Hello ancient titans!

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!

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!

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!

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!


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

Hello Giants!

We're releasing a big update for our Early Access title Godhood! To celebrate this joyous occasion, Godhood is now on sale with a 30% discount!

Check out the store page for more info on the update!

- Greetings from the Monks

That's right, young gods, we finally have a release date for our new game!
Two moons from now Godhood will be available for everyone to play!

On July 10th we will launch our strategy god game into Early Access here on Steam. This will be the first opportunity to play our new strategy god game. We're incredibly excited to move to this next stage of development. From July 10th onward, we'll be using community feedback to improve Godhood in our continuing monthly updates. Exciting times for sure!

To prepare for release with us, make sure you wishlist the game on the store page. This will send you a notification once the game releases, and also helps bring the game to a bigger audience! If you know anyone you think would be as into Godhood as you are, we'd really appreciate if you could share the game with them, for example by sharing our launch-date tweet:
https://twitter.com/AbbeyGamesNL/status/1134110185402884096

Follow our development updates here
https://community.abbeygames.com/threads/godhood-available-in-steam-early-access-on-july-10th.188/

~ Abbey Games

Thanks to the community's effort on social media, Kickstarter backers of our upcoming god game Godhood have unlocked a free copy of Reus! Next to that, there's a stream of Godhood later today. Read all about it in this kickstarter update:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/abbeygames/godhood/posts/2422233

We hope you enjoyed playing Reus as much as we enjoyed making it. We've learned a lot of lessons along the way and believe Godhood couldn't have happened without your support and enthusiasm.

As you may know, our upcoming game Godhood lets you create your own religion. But we also want to give you the chance to help create Godhood! You can do so by backing the Kickstarter campaign for the game, that just went live.

If Kickstarter is not for you, but you do want to help us out: there are other ways! We talk about it in this post over on our community forum.

Thanks for your help!
From the Abbey,
Sincerely,

-Joni

To celebrate the 5th birthday of the game, we finally got round to make the soundtrack available... properly! The game's composer Joni (that's me, actually) took some time off to remaster a grand total of 25 tracks, 13 of which were previously unreleased, and bundled them together on an album that's available right now, right here on Steam!



Next to that, to make a real birthday party out of it, Reus is now part of a daily deal with a historically deep discount of 85%.

We hope you enjoy this celebration as much as we enjoy your continued support for this game. It's been around for a half a decade now... We still can't quite get our heads around it.

~The monks from the Abbey

It’s five years ago since Reus came out! That calls for a little celebration and that’s why we are finally releasing the soundtrack to the game this Thursday (through Steam as well!) and a little Twitch Stream of Reus on Thursday as well. And we have a new patch for you right now that most notably features:

• An “Unlock All” option in the Free Mode of the game. This gives you the option to be able to create all possible resources, without having to hunt for achievements. So you can go crazy deep and take your time, even in your first play-through.
  
• A lot of small bug-fixes and rebalancing to improve the overall quality of gameplay. See the patch notes for more info on these.
  
• Some Abbey Games festivities and community information in the main menu.
  
• An FNA build of the game on Windows, that fixes memory issues and corresponding crashes on 64bit versions of Windows. This build is still in beta, but if you suffer from said memory issues and crashes, feel free to switch to the special FNA-version branch to see if that fixes your problems.

If you encounter any problems, please let us know.
We hope you have fun with patch 1.6 and that you’ll join us in celebrating Reus’ fifth birthday this week!

~ the monks from Abbey Games

It’s Reus’ birthday! To celebrate, we’re giving Reus some love with an update.

What’s new?

• Mac and Linux versions for Reus! We’ve eliminated crashes and improved performance. Reus should now run great on Mac and Linux.
  
• Overall better performance and small quality of life improvements, like much requested improvements to the UI text.
  
• Official Chinese Translations!

If you encounter problems, please let us know. We've moved the old 1.4 version to the [legacy] branch for your convenience.

We hope you have fun with Patch 1.5!

It’s Reus’ birthday! To celebrate, we’re giving Reus some love with an update.

What’s new?

• Mac and Linux versions for Reus! We’ve eliminated crashes and improved performance. Reus should now run great on Mac and Linux.
  
• Overall better performance and small quality of life improvements, like much requested improvements to the UI text.
  
• Official Chinese Translations!

If you encounter problems, please let us know. We've moved the old 1.4 version to the [legacy] branch for your convenience.

We hope you have fun with Patch 1.5!

In celebration of the upcoming release of our new game Renowned Explorers: International Society on September 2nd, we updated Reus!

NEW SOURCES:
- The Dolphin is now available in your seas!
- Natural Gas can now be mined!
- The Chinese crane can now roam your swamps!
- The Azure lakes are now available in your forests!
- The Oak Tree can now grow in your forests!

For the Russian players: we have also added the Russian community translation to the game.

Happy world building!