It has been 2 years since our successful Kickstarter Campaign in April 2018 and we are getting closer and closer to the release of Iron Harvest 1920+. With your help, we were able to collect invaluable feedback from the closed beta. We’re trying to incorporate as many ideas as possible - again we want to thank you for the amazing support! Also don't forget to say hi on our closed Backer Discord Channel. There you can share your thoughts directly with the team and the community.


During our Kickstarter campaign we promised you that we will not commit to any compromises for any version of the game (Windows/PlayStation/Xbox). Each platform will get all the love necessary, and things look very promising. The closed Beta runs smoothly, and the feedback you guys gave us was overwhelming. The control schemes for PlayStation and Xbox are also up and running and we are continuing with internal testing. However, with the global Covid-19 pandemic raging for over 3 months and the resulting change of workflows, things got a little complicated.

Let’s rip off the band aid - To release the game simultaneously on Windows and consoles on September 1st we’d need to forgo many of the things which we promised you. For us, such a compromise, to force out the console version, is not an option. To give the game all the love it needs, and you deserve, we unfortunately have decided to postpone the release of the Iron Harvest 1920+ on PlayStation & Xbox Versions until Q1 2021. The Windows version releases unchanged on September 1st, 2020.



The console versions are very important for us and we strongly believe that with the extra time we will all get the outstanding console RTS we all are waiting for.

Also influenced by the current Covid-19 regulations are logistical problems we are facing concerning the physical Kickstarter rewards. Rest assured that every eligible Backer will get a digital game key on release day, however with our physical rewards production we are currently looking into possible delays that might occur due to the government lock-downs in various countries. We will do everything possible - however, we’ll have to wait for further Covid-19 pandemic developments and regulations. We’ll always keep you updated!


I’ve done tons of stuff in preparation for the release like discussing trailer ideas and ideas for other marketing assets. Besides that, I am testing a lot, giving feedback to our game designers, level designers and programmers regarding the feel of the game and the balancing.

I’m also working on the story / progression of the Kickstarter bonus campaign. There are many balls in the air at this point and there is a lot of stress involved, but I’m still super motivated because of the positive feedback we get! Thanks for that!

Creating a dense battlefield of 1920+ feeling requires a lot of mixing and effects.


My focus right now is to synchronize our development with the publisher, balance creativity with business. Orchestrating our team with Jan and Nico to precisely hit all the beats on the publishing side from Age Rating to Marketing is a big challenge.

Tied to my living room and not being able to see all our partners at GDC or E3 is sad, but we are giving our best to expand our network to create cool new opportunities for Iron Harvest. The upcoming months will be BIG with a lot of cool stuff going on, so stay tuned!

Besides all that, I am also the Audio Director of the game. I have the great pleasure to work with Adam Skorupa, Krzysztof Wierzynkiewicz and Michal Cielecki from Music Imaginary on the music for Iron Harvest. So far, we have created around 1½ hours of music for the game and the mix of classic orchestra and industrial synths really shines and creates a unique soundtrack. Working with artists and choirs of all 3 representative nations from Germany, Poland and Russia is a great creative journey. Adam is also working with me on the weapon sound design, creating an authentic diesel-punk experience for every unit. My long-term buddy for SFX Clemens (since “The Book of Unwritten Tales”) created a lot of new unit animation sounds, tons of engines and scene atmosphere. Also mixing the over 1 hour of cinematic video material and processing thousands of VO files for radio and other effects.

The entire team is working hard, pushing the game towards the finish line. Our implemented production logistics paid off and we made a lot of progress in the past months. 

The Corona pandemic brought a lot of challenges that we had to tackle if we were to keep the production as smooth as possible. In my role I have to talk to a lot of team members on a daily basis and right now I have more Skype calls in a week than in the last year combined.

We now started polishing all areas of the game and it’s really cool seeing everything coming together right now.

My usual duties continue to keep our project plan on track. I manage the outsourcing system; help coordinate our art department and assign tasks. All while identifying constraints and working to resolve them together with the team. Even though we are currently working from home, our internal communications methods have worked out well and I’m happy with how we have adapted to the new challenges.

Currently, I am working on the KING Art internal management tool. During the development of Iron Harvest we have discovered many limitations and room for improvement, so we are currently adapting and improving it to be ready for the next big projects!

As always, I have been busy arranging tasks within the game design department and coordinating our efforts with everyone else in the Iron Harvest team. Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at gamepad controls for the Iron Harvest console versions. I’ve also set up the first set of achievements (for consoles and pc) and started crunching the numbers on a lot of the metagame elements. Finally, we have been taking a close look at all your feedback, evaluating the improvements and changes, as well as prepared everything for upcoming feature updates of the game! I hope you are all excited for what’s to come!

Over the course of the last month, the problems and challenges facing the games balance has changed a lot. With all units and features narrowing down to their final state, a lot of edge cases came up. For example, discrepancies between abilities that work perfectly fine in multiplayer, but tear any campaign map apart.

In addition, we made our first steps towards collecting and evaluating telemetry data. For example, the win ratio per faction, damage dealt by each unit type and whole lot more. This, combined with your feedback, will help us to improve balancing further and will become an invaluable tool to find the optimal solutions to our balancing related problems.

This month I've been working on localization: helping translators ensure Iron Harvest is released in multiple languages upon launch.
I additionally worked on submitting forms to the various ratings boards across the world so we'll know which age rating Iron Harvest will have! 
Between all that, I worked together with Francis to fix a long-standing issue with Victory Point bonuses to prevent exploitation. Read his entry for more information on that!
Otherwise, I've mostly been fixing minor bugs and begun looking at how we can polish our units further to make them feel even more awesome!

This past month, Elliott and I have been hard at work creating a prototype able to crunch the numbers on the effects of different victory point bonus systems. The current implemented system has (some) positive impact on matches, but it’s exploitable and this is something we really needed to address. Something we’ve finally found the time for. We have been analyzing the full extent of the system's current effects and comparing it to a "no bonus" system and different new proposals. A new design for the system has been picked and will now be implemented into the game!

Furthermore, I have been looking into everything to do with playing Iron Harvest with a controller, finding the current issues, and researching & designing solutions



Most of my time was spent busy managing our awesome team of engineers. I try to come up with a good plan for whom should do what and when. We always have plenty of issues, ideas, improvements, and obligations to juggle with and it is not always easy to decide on what would be the best route to further improve the game. But, when I sometimes take a step back, and try to look at Iron Harvest from a greater distance, I can clearly see how much it improves with every week of effort we put into it. I hope you can feel that too when you have the chance to look at the game (again).

Following your Beta feedback, I’ve been working on improving the responsiveness of infantry units. To allow players to feel like they are really in command of the war effort, their units should be able to abort their current action and work towards their new goals as soon as possible. This is especially important for units that are designed to be slower, like the MG infantry, which is powerful once setup but takes several seconds to deploy and redeploy.

The past month was quite different at KING Art. Firstly, we had to make sure that the workflows we used to have at the office still worked with all my colleges and myself working from home. Especially, getting out daily (or sometimes hourly) builds to the team was quite a challenge. On the other hand, I was working on getting the Iron Harvest client ready to meet all the requirements of the console platforms, also quite challenging!

Lastly, I am right now working on making sure that the Iron Harvest online services function without a glitch, so you can play your multiplayer matches, get XP and level-ups. We have quite some cool features planed that will arrive soon and I am making sure that all these things don't crash our servers when it is used by thousands of players.

As well as the game being on PC-Steam and GOG, I've been working on consoles and different PC stores. We want the game to eventually be accessible on as many platforms as makes sense for our game. No exclusivity anywhere. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of fiddly details to work out for each individual platform. It’s frustrating work, but it’ll be worthwhile in the end.

I've worked mostly on the A.I. and adjusting it to the needs of the level-designers. I improved the configurability and the performance especially for the campaign maps and made sure the level-designers can implement the A.I. within the structure of the specific Levels. 

To improve iteration-speed, I tried to adjust our internal tools to give the level-designers the up most freedom to configure and customize the A.I., as well as debug-Tools to better understand the decisions it is taking and which tasks are tackled at certain points in time. Otherwise, I’ve worked on general bug fixes and improvements regarding scripting, tools, and overall game play mechanics.

I've spent the last month mostly fixing bugs and supporting our level-designers. As a part of that I've improved the sequence-system that we use to stage and script the single-player missions. It now causes fewer delays, and is way better suited for skipping cutscenes, which is why we will now enable the skipping of cutscenes for players in a future update to Beta.

I’ve been working on a plethora of different things: For instance, on the possibility to play the campaign co-operatively, on the localization of the game's texts into different languages, implementing a way for players to choose and configure their favorite hero and some call-in reserves in multiplayer matches. All exciting stuff to come.


I‘ve made the environment more interactive: Vegetation now has a dynamic wind system with changing directions. Trees and grass react to explosion shock waves. Grass can be burned or trampled down. The terrain becomes beaten by craters, burned earth and oil spills. Units also leave trails in the snow. 


I also made performance improvements to make the game run faster. For example, I altered the rendering pipeline completely for destructible buildings. Shadow lengths are pre-processed, and dynamic occlusion culling discards all hidden parts from rendering, such as interiors of buildings and fronts that are turned away from sight.

I implemented a music system that can crossfade between two similar music tracks with different intensities. This can for example be used by our scripters to make the music more intense when a battle is starting without interrupting the music. I also fixed some bugs regarding shouts, savegames and other things.

I have been working on implementing and improving (fixing bugs) several different abilities for heroes and mechs. Working closely with the designers and animators to make the abilities function like they imagined.

I am an intern starting to get to grips with this cool project. Currently, I am working on implementing a redesign for a better player experience and fixing some bugs.

Over the past weeks I’ve been busy adding, polishing, and finalizing vegetation tools and assets, so our level artists have everything they need to finish the campaign maps. I’ve also worked on more visual polish and fidelity like systems for rain, snow, and cloud shadows to breathe even more life into the world of 1920+. I even found some time to experiment with some of our “nice-to-have” features, For example, a system for different mech skins!

Robert (3D Artist)

The cutscene asset production was one of the major parts that kept me busy during the last couple of weeks. Because it’s quite spoiler heavy, I am unfortunately not able to show too much detail, but you can have a glimpse at some of the assets which will be placed in these cutscene environments. Besides that, I was also creating gameplay assets for the end-maps, polishing some of our existing assets and designing some propaganda posters, which is always fun.

Michiel (3D Artist)

We have been making huge leaps of progress in our cinematic cutscenes. The basics for all of them are done – environment, animations, effects, lighting, etc. Which now leads to putting all our focus on fixing and polishing to make them look even more awesome. On my end, I’ve been mainly organizing the environments, creating lighting for all the scenes, remaking and improving character textures, and some work on shaders. We also started making bi-daily reviews of our work to instantly seek and solve major issues since so many overarching disciplines have to work together while not having the comfort of being able to sit next to each other.

Sebastian B. (3D Artist)

I’ve just joined the team and during my first month I worked on unit renderings for the in-game U.I. as well as for marketing and press releases. It’s exciting to be a part of this team and help to bring the world of 1920+ to life.

Youri (3D Artist Intern)

I also recently started at King Art as an art intern. Over the last two months I've worked on environment assets for the game and for the cinematics. My favorite one so far is the bishop's throne for one of the cinematics.

Sebastian G. (Level/3D Artist)

This month, I took the time and created some eye-catching cover images for each of our beautifully crafted maps, highlighting their unique visual features and tactical elements. Check out this shot of a rocket research facility . . . and that’s all I’m saying about that ;)

Dirk (Level Designer)

I have been working on the scripting of my maps. If there were tests that found bugs, I fixed them. By playing the game on my own, I also adjusted some small things like the balancing and tempo.

Magnus (Level Designer)

The past month has been a wild one. I have of course been using your feedback to both fix problems in our current maps and prevent them occurring in future ones. Speaking of which, I have also been very busy finishing up and balancing several other campaign maps. During this process, I worked with our programmers to further improve our scripting and A.I. tools for all involved in the level design process. In the breaks in-between all of that, I went back to my beloved multiplayer maps, both continuing work on some that we can’t show you yet, and starting to think about potential future maps for our post-release plans!

Why yes, all of this makes total sense and I am in complete control of the situation, thank you very much for asking!

Stijn (Level Designer)

Like most of the other level designers I have been focusing on polishing the campaign maps. Often, this is the least glorious stage of level design because it involves fixing bugs, implementing small final features, polishing cutscenes and testing. Lots and lots of testing. But in the end, it is all worth it because it leads to better maps for our players!


Justin (Game and level Designer)
Besides polishing and bug fixing the snowball fight and deer hunt tutorial, I continued my work on some other very exiting campaign maps. I worked on the design of some NPC Units and their features. I created some special encounters and created more interesting narrative beats throughout my maps. I can't tell you much about them yet, but we are working on some great content, especially for the grand finale ;)

Sabrina (Level Designer)

I spent these past weeks with debugging and tweaking of my campaign maps. The tickets keep coming and I’m just trying to keep up with them. We’ve also got some new features for scripting. The new A.I. is still a bit wonky, but I’m sure that it will make for some fun campaign maps when we release them.

Thomas D. (Lead Animator)

I'm happy to announce that we were able to finish motion capture and lip sync for the cinematics earlier than anticipated. That leaves us with a couple options to explore. We can either spend even more time on polishing cinematics that are still rough around the edges and create more content, or - which is more likely - we shift animators over to the gameplay department and make the best game possible. It's rewarding to have a close to functional state, to be able to see how everything plays out after years of development and at the same time it helps us notice things that still require an animator's attention.

Rahel (Animator)

Together with the code in-game animation department I have been working hard on getting responsiveness of infantry onto a nice level. We know this was a key piece of feedback from the Beta community and we’re always looking to improve responsiveness. This also involved polishing animations and working on some new units for later release ;)

Theresa (Animator)

Adjusting camera movements and motion-capture in our cutscenes has been my domain for the most part of the last month. Tweaking here, polishing there, trying to really get those characters across. But little did I know of the world that would open up soon after: Lip-syncing! Now, that the voice actors have been chosen, all those shots are really coming to life. And it’s truly astonishing how much the dynamics in a scene change when you get to show expressions on top of the acting itself. So, my current work and personal goal is to grant each and every one of them, no matter if hero or villain, what they truly deserve: Some fine, hand-picked facial expressions!

Vladislav (Animator)

I’ve been supporting the cinematics team wherever I could, as well as animating a new boss and secret hero unit!

Valentin (VFX)

During the past month, I placed a lot of effects and destruction simulations into our cinematics and in-game cutscenes. This was the first pass and involves placing existing effects into the scene and adjusting the timing of the effect. The next step for this will be finalizing the effects, adjusting the simulations and make everything look awesome!

Currently, I’m polishing all unit and structures effects and I’m adding a lot of new ability effects.

Felix (VFX)

Since January, I've work half time in the VFX department whilst finishing my bachelor’s degree. Lately, I've been working on lots of effects for our rendered and in-game cutscenes, unit and building effects, mainly regarding their destruction and explosions! It's a very rewarding feeling being this new in VFX and seeing your effects in prominent roles in the game and not just barely noticeable or placeholder thingies.Home office hits me hard on the productivity and it's extra exhausting staying focused, but I think we’ve all managed it very nicely. See you next time!

Thomas P. (Lead Technical Artist)

I’ve been simulating cloth and Anna’s hair for our cutscenes to make them look good. This way her hair and jacket will move and flow more realistically. I’ve also been fixing and tweaking various stuff here and there. There are so many small things that on their own might go unnoticed, but together, really make a game shine.

Yuhuang (Technical Artist)

Lately, I've been working on the finishing steps of rigging cinematic characters. I've updated the grooming for our cinematic characters, as well as adding mechanical details to mechs that will appear in cinematics. Other than that, it's mainly fixing newly found issue.

Matthias (Content Manager)

Among other things, I’ve been taking care of implementing and maintaining assets. This includes keeping our assets up to date with new features implemented by other teams, importing and removing assets, as well as trying to keep our project in a somewhat “clean” state. Something more “solid”; I recently completed an overhaul of our bunker variants, which required some re-structuring regarding their IDs and configuration to support varying tiers and equipment.

One of the bigger upcoming implementations I’m tackling right now is our “Room Service”. Basically, this involves one or more rooms for garrisoned buildings, allowing units to stay in a partially destroyed building longer, as they are able to switch into an intact room, should theirs be destroyed.

Thorben (Quality Assurance)

I’ve been happily swamped by all your feedback and bug reports since we released Beta. So, thanks for that :P. I’ve been coordinating between our various QA teams and devs as we filter through and prioritize the most urgent bugs. You can find me , or Will, on our Backers-only Discord channel if you’d like more one to one help with an issue your having. 

Will (Community Manager and QA )

I’ve been enjoying the writing and coordinating of DevBlogs such as this. With the release of our Beta, there has been great content to communicate and interest to engage with. I continue to take care of our Backers-only Discord channel, streamlining our communication channels and responding to all your feedback in whatever form it takes. Your input keeps us on our toes, and this is why I love indi game development. I also get my hands dirty by investigating your bug-reports, which can be tricky to replicate, as well as, coordinating between the relevant programmers and designers. Exciting times ahead, and so I look forward to all that brings. 

Alejandro (QA Project Manager)

I have been part of the early milestone approvals between King Art and Koch Media/DeepSilver. Since then, and until release, the testing team and myself are going to sweep over and over the Polanian, Rusviet and Saxony battlegrounds to spot any enemy bugs that we can.

Matěj (QA Lead)

I make sure our QA specialists have all the tools and answers needed to test the game reliably. We're reporting every little bug we can find to make sure we can deliver the best version of the game that we can.

Vojtěch (Jr. QA Specialist)

My job is to test the game builds using various techniques and make sure everything runs as it should. If I encounter any issues, I investigate them thoroughly, which allows me to report the bugs as accurately as possible. Reported issues are then sent to the dev team, which helps them to create the game everyone will enjoy.

Luis (Jr. QA Specialist)

Normally a game is meant to be enjoyed and to provide a nice experience for players. As part of the QA team we are meant to "break it", so players won't have deal with those "nastsy little bugseses". Sometimes they're obvious, others we must flush out, which sometimes means trying to do everything the game doesn't want us to. Sometimes "the bugs fights back". hehe...

Tomáš (Jr. QA Specialist)

I am part of a QA team, which means, that we are making sure the game runs as it should, by play-testing the game and correcting what's wrong. Since my Warcraft 3 and Warhammer 40k days I developed strong ongoing passion for RTS games, now continuing with Iron Harvest.

Martin (Jr. QA Specialist)

To my mind, QA testing means making the game as good as possible from the technical point of view. Our team is constantly trying to take one more step – to make the game an enjoyable experience for the player (and to have some fun along the way). I think that the developers have done a really good job. With Iron Harvest the community of gamers are up for a rocket ride.

Klára (Jr. QA Specialist)

I’ve been testing the game for a few months now and it is very exciting to watch the game grow and the story unravel. With every update, we look forward to new features that we then tested and made sure they worked well. We may have even played the game for fun after hours in the office! :) We especially fell in love with the mechs, who are adorable and deadly at the same time, and each of them has a distinct character. I am sure the gamers will have a great treat to look forward to (I know I do).

Ema (Jr. QA Specialist)

Like the rest of the QA team, I spend my time with the game playing it over and over and over and reporting any issues I encounter. My favourite aspect of the game are the various mechs - I find them very charming, and I'm sure the players will agree!

Tobi (Public relations manager)

Deep Silver and I are very busy, but in a different way to expected. Unfortunately, due to the Corona epidemic, most of the events we planned to go to this year were cancelled. It’s a shame, not only because we wanted to show the game to everyone out there, but we of course also wanted to high five ya’all. Despite this inconvenience, the team still tries to come up with new solutions and ideas. Let me tell you a secret, we have something really cool planned for this summer, so stay tuned for that.

The release of Iron Harvest is around the corner, which means that we are entering the hot stage of finishing, polishing, and submitting the gold version of Iron Harvest. For the publisher this also means preparing stores all around the world to “list" their game and try to establish partnerships – for instance with hardware manufacturers. In the end it is all about exposure and getting the word out, because what good is a game, if you can’t find it and/or buy it once it’s released, right?

Marketing and PR tries the same thing. Let the game shine! Together with video production they are currently working on several videos they’d like to release in the next month. Not only are we going in depth with the different factions and their pro’s and con’s, but the team is also thinking of something like a beginner’s guide. We’ll see 😊.

Anyway, everyone is extremely looking forward to the release of Iron Harvest, but as they say in game development. The last 10% are always the hardest – so fingers crossed!

Ronald (Lead Product Manager)

I'm focusing on the overall project plan and adjusting it, as necessary. Therefore, I'm also heavily involved on the contractual side and the milestone process. I liaise between our several internal departments and first parties.Having previously released many titles, the most recent being Metro Exodus and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, I'm guiding my production colleagues with my experience to avoid any issues along the way.

Looking Ahead

If you read this far, congrats :), and you can see we are crazy busy. Within the next months or so you’ll hopefully be seeing the fruits of the above labors. We’re going to have a lot to show you and whet your appetite for. You can expect a Beta update as soon as we have one stable and ready When we have details, we’ll be sure to let you know!

HelpingHans is a longtime RTS veteran and Twitch Streaming pro.
Watch as he takes a fresh look at Iron Harvest's New Beta and gives his views on our development.
Tons of new stuff to check out!

You'll find him here: https://www.twitch.tv/helpinghans

Interested?
The game's Beta is currently only open to our Kickstarter Backers, but it will release to the public, in full, on the 1st of September 2020.
Wish-List us and you won't miss out
https://store.steampowered.com/app/826630/Iron_Harvest/

Follow our social channels for more game experiences, feedback, videos, screenshots, fan-art, questions and anything else your little mech hearts desire on our:

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• Reddit
  
• Steam Forum

Stay tuned because we regularly post updates, news, cool/pretty images, fan-art, more tournaments contests and you'll never miss our monthly DevBlogs.</p>

It’s here and we’re proud of the result. This is a major milestone for us and puts us in good confidence going forward towards our full release date of September 1st.

Here are some patch note highlights, so you know what to expect and what to look forward to next time you boot up.

Saxony Gunfort: SKS 300 "Kaiser" (right)
A high end mech armed with a deadly cannon and multiple MGs. It can deploy to enable its rocket launchers to shoot.

Polania Gunfort: PZM-24 "Tur" (left)
A large walker that fires huge explosive shells from its twinned barrels. To get rid of smaller enemies it can fire a bunch of mortar-like shells to clear the area around its feet.


Polania Exoskeleton: PZM-2 “Rycerz”
Exoskeletons with female operators that use the additional power of their augmentations to maintain high speed while wearing armor. Their multipurpose gun is able to damage armored targets.


Saxony Heavy Flavor Unit: MWF 28 “Stiefmutter”
A walking factory that constantly unleashes drones that greet their target with a deadly explosion.


Bunkers now come in an unarmed version which is the new default version. This can be upgraded into the MG bunker that can only be built by veteran engineers. This can be upgraded once more into the new cannon bunker that can otherwise only be built by elite engineers. All of them can be garrisoned.


Engineers can now build field mines. These are little mechs that dormant until a larger enemy mech walks into its detection range. They then charge towards them and detonate on contact.


The PZM-9 "Straznik" new veteran ability is “Overdrive”. The unit becomes immobile while firing successive short intense burst of bullets at each enemy within its reach.


The PZM-16 "Nosidelko" veteran ability is “Fortify”. The unit becomes immobile and hunkers down to reduce incoming damage and increase the garrisoned unit’s rate of fire.


The SLL 33 "Erlkönig" veteran ability is “Flare Shot”. This Saxon artillery unit fires a projectile that illuminates through the fog of war within an area for a short time.

The Pkp 17 "Eisenhans" underwent some changes. Before, they were just yet another artillery unit at Saxony’s disposal. While they still fire long range mortar attacks, they now perform devastating melee attacks. As slow as they are, you might think they’ll never reach their target, but they also received an armour upgrade and so are now very hard to kill.

Resources: The whole resource system has been overhauled. Iron, oil, and victory points stay, basically everything else has changed. The mid-game has been delayed a lot. This results in more distinct gameplay phases that still blend smoothly. The improved pacing gives every unit a time window to shine which results in a huge increase in strategic potential.

Suppression: Overall the speed with which infantry gets suppressed was reduced significantly. To accommodate for this, being suppressed is now a huge disadvantage. It might help to survive a little bit longer, but fire rate and movement speed are impaired a lot more than before.

Veterancy: All units are now able to reach veterancy with comparable effort.

All mechs are now able to shoot over obstacles they should be, visually, clearly be able to.

• Grenades, artillery shells and rockets now deal a portion of their damage to targets further away from the explosion’s origin.
• Infantry units now deal different amounts of damage while melee fighting.
• New responsive and more dynamic A.I., particularly on the 4th and 5th Polanian campaign mission.
• Living up to our name, wrecks from destroyed mechs are now harvestable!

The 1st five Polanian campaign maps are playable and we’re pleased with the result. These add a whole lot of depth to the world of 1920+ and we know, like us, you crave that in RTS games.


New 2 vs. 2 multiplayer and skirmish map, fight for the cargo of fallen airships.


New multiplayer and skirmish 3 vs. 3 map. Don't get lost and use this challenging landscape to your advantage.

• Improved challenge map.
• Lots of general map polishing.

• Animated all new units! Seriously, check out the moment of the “Stiefmutter”! We’re very happy with how that turned out.
• We made sure that every unit has a proper flinch reaction. Shoot it and you'll see what we mean!
• Infantry can now vault over short walls and fences. This includes "Wojtek", the bear, and he ain’t half cute/deadly while doing it.

• Added unconscious state to some units.
• Animated NPC civilians.
• Minor animation improvements on structures.
• Loads of other cool things you can't see yet.

The narrative behind our RTS is truly enhanced by all new cinematics between campaign missions.

• Vegetation is livelier than ever. It can now burn, be bombed away and trampled down or just peacefully wave in the wind of a nearby explosion.
• Units now leave tracks in deep snow.
• Likewise, explosions now affect the terrain.
• Landscapes are more varied now. Including lush flowery fields or barren sand plains.

• Cutscenes for the Polania Campaign have been polished and are close to our vision for the final product.
• All blockout-assets for the Polania Campaign have been replaced with their finished counterparts. This includes improved industrial buildings, more varied walls and hedges as well as the incredible train you'll commandeer in the 5th Polanian mission

• Finalized all unit portraits

• A lot of new weapon and unit SFX (engines, steps, explosions).
• New music, including Choir and Solo instrument recordings.
• More unit shouts!

• Tons of new Visual FX
• Introduced multi-threading for several subsystems to improve performance and reduce lag spikes.
• Trains now navigates along its tracks better. Full Steam Ahead!
• A.I. is now using cover & throwing grenades, as well as general improvements all over, especially in campaign maps.
• Vaulting behaviour.
• Mines now do interesting things when triggered.
• Manual and Automatic saves of games can now be made.

Like what you see? Then:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/826630/Iron_Harvest/

Our Backer Beta is only accessible by all the people who backed us during our early-supporters phase. We’re sorry that inevitably people missed out on that campaign. However, stay tuned as there may be opportunities later and September 1st] isn’t that far away.

If you already have the Alpha3 in your Steam library, you shouldn’t need to do anything. Steam should auto update.

If you are new, welcome, thanks for joining us and here’s a quick guide to get you stomping:

1. Go to our website https://kingart-games.com/games/7-iron-harvest
2. Click the KingArt yellow and blue symbol in the top-right of the screen.
3. Click on “My KingArt” and log in using the same email address you used for Kickstarter or when you previously purchased.
4. Click “claim purchases” and enter your email again. The same addressed used for Kickstarter or past purchases.
5. You’ll receive an email with instructions and see your PC-Steam game key in your “Library”

Firstly, we can’t thank our community enough. Iron Harvest wouldn’t be where it is today without your tireless support and feedback. We’ve already seen the positive impact of your feedback and look forward to continuing to make Iron Harvest better with you.

When you enter Iron Harvest, you’ll see a button in the bottom of the main menu screen. Please remember this is here. Click it and fill in the Beta survey as soon as you’ve completed the campaign missions, then again after the challenge map and/or once you’ve played roughly 10 Skirmish/multiplayer games.


We have a great and growing community and you’re all welcome to be a part of it. A lot is going to be happening between now and full release so please like, subscribe, follow and all that jazz. It helps us get noticed and make the game more of a success.

You are free to stream Iron Harvest gameplay etc. Please make it clear to your audience the game is in Beta, use #IronHarvest and @ us so we see it. Share you game experiences, feedback, videos, screenshots, fan-art, questions and anything else your little mech heart’s desire on our:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Reddit
• Steam Forum

Stay tuned because we regularly post updates, news, cool/pretty images, fan-art, more tournaments contests and you'll never miss our monthly DevBlogs.

Really keen? If you've already claimed your early supporters game, please also join us in our Backers Discord Channel for all the latest news, info and discussion. You'll find the link here. 

Our Backers-only Discord is the best place to arrange multiplayer games, discuss, compete in tournaments, win prizes and get 1-on-1 with our Devs. Come September 1st we’ll open it to the public.

Considering the recent difficulties, we’re extremely pleased and excited to have reached this major milestone. However, as much as we’d like to take a break, now is the time to ride the momentum towards the finish goal of September 1st.

We’ll be taking a good look at your feedback as it comes in over the next few weeks. We’ve still got lots to do, and when we’re ready, we’ll no doubt have a Beta 2 to release with some hot-fixes and perhaps some new additions for you to try.

The no.1 questions we get from our fans is which platforms will IH be on?
or will IH be on this platform or console I love?

For more information visit: {LINK REMOVED}https://tinyurl.com/IHonGameboy

Wish-list us here so you don't miss out:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/826630

News: Covid-19 shortly delays our Backer Beta!

As you may be aware, the games industry has been hit hard by the Covid-19 outbreak with many gaming events cancelled and projects delayed. Unfortunately, we are no exception and we must now announce a short delay to the Backer Beta we had planned to release this week.

While we are just as disappointed by this as you are, be assured that we are doing everything within our means to bring together our teams online and adapt. We are adjusting our workflow to new challenges and we will deliver the Backer Beta as soon as possible.


Here’s a taster of things to come. Some of you have already spotted new things ;)

Thank you to everyone who has expressed their support and encouragement to us through Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Instagram. Join us there and share your Iron Harvest thoughts, questions and fan creations.

We’ll let you know the moment we’re able to release, hopefully sometime in mid-April.

If you've already claimed your early supporters game, please also join us in our Backers Discord Channel for all the latest news, info and discussion. You'll find the link here. 

Info: Previews Are Here!

Fortunately, and just before the European Covid-19 lockdown, game industry veterans got to grips with the latest version of Iron Harvest during PaxEast2020 and a Berlin Press event.


No better setting than an abandoned WWI factory complete with an air-raid shelter and Pretzels!

This was intense, but a lot of fun and a great way for us to get independent feedback of our game for you. If you’re unsure if Iron Harvest is for you, here are some highlights and new screenshots:

- Seth Macy for IGN UK, full article here



- Colin Campbell for Polygon, full article here



- Gina Lees for PCGamesN, full article here[/h2]



- Chris Wray for Wccftech, full article here



- Dave Rottino for Rated G for Games, full article here



- Nedim Hadzic for AltChar, full article here



- Sergio Cejas for Vidaextra, full article here



- Erick Tay & Michael Higham for Gamespot, full article here



- Ulrich Wimmeroth for EuroGamer, full article here

https://store.steampowered.com/app/826630/Iron_Harvest/

Looking Ahead

All these previews, and the many more out there, motivate and encourage us as we look ahead. Of course, there is still a lot to do, and an unprecedented new situation to adapt to, but our morale is high.

We wish you and yours good health and we will release the backer beta as soon as possible.

Never want to miss an Iron Harvest DevBlog or update?

For extra content and info, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, Reddit and Instagram. Subscribe to our mailing list and you'll never miss out!

News: Backer Beta Confirmed!

That’s right, we can confirm Beta will be released during the last week of March.

Backers will be able to play the first 5 missions of the first campaign (Polanian), new skirmish and multiplayer maps. Check out new units and play for the first time with some of our heroes.  

For those eager for our 3rd faction, the Rusviets; you’ll meet them as opponents while playing the campaign missions. We'll assess your feedback and then later this year we will make them available as a playable faction for skirmish and multiplayer. 

Below we tease some of the content, features and improvements you’ll find. We’ll do a full breakdown and give details in next month’s DevBlog. No brakes on this hype train hype!

Like what you see and want to support us?
Click here to Wish-list us on Steam, you’ll know immediately when we release and if a pre-release version of Iron Harvest becomes available.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/826630

News: Iron Harvest at PaxEast 2020

We’re at Pax East 2020 in Boston, MA, US, from today until March 1st

You’ll find us here:


This is one of our favorite annual gaming conventions and the atmosphere is electric. We’ve got a great booth set up this year, so come find us for a chance to play the latest version of Iron Harvest.

Look out for Tobi’s big bushy ginger beard, he’ll be happy to grease your gears and answer any questions you might have.

News: Backer Portraits

Our 2D artist has been scribbling away and already produced some great in-game player portraits for our backers with the “You-in-the-Game” perk.

Here’s a sneak peak, perhaps you’ll recognize one.


You’ll get to play the first five missions of the Polania campaign. Follow Anna from her early days to her descent into the chaos of war that threatens her homeland.

*Spoiler Warning*


The war comes to Anna’s peaceful village


Polanian forces live to fight another day


United by a common cause, Polanian resistance fighters execute a daring strategy


In a moment of respite, Anna and her compatriots plan their next move 


Valuable cargo secured, the journey towards answers and freedom begins

We’re also very excited to show you our latest cinematics that we hope will engross you into our stories as they start to unfold.

We’ll also have two new multiplayer maps for you to challenge each other on.


“Crashed Site” will see you and a friend race against two opponents to control the spoils of a downed Airship.


“Restless woods” is our largest map yet! This will see you fight 3 vs. 3 over a large, varied landscape that’ll require you to constantly adapt.





Introducing two of the largest, and so deadliest :P, mechs in the game.

The Saxonian “SKS 300 Kaiser” (left) and Polanian “PMZ-24 Tur” (right), these boys are huge, end game, mechs that will both inspire and terrify.


If it’s the quickest way to get from A to B, our infantry pathfinding now includes the ability to vault over objects no higher than 1 meter. Very handy for getting into and out of trouble quickly.

Looking Ahead

The next month is sure to be intense! We can’t wait to bring you our Beta and show you our labor of love as it nears its final form. Our confidence continues to grow, and we can’t wait to meet fans during upcoming gaming events.

Next month’s DevBlog will be in late March when we release Beta. We’ll have all the details for you then. Stay tuned on social media because we don’t think we’ll be able to contain the hype for much longer ;) 

Never want to miss an Iron Harvest DevBlog or update?
For extra content and info, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, Reddit and Instagram. Subscribe to our mailing list and you'll never miss out!

News: Last Chance to Upgrade

To get final numbers and begin producing the physical assets, such as the mecha miniature and artbook, we’ll be disabling upgrades on the 31st of January.

This is your last chance get your mechanical claws on any of the physical goodies and perks from our Kickstarter campaign. Please upgrade your game edition by logging in here.

Anyone who has supported us from the $1 tier and higher is able to upgrade for access to the Alpha/Beta, and any of our other perks.

Best way to support us? Click here to Wish-list us on Steam, you’ll know immediately if a pre-release version of Iron Harvest becomes available and won’t miss our release.

Even if you don’t intend to play on PC, please consider Wish-listing us because this is a good way to show your support for the game and help us be successful upon release. And if you’re feeling especially awesome, please ask your friends to Wish-list us too :)

News: “You in the Game” Edition

A big thank you once again to all those who supported us on Kickstarter at the “You in the game” level. Now it’s time for us to start delivering!

If your bought this perk, check your emails, spam folders and/or account for instructions.
We need you to complete the “Ingame Avatar” survey by uploading 2-3 headshots that our artist will turn into a custom in-game portrait of you.

You’ll also be asked what in-game profession you’d like to have. By supplying this info, you also have the chance to become one of our campaign NPCs.

This all needs to be done before the 31st of January 2020!

If you have already supported us, you can still upgrade your pledge to this tier here.

Inevitably, some of you missed out on this opportunity, but take this announcement as an indication that our development is progressing well, and we fully intend to deliver on our promised perks.

News: Your Name in the Credits

No matter what level you’ve supported us at, we’ll put your name in the game’s credits.
Tell us what name you want by logging in here and completing the “Iron Harvest Credit Name” survey.

Info: End of Year Q&A - Part 2

Continuing on from last month's DevBlog, we answer all your questions going into 2020.
You guys really out did yourselves with interesting questions and so you'll find some great insights for answers.

It's a lot, but you did ask, so you only have yourselves to blame. Enjoy!

When can we expect big maps or 8 player maps? - tomasz_exe (Discord)

We have a 6-player map and an experimental 8-player map in development. The 6-player map will probably be part of the Beta. Whether or not we’re going to release the 8-player map depends on our internal testing. It is very demanding when it comes to memory, so it might not work out in the end.

Is it planned to have day/night cycles in the game (like in WC3) and will it have an effect on units? - SentoN (Discord)

Our plan is that you can chose the time of day and the weather for multiplayer and skirmish matches. If/what effects this will have on the gameplay is not yet clear. Depending on the weather, the range of sight or the attack range might be reduced, possibly also movement speed. But if all that just makes the game less fun, we would rather leave it out and make it purely cosmetic.


Are there heavy armor infantry units? - Justin Walberg (Facebook)

Yes, there are. Bunkers and some heavy mechs for example.

Any plans for other exoskeleton types and the possibility of making them weapons kits for late game? - Shaders...ellipses (Discord)

Each faction has at least one unique exo-skeleton and there is also a hero besides Gunter who uses enhancements. The weaponry is set as for all units.

In regard to actual game content, not just fixing bugs. Is there anything someone in the community said, that became a major topic at an internal meeting or started an idea or change of mind? - n0x (Discord)

After we release a new version, we collect feedback from all sources and compile a list. Once a week there is a “game design meeting” with the game design lead, the game director, the lead programmer and others who discuss the suggestions. We have the philosophy that the origin of an idea doesn’t matter. If it is a good idea, we discuss it.

Not all good ideas find their way into the game, though. Sometimes they don’t mix well with other concepts already in the game or are not possible/too hard to implement. More often we already have an idea for a feature and community feedback encourages us to implement it eventually. Examples of that are:

• Enable backwards movement for mechs
  
• Make exo-skeleton squads, instead of having them as a single unit.
  
• Different weapons for bunkers/upgradable bunkers
  
• Map editor/User maps
  
• Reload indicator
  
• More background story/lore -> Glossary
  
• Skins/cosmetics (e.g. “Winged Hussar Recon”)

Will you have your files available for 3D printing? - Tom Barnes (Facebook)

Maybe after release. Until then we strongly recommend you check out Vidovicarts.
He created quite a few of our mechs and uploaded files for 3D printing on Thingiverse.

Will we ever get werewolves/knight-like mechs? - Zlo Sov (Twitter)

Not for Iron Harvest, which is based on the "World of 1920+". The knights and werewolves are from another of Jakub Rozalski’s universes.

How much visual customization options (if any) will players have when designing their armies? - Benjamin (Facebook)

There will be some. For example, you will be able to choose your own banner (for your flag poles and on your buildings). There will be also some skins and potentially attachments for mechs as rewards in our progression system (for example, for unlocking a certain achievement, reaching a certain level or playing successfully in the league). Additionally, there will be many options in the meta-game to customize your appearance there.

Any plans for Mech camo paint/kits that might affect their visibility of the machine or be just decorative? - Axelyoder (Discord) and Davis (Facebook)

There will be skins as rewards (see above), but they’ll be purely cosmetic.

Will mechs have different skins? E.g. Christmas hat or a Pumpkin head - Guzma (Discord)

Hehe. Mechs with Santa hats? We’ll see.
We’re going to have events and we have skins, so... stay tuned :)

Will infantry units be able to climb over waist-high obstacles? - 2Sk3tChy (Discord)

Yes. They can vault over any cover that is approximately 1 m high.

Will the game have an ELO, leagues or seasons based ranked leaderboard? - Kaos (Discord)

Yes! Well… it’s not ELO, but an ELO-like system. There will be a competitive ranked mode and a more casual multiplayer mode and seasons.

Will we get horse riding units - 2Sk3tChy (Discord)

Yes. One of our hero units is basically “The Cavalry". This hero’s squad becomes larger and larger as he levels up.

Will there be melee mechs? - August Jones? (Twitter)

Oh most definitely ;)

Will there be more realistic close combat with punches, swords and hatchets in the head?- David Vigil (Facebook)

Our goal is not to make it as gruesome as possible, but we plan to add synchronized kills that enable more graphic deaths.

Will the fog of war system be like Company of Heroes 2 whereby buildings can block your view of enemy units? - EIectron (Reddit)

No. We did tests with that and it didn’t feel good. There are a lot of assets in our maps and to constantly have big portions of the screen be visible one second and under FoW the next just isn’t great. We opted for the simpler and calmer “standard” FoW.

Will there be an option to change the HP bars, or at least the option to change the size or remove them? - Seleck84 (Reddit)

It is already possible to scale UI elements from within our setting menu. You can decide how prominently you want to see the UI in general. If there is interest, we could add an option to scale the overhead info separately or to hide them completely. It’s usually pretty important, though.

Will a unit design contest take place where the best design(s) could be implemented into the game? - EthosImmortal (Discord)

No, sorry. It’s too late for that. All units and buildings are already designed.

Will the story/campaign feature a nonlinear, territory-based perk system? - Onxy (Discord)

No. We follow the “Warcraft 3 model”: Three campaigns (one for each faction) that are all part of one bigger narrative.

Will there be a photo mode with ability to control both armies so we can create dioramas and films? - Grey MJ and EthosImmortal (Discord)

You can play against yourself when you set all factions in a skirmish map to “Player”. Additionally, we could maybe release some of our debug options. They are quite nice for this sort of thing (you can spawn units, use free camera and so on). We can’t do it before release because of spoilers. But maybe we’ll see these features in an update after release.

Will there be off-map Abilities? e.g. airstrikes, supply crates, mech delivery - 2Sk3tChy (Discord)

No active abilities, but there are some missions/challenges in which, for example, supplies are being dropped on to the battlefield by an airship and things like that. When it comes to reinforcements, we’re planning an optional system for skirmishes and multiplayer that enables players to invest points for reinforcements they’ll receive when they reach certain goals in the map.

Will the HQ become a building that can be upgraded? - 2Sk3tChy (Discord)

No. Barracks, workshops, iron mines, oil pumps and bunkers can be upgraded, the HQ cannot.

Will there be mod support/community made content? - Willows "Trench Fox" WulfLast (Discord)

We would love user generated content for Iron Harvest! However, since we’re using Unity as our level editor, we can’t really make a neat little editor for everyone to use. Once we’re done with the main game, we’ll investigate if we can enable the community to work on Iron Harvest content within a free Unity version. It will be more complicated than other editors, so it’s not going to be for everyone. But it would be a way for dedicated community members to build upon our game. Hopefully, there will be the first user created maps on release!

Will there be a separate map maker tool with ability to put custom trigger conditions? - tomasz_exe and A furry (Discord)

See above. If it’s possible/feasible, we’re going to do “something”™, but we don’t know at this point how easy/comfortable and how powerful it’s going to be.

Will the AI/pathfinding be able to blow up rubble/buildings/wrecks to create a path to the target location if there is none? - tomasz_exe (Discord)

Yes, absolutely. Units evaluate multiple routes and if it makes sense to destroy (or jump over) something to reach a target faster, they’ll do it.


Any plans for E-sports? - Kaos (Discord)

We always say: “It’s not really up to us whether Iron Harvest is going to be an E-sports title or not.” We can’t invest tens of millions of dollars into an E-sport initiative with uncertain results. We’ll do everything we can to offer a great multiplayer experience. After that, it’s up to the community to grow the game as an E-sport and we’ll help wherever we can.

Will we get an official livestream from devs playing the game? - Rusviet (Discord)

Closer to release we’d like to do these. Tobi, our resident redhead, is raring to go and we’re also looking forward to seeing more of you livestream! Every couple of weeks we have an internal tournament. Maybe we could stream those as well.

Will the bunkers include support roles like medical bunkers, repair or artillery? - Brox9146 (Discord)

Each faction has three types of bunkers. An empty bunker, without any weapons, a bunker with strong capabilities against infantry and one bunker that is strong against mechs. It is often a good idea to garrison inside an infantry type that complements the bunker well (e.g. anti-mech Gunners in an MG bunker). There is also a field medical building you can build by sacrificing a veteran medic squad.

Is there anything you thought of adding to the game and then decided that’s just too crazy and would never work? - Benjamin Brøgger (Facebook)

There are a few things we won’t talk about because they might be part of a fun event some day or maybe an add-on. Other than that, there were some locomotion concepts for mechs that were on the stranger side. Does anyone remember the “He-Man Dragon Walker”? We also would have liked to have sandworms in the game, but somehow, they didn’t fit right with our setting ;-)

Will we always need an internet connection to play? - Nathan Raveau (Facebook)

You will be able to play single player campaigns and skirmishes offline. However, you’ll need to be online in order to play multiplayer, co-op, get achievements, progression rewards and so on. . .

What is the average tris count for your grass meshes and your tree meshes? They look great but are clearly low poly enough to have dense foliage without affecting performance. - Jeremy Scharphorn (Facebook)

We rely heavily on instanced rendering for our Vegetation, which enables to display large fields of lush grass without the heavy performance hit this would usually mean.
Every grass/plant asset consists of up to 3 levels-of-detail, ranging from 20-30 tris on the lowest resolution up to 150-180 tris on the highest.

All visible instances of one Vegetation Type get combined into a single Mesh on RenderTime and shadowed via Screenspace Shadows. This keeps the cost for rendering millions of polygons extremely low. Our trees consist of 4 levels-of-detail and a billboard. Which level-of-detail you will see in closeup changes based on your quality setting.

The tree featured here is right in the middle of the park resolution wise. Larger trees can reach up to twice the triangle count while those used to fill our forests never exceed a 1000 tris, even on the highest settings.

Will the game have V-sync to prevent screen tearing? - Gadzooks (Steam) and Oskar Lukianowicz (Facebook)

Yes. It’s already in the game settings.

How intuitive will the hotkey system be, and will it allow complete customization of all units/buildings/game functions? - mell00yell00 (Reddit)

There is already hotkey customization, so players can play in any settings they prefer. There are only very few fixed key bindings, for example “Esc-key” opens the in-game menu. When it comes to the “factory settings” we tried to be as close as possible to established standards, if there are any. It’s always a pain to re-learn those things.

Does this game use hit scan, or is each projectile calculated individually? - Suniwat (Facebook)

Beneath it all is a 2D simulation of the whole battlefield. Each bullet is simulated individually in this 2D space with some additional height information. So for example, if a Saxonian Stormtrooper fires a volley of five bullets at a target that is partially blocked by a waist high wall, some bullets will hit the wall, some will fly over the wall and hit the target and others might fly over the wall, don’t hit the target but hit a building behind it.

What's the chance of getting mouse and keyboard support for PS4? - Callum Sweeney (Facebook)

It is possible and we’ve already investigated it. The mouse & keyboard UI works on televisions (and you can "feely" scale it) and there doesn’t seem to be a technical problem we can’t solve.
One of the challenges is to keep the multiplayer fair, a match between PS4 players using gamepad and the other using mouse & keyboard is problematic. So, this is no confirmation at this point but if it enhances the experience, we’re all for it.

Will there be LAN support? - Solensia (Reddit)

We’ve already managed to build a local server running on a PC, and we used it to present 1 vs. 1 competitive gameplay in Korea at G-Star 2019. So, LAN multiplayer is possible in theory. But we would have to improve it and make it more convenient to use. That’s definitely on our list, but don’t take it as a confirmation at this point.

What are the most known German game dev studios and how KAG compare to them? Do you still consider yourselves indie? - luk_zloty (Discord)

In general, there are not as many great and well-known studios in Germany. Our neighbors like France and Poland have done a much better job building a strong games industry. There are a couple of big mobile games studios like Bigpoint, InnoGames, Gameforge or GoodGame and some good PC/console developers like Crytek (Farcry, Crysis), Yager (Spec Ops: The Line), Ubisoft/Blue Byte (Anno Series, Settlers Series), Deck13 (Lords of the Fallen, The Surge), Piranha Bytes (Gothic Series, Elex) but it could be more.

Currently, it feels like the German games industry might finally be on the upswing and it is our intention to help with that ;-) KING Art is one of the older German developers (20 years in the business and counting). We have the reputation to make good games with small budgets. Iron Harvest is the first project we are working on, where the budget actually meets our ambition ;-) With approximately 60 developers, we are the 30th biggest developer in Germany.
Yeah… we consider ourselves “indie”. Whenever we can, and it’s true for Iron Harvest as well, we keep total creative control of our projects and we try to invest as much as possible of our own money.

Has the lore been changed for the Rusviets or is it the same nonsensical "soviets kept the tsar in power" thing? - Patrick Katalenas (Facebook)

Iron Harvest is an “origin story” and takes place a little before other stories in the “world of 1920+” you might know. There are changes but, yes, a country named “Rusviet” is still ruled by a tsar which isn’t super logical. But maybe in our world the tsar isn’t around forever?

If the game does well, would you like to do a sequel and expand on this universe? - Tyler Harris (Twitter)

Yes. First thing we would like to do is add-ons, adding new factions, campaigns and game modes. But also, spin-offs games like a grand strategy game (turn-based) or a 3rd person shooter could be really cool. What would you like to see?

If the super-Mechs like the “Tur” are added, will they be unique controllable units or more like set-pieces unique to the environment? - Rusviet (Discord)

All the factions have different-sized mechs and one “super-mech”, that can be controlled. These units are late-game units and of course, pretty expensive. In case of the TUR we had to make it a little smaller, to make sure it fits on the screen and doesn’t block out the rest of your army ;)


Will we see other factions from the world of Iron Harvest be made into DLC of the game and if so, which candidates would the Devs most like to see in the game? - Aaron Park (Facebook)

Hopefully! We would love to make add-ons. There are many cool options to chose from. Having an Asian faction could be really cool, but also other factions you might know from Jakub’s artworks. Or we could do something totally different. At the moment, we’re focused on the main game and making it a success that warrants more factions! :)

What is your favorite unit in Iron Harvest and why? - Ashton Grey (Facebook)

We asked the game designers and animators. Here are their answers:

Dominik (Game Designer): SKS 156 “Wotan”
It is just a cute, loveable mech! Especially when it moves and turns with all its legs. Yet when it arrives at position, it just annihilates its enemies with brute explosion power!

Tim (Game Design Intern): PZM-13 “Mocny”
Once setup, it goes BOOM…and then everything is gone to dust.

Elliott (Game Designer): SHM-69 “Serp”
The “Serp” is the one giant enemy that no player can ignore when it arrives at the battlefield! Whenever it appears it draws the attention and is just spectacular every time!

Francis (Game Design Intern): Sd.KS 78 “Isegrim”
With its simple box form and its four long legs – I think the “Isegrim” is really cute, yet imposing, when traversing the battlefield. Sometimes it’s the simple things: It looks good and does a good job in every situation!

Maximilian K. (Game Design Lead): MWF 28 “Stiefmutter”
The working process behind this unit has driven one of our designers crazy so far (and he probably was not the only one) – yet the idea is something really unique I think; and alone the naming of the mech (combined with what it does) is just too good to not love it!

Sarah (Animator): SKS 156 “Wotan”
It is simply cute! And it was genuinely fun to animate with all its little legs!

Thomas Derksen (Lead Animator): SHM-69 “Serp”
From all mechs in the game, the “Serp” represents Jakub’s look best! We needed to compromise on most mechs with the sizing a little bit – but the “Serp” stayed a huge, impressive metal giant, dominating the battlefield!

Vladislav (Animator): Lech Kos’ Mech – The Rebel Leader
It’s a powerful, aggressive and melee focused unit, and the animations we did to translate this were really fun to make!

Rahel (Animator): Tag & Nacht

They're good doggos

Mailyn (Animator): Lev Zubov’s Mech - The Rusviet General
The two badass rotating blades are really cool, and all its crazy melee attacks make it even better!

Thomas Peter Paul (Lead Technical Artist): PZM-7 "Smialy": The "Smialy" is definitely the most iconic unit of the game to me! In addition, is great speed and range perfectly fits my play-style!

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? - Valentine (Discord)
Depends, is it an African or European swallow?


Is the cake really a lie? - Peter Norell (Facebook)

THE cake? Yes, I know it’s hard to accept, but yes. Let’s move on.

How did you and this game get so awesome? - Joshua Hill (Facebook)

No, you’re awesome!

Do you prefer eggnog or hot cocoa drinks this time of the year? - shdewit (Reddit)

Glühwein or cocoa, the historical Bremen Christmas market is just across the road from the office. Delightful.

What was the hardest time you have ever laughed in your life? - Zerg_x (Discord)
Not sure, but this is top-10:


Within the company, do you have morale boosting events? - ThibmoRozier (Discord)

Once a year, we have our company summer and winter festivals. We also have regular “Show & Tells” where the different teams show off what they are working on. Then there are the many unofficial activities. We do Wine Wednesday every week (The Iron Doctor insists on bringing his Gin), board game/pen&paper rounds or miniatures painting. A whole bunch of us have weekly medieval sword fight training or train for half-marathons. I find only one of the last two things strange ;)

What kind of coffee does Elliott prefer? - Night Owl (Discord)

Like himself, Black (of heart), bitter (of mind) and preferably fair-trade (of body).

Which came first, chicken or egg? - Kaos (Discord)

Egg! Darwinian evolution teaches us that a proto-chicken must have laid the 1st chicken egg. Which then hatched the first mech and from this the AT-ST naturally followed.

Will the Rusviet mechs be powered by vodka? - Shaders...ellipses (Discord)

Iron Harvest is DIESELpunk mechs. We can’t comment for the pilots, though hehe.

What is the sense of life? - Rusviet (Discord)

To buy Iron Harvest 42 times.

Pineapple on pizza? Thoughts?

Not bad. Come at me bro!

Info: End of 2019 Gameplay Video

If you haven’t seen it already, check out our latest gameplay trailer. It’s proving very popular and will get you up-to speed with our progress over 2019.

Contains new in-game footage and a 1st look at our cutscenes. Enjoy!

Looking Ahead

We're gaining more and more traction as we steam towards Beta release in mid-March.
The office is full of activity and excitement as we start to put the build together and we're pumped to show you what we've got as soon as its 100% confirmed.

Until then, we're presenting the game at conventions, such as Dreamhack in Leipzig this weekend. If you're in the area, drop on by and play the latest version of Iron Harvest against your friends!

If you've already claimed your early supporters game, please also join us in our Backers Discord Channel. for all the latest news, info and discussion. You'll find the link here.

Never want to miss an Iron Harvest DevBlog or update?

For extra content and info, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, Reddit and Instagram. Subscribe to our mailing list and you'll never miss out!

We plan to launch our Beta in late-February/early-March 2020.

We had hoped for mid-December 2019, but after careful consideration we decided to finish what we’re currently working on so that you’ll get to play with a more complete game than originally planned.

Ultimately, the purpose of the Beta is to let our backers road-test many of the games key features, ensure they’re working as intended and then gather feedback. We’re pleased with how this worked for the Alphas and your Beta feedback will undoubtedly improve the final released product. We also gave Beta-backers the opportunity to play the Alpha and so they’ve already had a feel for the game earlier than originally planned. Recently, our development has really escalated and stopping now to implement the Beta and monitor its progress would disrupt the teams current flow.

Launching the Beta when its ready will have no impact on our release date of 1st of September 2020. Thank you for your understanding and all your support so far.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/826630/Iron_Harvest/

The community’s response to our call for questions has been phenomenal. The Iron Doctor, our community manager, has been swamped. But it’s great to see what you’re interested in as we move forward. We’ve had to split the answers into two parts. Here’s the 1st, and the 2nd will be in January’s DevBlog.



When will you send out the request for the in-game picture of the backers? - Kaada (Discord)

We’re going to start sending our requests for your likeness to help us create the in-game portraits of you over the holiday period. If you haven’t heard from us by January 15th, please contact us.

When can we expect all the backer’s special extras to be shipped to early supporters? - Polarwrath (Discord)

The plan is to send out all rewards together with the game. Our goal is you having everything in your hand at launch day.

When will Iron Harvest launch? - German Marine (Discord)

1st of September 2020 to Steam and GOG on PC as well as Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

I pre-ordered/supported in the early stages, how will I get my key? - Kaos (Discord)

Thank you, if you’re an Alpha or Beta backer you can access the PC Alpha already by logging in from the top right of our webpage and claim your Steam key. When we release the game in full, everybody gets a new key for the platform of your choosing. The Alpha/Beta Steam key will no longer work.


Are you going to sell the artbook separately? - Night Owl (Discord)

We haven't decided yet. The artbook is primarily for our early supporters. But if there is interest, perhaps we could offer it later over our shop as well.

Any ideas on the number of maps available at release? - 2Sk3tChy (Discord)

Yes. :-) What we can confirm so far: There will be 21 campaign maps, 7 for each campaign. There will also be a good number of multiplayer and challenge maps as well as new maps after release.

Will Iron Harvest be physically released? - Cody Martinka (Facebook)
Yes! The plan is to release it physically in all major markets. Our publisher Deep Silver (Koch Media) is one of the biggest distributors for boxed games in the world. We’ll also lobby for at least one Collector’s Edition.



Any chance of Iron Harvest running under Steam on Linux? - Fonant (Twitter)All our previous games had native Linux support. The only reason we didn’t want to promise anything for Iron Harvest is the fact that it is so much more complex than anything we’ve done so far (including multiplayer and coop features). We’ll look into Linux and try to make it as easy as possible for Linux fans to get the game running. We have some Linux fans in the company, so you have a lobby here ;-)

Will there be a Mac version? - Mike Lewis (Facebook)

As with Linux (see above), we can’t promise anything yet, but we’ll look into it down the line. One additional problem on Mac is that many Mac systems, especially older MacBooks, have notorious bad graphic chips. So even if we would be able to release a Mac version, it would most likely be limited to higher-end systems. Look out for news mid-2020.

Are you able to sell/open access to Alpha or Beta before release, or has the opportunity been missed? - many people (everywhere)

It’s great that a lot of people want to get into Iron Harvest ASAP. However, Alpha will remain closed as it was always a special thing for our early supporters and Kickstarter backers. We are current discussing internally, how open/closed the Beta will be. There are a surprisingly number of pros and cons to consider here, but we will defiantly let you know as soon as we have decided.

What are you plans for pre-release? I’d love an old school Demo - David West (Facebook)

We’re going to do the backer-Beta early 2020 and most likely some sort of performance/stability test, maybe a “Beta 2”, an Open Beta or sort of demo, close to release.

How much do you think the game will cost at release? - LokenTheAtom (Reddit)

There will be most likely different versions (we’re thinking about a “Collector’s Edition”, for example). The game will be a “full price game” which means different things in different territories and on different platforms. You can take games like Total War: Three Kingdoms or Dawn of War 3 as examples.

Would you like to release a Nintendo Switch version of Iron Harvest? - Chris Sharples (Facebook)

YES! We would love to. But it’s not going to happen. At least not without some sort of game streaming solution on the Switch or a hardware upgrade. Iron Harvest is relatively demanding when it comes to CPU power (AI, pathfinding, many animations for many units at the same time and so on) and the Switch has a pretty weak CPU. We love the Switch, but there is no way we can make it happen.

Are you going to release it on next gen consoles too, as its being released during that period? - Ryan Hale (Facebook)

We don’t know yet. We’re talking with Unity; our engine provider and Deep Silver is in close contact with Sony and Microsoft. So, we’ll investigate it but it’s too early to say.

Plans for Google Stadia? - Sascha Seewald (Facebook)

As with the next gen consoles, we’ll investigate it. In general, we think it makes sense to give players many different options to play a game. We don’t like exclusives, but we DO like choice.

What is the strategy and roadmap to keep the game alive? - Kaos (Discord)

There will be announcements regarding our plans next year. All we can confirm up to this point are the things we have already promised: There will be a mini-campaign as DLC (Kickstarter stretch goal; free for backers), there will be new maps and game modes. We’ll also try to provide an editor so fans can create their own maps. We’ve put a lot of effort into a metagame that works for both, multiplayer AND single player fans. More about that next year. We believe in Iron Harvest and want to support the game long-term. So, we are actively working with Deep Silver on ideas how to make that possible.

How often will there be tournaments and what will the prizes be like? - Kaos (Discord)

We will likely do another tournament after Beta release. Once we’ve launched, these will continue every now and then depending on the demand from the community. We’ll try to support these with suitable and themed prizes from us.

When can we expect the 3rd faction (Rusviets) to be playable? - PASHA (Discord)

Rusviets will definitely be playable and will most likely enter the battlefield later in Beta.

How much interaction will there be with the environment? - Somencarl (Instagram)

A lot. Buildings and many other things on the maps are destructible. Big mechs can walk through most structures, infantry can jump over fences, low walls and so on. Expect maps to look a whole lot different at the end than they did at the beginning of a match.


Will mechs be able to suffer partial damage? - Somencarl (Instagram)

No. We have a system where most units receive more damage when hit from behind. But you won’t be able to focus fire on individual parts of a mech. Visually, though, mechs receive damage where they get hit.

Will you change/balance the “infantry can swap to any type” system to make it more realistic in future? - Everett Van Horne (Facebook)

It’s not realistic, for sure, but we think it works well and makes the game better. Balancing is, of course, one of the biggest tasks on our list for the next months. In general, gameplay is more important for us than realism. We are talking about a world with giant mechs after all ;-)

Will Polania have winged hussars like calvary? - Joshua Robinson (Facebook)

They will have cavalry and we plan to bring these into the game during Beta. No wings, though. Could be a cool idea for a skin!



What will the production system be like in making units?? Will it be cheap and easy, or will it cost a lot and make it feel like every life matter? - Jason Wood (Facebook)

One of our design goals was to make each unit/squad feel important. Your units become veterans and ultimately elite units, so you want to keep them alive for as long as possible. That’s one reason why we implemented a “retreat” functionality, engineers, medics, medic tents and so on. They all help to keep your units alive. Units will be relatively costly, and you want to think about how to use each one efficiently.

How will the three factions vary in terms of play style and how will you keep this balanced? - Solensia (Reddit)

Each of our faction has a unique theme: Polania are the guerilla rebels, Rusviet are military powerhouse and Saxony are the industrial elitists. Their playstyles derive not only from one facet of their theme but from many of them. Keeping this balanced means while the factions are not equal, they stay equally viable. We ensure this by providing each faction with all the tools they need in a way that matches their themes.

How many vs. A.I. challenges are planned for the game? - EthosImmortal (Discord)

We will have a couple of “Challenge maps” in the game, which are maps with special goals designed for you to play them multiple times and get better and better over time. But you can also play all multiplayer maps against the AI in any configuration (so for example you and an A.I. teammate against two A.Is.). We don’t know yet exactly how many maps will be in the game at release or how many more we’re going to release after release.

What distinguishes Iron Harvest from Company of Heroes and stops it feeling like a CoH mod? - STRONTJESBERG (Discord)

You will see that while CoH has been a big inspiration for us, Iron Harvest plays different. Many of our units are slower but offer more flexibility and utility. Depending on which hero you chose for a match, you have very different ways to put pressure on the opponent. Very experienced CoH players are usually positively surprised how much they must adapt and come up with new tactics. We also invested a lot of time in streamlining the UI and controls. We believe in complex and deep games, but we also think it is our job to make it easier for new players to get into a game. We think our U.I. is more consistent and less redundant than some U.Is. in the past. There is a whole metagame we haven’t talked about yet; our campaign is comparatively HUGE and of course we have a very different setting. Did we mention the mechs?

Will there be something to stop mechs passing certain locations? - Vipasyn (Discord)

I presume you refer to permanent features. Mechs must already navigate around trenches, some buildings and map features such as rivers and narrow bridges. You can also lay minefields. Mechs will want to avoid bottlenecks and dominate open terrain.

Will there be other types of cover than the ones we currently have? - Jnc3 (Discord)

Visually there will be many different types of cover. Gameplay-wise we only have three fundamental types: Low cover which infantry can use to shoot over while being somewhat save from many attacks, high cover which is to high to shoot over and something we call implicit cover which is, for example, a mech between the attacker and you, or a cliff that prevents you hitting the enemy. Many covers can be destroyed. These covers have an armor type and hit points, so for example a wooden fence can be easily destroyed by bullets, a heavy cover can’t. Some cover, like for example trenches or objects like rocks, can’t be destroyed at all.



Are you planning on giving purchasable abilities for individual squads? - Mike6411 (Reddit)

Units can become veteran and eventually elite. Many units get at least one new ability when they level up, but you can’t choose between different abilities for standard units. Heroes, however, have different skills that you can level up individually during the campaigns.

Do you want this game to be competitive for a longer period and have frequent balance updates? - Kaos (Discord)

Absolutely. As mentioned above, we’ll talk more about the metagame and our ongoing efforts next year. We’ll do more than “just” frequent balance updates.

Do you value multiplayer over single player? - Kaos (Discord)

We don’t see Iron Harvest as favoring one or another and nor would we want to limit ourselves by choosing only one of these. Iron Harvest aims to have a great single player campaign for those times when you want to immerse yourself and take it easy, while also having a well-grounded multiplayer experience for when you want to get competitive and try out new tactics. Thanks to all our Kickstarter supporters and our publisher Deep Silver, we have the resources to do both. And we’ll support both after launch.

Currently, when using a weapon system (AT cannon, MG station), the unit that’s assigned to the weapon system is the unit that gets the experience. Will this change in the future? - 2Sk3tChy (Discord)

That is working as intended. As you know, you can give squads new equipment, effectively making them a new unit type. Nonetheless they keep their XP/rank. The same is true for weapon systems. The weapon systems are just “tools” manned by soldiers and the soldiers are the ones that get the XP.

Estimated playtime for the campaign? - 2Sk3tChy (Discord)

Depends on how often you must restart a mission, of course. We think most players will take about 20 hours. Most missions are around 40-50 minutes, but there are some much shorter (20-25 minutes) and some much longer as well (up to 90 minutes). And there will be good 60 minutes of cinematic cutscenes between the missions.

What's the max unit count of a fully upgraded base? - PJ O’Neill and Christian Franco (Facebook)

This depends on the game settings players choose. We think the game feels best with no more than 15 units/squads under your control but if players what to control more units, they can obviously choose to do so (you can set the max and the rate of resource income in the multiplayer & skirmish settings). In most of the campaign missions you will have less than a dozen units/squads most of the time, but there are also some very open missions with a much higher ceiling.

Did you draw any inspiration from the Red Alert series? - Michal Durian (Facebook)

We looked at all games in the “RTS Hall of Fame” but I’m not sure we used something explicitly from a Red Alert game. I know we talked about the option to increase the size of maps during missions but ultimately, we chose fixed sizes. Now I think about it: There is one mission that was definitely inspired by classic Tanya missions.

Your mechs seem super slow and lack a real punch. Is it just my impression or a conscious design decision? - Dmytro Soloviov (Facebook)

Them being slow is a design decision (though we’re still working on them, so speeds might change). Lacking punch is something we have on our list. This has mainly to do with animations, effects and missing “juice”. Or are you talking about gameplay/stats? We think most mechs already have good punch there, depending on how you use them (not every mech is good against each type of enemy).

Will there be any other types of production buildings? - Jnc3 (Discord)

No. We wanted to keep production kind of simple: One building for infantry, exo-skeletons and weapon systems, one for mechs, both upgradable.



Are there going to be any infantry squads with more or less than 5 men? - Jnc3 (Discord)

Infantry is defined by always having 5 squad members. But there is another unit class called exo-skeletons. They usually have three squad members. Making larger than 5-man squads is something we are also investigating. It comes with new technical challenges, but it might well happen in the future.

Will there be a territory system? - Jnc3 (Discord)

You are talking about the CoH system where you only get resources from areas connected to your base? No. We thought about that, but our maps are usually on the smaller side (because units are slower) and it felt weird to force the necessary number of sectors into them.

Which RTS games did you look to for inspiration? - James Bevis (Facebook)

All of them. Well. Most of them. We looked at many classics plus basically everything that came out in the last 5 years. The biggest inspiration when it comes to gameplay and feel is Company of Heroes 1. The campaign structure and the hero system are more like Warcraft 3. StarCraft 2 was an inspiration for some player progression system stuff and U.I. elements. Sometimes, when we were unsure about something, we literally let a game designer investigate half a dozen or more games and analyze what worked and why. But it is not only RTS that are helpful. We play a lot of games here and good ideas can come from everywhere. And of course, it cannot be ruled out we ourselves had a good idea or two. After all, we've been doing this for 20 years ;-)

What surprises or interesting things did you learn from the players so far? - Solensia (Reddit)

Very early on we did a survey and the fact that A LOT of people really care about the campaigns in RTS was something we saw in ourselves but didn’t know was so widespread. Something else that is surprising is how different players play. We get feedback from player A that some unit is completely broken and useless, while player B thinks the units is awesome, maybe slightly over-powered. Sometimes, as a developer, you think in terms of “the players” or maybe player types/groups but in reality, all players and play-styles are unique and you need to figure out how to enable as many as possible to have a good time.

What was the biggest challenge while developing the game? - Heinsen (Reddit)

The complexity. There are a lot of moving parts (literally) and so many systems that are all interconnected. On the one hand that is what you want: You want everything in the game to influence everything else because it makes for a deep gameplay experience. But at the same time, it is really, really hard to make it fun, balanced and not exploitable.

We’ve been making games for 20 years, but this is the first time we've often left meetings with more questions than we had when we went in. Everything is more complicated and more complex than you would expect. It became a running joke: Nothing is ever easy when you want to make an RTS that can be up there with the greats.



Are you working on pathfinding currently and how high of the priority list is it currently? - Uliysess (Discord)

The new path-finding system will be in the Beta. It is currently in our internal QA. The new system is very cool. Faster than the old system, more powerful and much more flexible. It’s probably one of the most advanced systems in any RTS, the scientific papers it is based on are fresh off the press ;-)

The big challenge we have with Iron Harvest is that many different units need to find many different paths in an ultra-dynamic environment. For example: A big mech can go through sandbag barriers and even houses, but it can’t use a narrow bridge over a river. A light mech can go through a wooden fence or a chicken house and it can use the narrow bridge, but it can’t go through a house. Infantry can’t go through a wooden fence, but they can leap over it, if its not too high. They can also jump into and out of trenches, which is something mechs and weapon systems can’t do. When a wreck of a mech blocks a bridge, some units can destroy the wreck and make a way for themselves, others can’t.

Now imagine this with a couple of hundred units sending thousands of path requests on a map that changes 8 times per second and you get an idea why it took Thomas, our Technical Director, a couple of months to rework the system ;-)


Is there an order of factions in the campaign, or are there 3 separate campaigns? - luk_zloty (Discord)

It’s one overarching story. The order is: Polania, Rusviet, Saxony.

Is Iron Harvest "base" campaign a closed story, or you end it with a cliffhanger? luk_zloty (Discord)

I would call it an “origin story”. It has an ending, but we’re also setting up the world for future factions and heroes. It is no secret that we would love to add more factions to the game and continue the story. So, let’s say: At the end of the third campaign, the first overarching story had its conclusion, but we also have plenty of opportunities for new stories.

Any plans to expand upon barbed wire and sandbags? For example, with Mech traps, tripwire and mines. - PASHA (Discord)

Mines are the last type of fortification on our list. That doesn’t mean there can’t be more, but we would only add more if there is a strong desire or need to add more. Let’s see what the Beta feedback says.

Are there plans to update how garrisoning a building works? E.g. Infantry evacuating as soon as a building loses a tiny part of it. - DeadPixel (Discord)

Yes. Now, each building has only one “room” inside. In the future, building have multiple “rooms” and if at least one room is intact, units stay in the building. So, it will be harder to get infantry out and this will depend on its size.

Does angling a mech's armor do anything to reduce/stop the damage from incoming fire? - Axelyoder (Discord)

Most mechs have lighter armor on their backs, so if you can get behind them you will deal more damage.



Is it going to be possible to upgrade your units? - Jnc3 (Discord)

With heroes, you can invest a skill point for each level up in different skills. Normal units have a veterancy system in which they sometimes gain special abilities.

Are there any plans for more "offset" skirmish/multiplayer maps? For example, one player starts with prebuild defenses and has fights multiple players. - tomasz_exe (Discord)

There will be different game modes but we’re not sure about asymmetric maps. We feel that people who play competitively might not enjoy maps that force them into a certain role. There WILL be challenge maps that focus on offense or defense, though.

Any plans for a player controlled or NPC airforce? - Axelyoder (Discord)

No. We like the idea, but for now we stay firmly on the ground. Well . . . <spoilers> an airship might feature, but you can’t control it.

Are there any plans for mobile buildings? - Axelyoder (Discord)

Not directly, but we like the idea and it would fit the world of 1920+. If we hopefully do more factions, this might be an option. Polanian already has a large, fast transport mech that works like a moving bunker. The “medic tents” are also a similar idea in that a medic squad can transform itself into a building that can be used for healing units and that shortens how far units must run when they retreat. So: Medics run to a place, become a stationary building. Probably doesn’t count as a “mobile building”, though.

Are you still planning a co-op campaign, a co-op scenario mission or both? - NOOBIAN (Discord)

Planning & implementing. We’re laying the technical foundation as we speak.

What sort of balance changes do you hope to add in future updates? Are you aiming for a slower paced combat system or faster? - TheFloridaLeague (Reddit)

We envision combat to play out in a way where decisions matter. We want to keep the pace of combat slow enough that the challenge is to come up with a versatile and effective strategy rather than being able to perform the necessary click per second rate to pull it off.

Will Heroes be part of the multiplayer? - 2Sk3tChy (Discord)

Optionally. The idea is that all players can, if they want, chose one of their faction’s heroes to be part of the match. Depending on which hero it is, the hero will enter the game only after a certain time. This ensures that a strong mech hero won't be overpowered in the early game.

Would you like to develop a Warhammer 40K game? - Kaada (Discord)

Hell yeah, we would! Many in the office are big Games Workshop fans. Perhaps one day we’ll get that opportunity.


When can we expect big maps or 8 player maps? - tomasz_exe (Discord)

We only promised 6-player maps, but we’re testing an 8-player map now. We’ll have to see how it goes. If the tests are successful, we might add it to the beta.

Do you plan on making extremely large walkers, I’m talking like AT-AT size, down the road? - Jeffy (Twitter)

There are some big mechs coming for the late game, see below. The only limit is what is practical for game play. We don’t want the mech blocking out the entire screen and stopping you controlling the rest of your army.


Thanks to 2Sk3tChy who live streamed the contest in order to get us some democratically chosen Winners!

Blackwood came first and won a $100 Steam voucher with this fierce take on our three factions.


HoshieArt came second by capturing Anna in all her fieriness to win a $50 Steam Voucher.


RitteninRot came thrid and won $20 with this hand-drawn depiction of our three faction’s infantries.

Congratulations to you all and enjoy your early Christmas presents.

We are extremely impressed by the fan dedication on display during the whole contests. All the entrants were fantastic. We think the contest was a success and so, once we are closer to release and have some great prizes to offer, we hope to do official Iron Harvest contests next year


Are you a content creator who can write, make videos, and build communities?
Do you want to work in the games industry? Well we might have the job for you!

You can check out the full details and apply here.

We’re looking for a Content Creator & Community Builder willing to work in Bremen, Germany, who can help us present Iron Harvest to the gaming world in the best possible way. Please share this with anyone you think might be interested.

2020 is going to be a big year for us, so much will happen and we’ll start to outline it all in next year’s DevBlogs. We’re excited and also looking forward to seeing our backers play the Beta in February/March. We hope you are too. Thank you for all your support this year and we wish you the best of Holiday seasons.


Never want to miss an Iron Harvest DevBlog or update?
For extra content and info, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.
Subscribe to our mailing list and you'll never miss out!

Read on to find out about the use of Gstar, Fortifications in Iron Harvest, our big “End of the year Q&A” and how to win prizes in 2Sk3tchy’s Fan-art Competition.

Last week, Julian took Iron Harvest on the road to G-star2019 in Busan, South Korea. This was our first foray into Asia and a wonderful chance to meet RTS fans from a different culture.

Discord user “Qrien” found us and enjoyed the latest version of our multiplayer.
It was great to see new players challenge their friends and explore the world of Iron Harvest.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/826630/Iron_Harvest/?snr=1_7_15__13

These players were also the first to experiment with our new fortifications.

Players often ask about fortifications in Iron Harvest. Building awesome defensive lines and working out how best to break those of opponents, is one of the great things offered by RTS games. We love this and the many cool ideas players come up with. One of the challenges we face is to provide defensive options that complement the gameplay offered by our lumbering mechs.


In the early game, infantry squads push out, scout and establish early map control. Barbed wire gives you the option to quickly and cheaply halt your enemies plans and make them think twice. Effectively using cover is crucial to victory, so what to do when you find yourself out in the open or want to cover your flank? Build a wall of sandbags and give your infantry a significant defensive advantage. Eventually though, our mechs will be able to stomp straight through these.


Trenches were a “traditional” part of warfare during the First World War. In the era of 1920’s mechs, they pose as significant obstacles. While not directly buildable by players, throughout the game you will encounter numerous trenches as part of a landscape ravaged by war. They provide cover for infantry and mark key strategic locations that you might want to reinforce with other fortifications. Claim them before your enemy does!


To solidify control however, you’ll want bunkers and they now come in three types: unarmed (custom), machine-gun (anti-infantry) and cannon (anti-mech), with increasing iron costs. Bunkers can only fire forward in a 90° arc, but by holding down the left mouse button you can orientate bunkers however you like. When garrisoned, bunkers offer protection to infantry and allows them to fire their weapons from inside in a 270° firing arc.


This is also an opportunity to complement the limitations of bunkers. For example, if your slow firing anti-mech cannon bunker keeps getting rushed by infantry, you can garrison machine gunners to suppress them. Just remember to have some mobile support units nearby for when the artillery mechs begin to shell your position.


Of course, like all faction buildings, each has their own unique bunker designs that reflects their style. This is the current state of fortifications in Iron Harvest; however, their details might change as we consider new options, develop and balance the game further.


As we close out the year, we want to directly answer any questions you might have. We’ll get you a direct answer from the appropriate developer and include the best questions in next month’s Dev-Blog.
To be included, being your question with "Q&A" and send it directly to us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram.


In short, to win either a $100, $50 or $20 Steam gift card:

1. Create any Iron Harvest related fan-art
   
2. Subscribe to 2Sk3chy’s Youtube channel here.
   
3. Subscribe to 2Sk3chy’s Twitter channel here.
   
4. Submit your fan-art to this thread here.
   
5. All submissions must be received by the 15th of December.

Let your creativity flow and we’re excited to see the fruits of it. If this competition is successful, and you guys enjoy it, in the future we’d like to do more expanded competitions and community events with prizes from us!

And so, with the Q&A and fan-art competition to look forward to, we’ll be hoping to end the year on a high. Beta is also on the horizon and we’ll soon bring you more news regarding our plans. We’re racing towards this and we’ve also been making significant progress on the campaigns, so stay tuned!

If you've already claimed your early supporters game, please also join us in our Backers Discord Channel for all the latest news, info and discussion.

For extra content and info, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.
Subscribe to our mailing list and you'll never miss out!

Also contains:

• Teasers of things to come!
  
• Invitation to G-star in Busan, Korea.
  
• EVERSPACE2 kickstarter campaign.
  
• Beards & cosplay!

Feel free to discuss below anything you like the look of and we'll answer any questions we see.