nice change of pace after spending a couple of months fixing bugs and polishing on Monsters and Medicine.

In the past month we’ve shown: Bacchus Bank, in which you play a loan officer at a bank, Icarus, a small dog-fighting game for two players, and Polygenics, in which you breed shapes together for obscure reasons.

Today we’re adding to that list with Unseen, our attempt at mixing stealth games and roguelikes. This is actually our second attempt at this idea this year, but we felt that we failed to do justice the first time so here we are back for more. You can play the new version here. Personally speaking I’ve been having a lot of fun playing this, and I hope you all check it out and let us know what you think.

We’ve got some more prototypes currently in the idea/development pipeline, and we can’t wait to show them to you when they are ready.

Going forward from Monsters and Medicine we have decided to change the way we approach deciding which game to work on.

When we were deciding on our first project to do as a company we started with three weeks of prototyping. During this time we developed around ten prototypes. From these we chose, based mostly on some internal criteria, to develop the game that finally became known as Monsters and Medicine.

In retrospect, we have decided that this was not the best way to find the best project for us to work on. Which is why we’re shaking things up for the next round.

Going forward we aim to be much more transparent with our prototypes. We’re going to try to put out a new playable prototype every week for the next few months. Our hope is that by making these public and distributing them online, we can find a project that others are as excited about as we are.

On that note, we are releasing our first prototype today. Bacchus Bank is a text-based bank management game. We were playing around with the idea of emergent storytelling and how your actions as a bank (approving/rejecting loans etc.) change the lives of your customers. You can check it out here.