As we’re nearing the end of this crazy hot summer in The Netherlands, working out of our balmy office in Schinkelbuurt hasn’t been easy but – the first official prototype is juuuust about to be ready.

Here are some mouth-watering stills to pick your attention:




A glimpse of the dialogue system:




And some snapshots from one of the game’s locations, for a proper premiere and a first!

For the sixth edition of the devlog, first – it’s been a LONG time. There’s a lot of news, but – let’s start with an official update of the game description:

Covenant: Project Zero is a space saga with intergalactic trading, mystery, and action elements, weaved into an immersive storyline. We follow the adventures of John Covenant, captain of the cargo corvette “Tango”, as he and his ragtag crew of misfits try to make a buck traversing the frontier of the inhabited universe – and getting into all kinds of trouble along the way.​

A lot has happened since the last devlog. Duh.

Just when we thought this game was going smoothly – our game designer Aleksandar “Sasha” Djordjevic’s VFX career provided a distraction as he got picked up to supervise visual effects for a major Amazon Prime TV show – Outer Range, Season 1.

This course of events led him to spend over a year in USA & New Mexico and quite stuck for eight long months in an extraordinarily tight COVID-19 bubble with a bunch of A-list actors. The great cast and crew made the work and being away from his family so much easier, but it’s good that the pandemic feels almost like it’s behind us now.

But the days were really long, and there was simply no time for dev work so 11000AD was put on hiatus, being an indie studio. So, after that amazing experience finally came to an end in August 2021 – the busy-bee Sasha is – the day he came back to Amsterdam, The Netherlands – he started a brand new creative studio in town.

Doing good work means people want you to do more good work. Ok. Note taken. So, to add to it, 11000AD slowly started moving back into work mode.

With the company on a good run, we decided to bring on board more folks to work on it, and we have a more solid idea of where to go next with both the VFX and gaming departments within the studio to make sure everything moves forward.

11000AD was always supposed to be the experimental lab to test things out – but now it’s also an integrated gaming division of the company, with a sign on the door, and all.

A few major technical decisions had to be made, too. Although super appealing – Godot will remain in our hearts and on our drives but until it has airtight support for targeting mobile devices – we’ll have to stick with Unity 3D to make it happen. TBH – we always planned to develop in Unity.

And – also – Covenant’s finally gone 3D! Well, actually, 2.5D. Which is still 3D, but our main characters and NPCs are sprites in 3D space. And it looks freaking awesome and cute 🙂

We can still keep the pixel art look and feel, but the coding is so much more streamlined as there are a whole bunch of amazing 3D tools we can use.

So – here are some visuals of the shape of things to come. These, by no means, are final visuals, there’s definitely much more going into shader research and different models of creating the pixel art look and feel straight out of the shader.



The biggest challenge now shifts to creating prefabs to work with this new approach and still keep the desired look. But it’s lots of fun!

More to come.

My second update to the preview prototype is up. I’ve been thinking more and more to move to a 3D realm, so these may be the last days of a 2D approach game.

I’ve done more pixel art for the bottom floor, and it’s really starting to take shape, so even if it goes 3D, it’s going to be interesting trying to retain or reinvent the look for a pixel-art world feel. We’ve been looking over toon shaders for that, and we think it’s gonna be alright.

Although the lower deck takes a back seat to the main deck, it’s actually mighty important for the narrative. This being your proverbial interstellar cargo transporter, it’s all gonna be about the goods.

We worked on the initial planning and setup for lights and shadows, too, and worked out the basics. The screen glows are working great, and both they and the stairwells light the captain nicely.

We spent almost an hour (!) just walking around the spaceship and looking at screens. This is the kind of stuff indie development is all about. You give yourself some time to enjoy the little things.

There are a lot of functionalities ahead, but what we’re looking into now is finishing the basic look and feel, some essential designs, and animation cycles for the rest of the crew before we go full 3D.

Beyond that, we’ll be biding our figuring out interactions and items – and it’s already looking like once we start working on dialogues it’s gonna be a lot, a LOT of time to spend there.

We’ll just see where the solar winds take us!

Greetings, Knights!

We've just passed 1 year in Early Access and we wanted to take a moment to recap what we've accomplished as well as share a little bit about what we're working on to get ready for 1.0!



Taking all the feedback we received from our Combat Demo, we launched with the following stats and over the course of the year, added the following:

Lord Bruma got a bit of a glow-up!

We even found some early art concepts...

Skrixxa Za's cave

Rakkling Nest

Chillvalier progress

Evee's Skill Convergence

Skrixxa Za, in color

Our amazing community!

We had very modest expectations when we launched but were quickly overwhelmed with the amount of support we received. Thanks to all of you, we hit the incredible milestone of reaching an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam and grew our Discord community to over 4000 amazing members! From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your support and trust in us to work hard to bring you the best version of Ember Knights we can!






So, now what?

We have one more update before the full version launches.
0.12 is dropping at the end of May and we're planning to include the following:

• Reconnect support for disconnected players. This has been a massive undertaking but we feel pretty good about this being ready for 0.12
  
• The ability to swap items via an overhauled Offering Pit
  
• Improvements to the Ember Tree, Compendium and other systems
  
• Additional boss rewards
  
• And more!

As usual, player feedback has been an integral part of the development process and we're happy to implement a lot of player-requested features, especially the mechanic to swap items! Bob will be your new best friend!



After that, we're in the final stretch to 1.0, coming this summer. It's been extremely busy with making sure everything is ready and without spoiling too much, you can expect the following:

• The fifth and final area of the story
  
• The Praxis fight
  
• A new weapon
  
• A completely overhauled difficulty modifier system
  
• Boss variants
  
• And a few more surprises that we still have up our sleeves!

Thank you for an incredible year and we'll see you soon!

Doom Turtle

Clickety clickety-click, some more pixel art stuff, a few lines of code, and voila – we got a little walkthrough going on. This early prototype was roughed out in Godot engine (although we’ll be moving to Unity 3D soon), and it’s a run of just the main deck and movement animation check.

We made a super early prototype video, too. It’s really that first “it’s alive” moment, so although we’ll be making this from scratch soon, good to see what’s possible. Now, there’s a whole other level (L1) below the main deck, with three access points, but it’s WIP.

Also, there’s some kind of a stutter on movement… I wonder if it’s just a debug window issue or something I’m gonna deal with once I publish the game for a platform (it’s supposed to be a mobile game, btw.)

Oh well… There’s my homework for the next devlog.

We continue to publish the list of banned players for April (01.04-30.04). You can find it somewhere below:

• EU-server:

[expand type=details]

1. KENNI___
   
2. Harmageddon
   
3. NouremOkto
   
4. Typoct
   
5. Zarrek
   
6. Azarack
   
7. Derial_
   
8. OlaOlaOla
   
9. Russian_Monster
   
10. ADASDADS
    
11. Lublu_Viskas
    
12. Warned
    
13. Grisha_Goblin
    
14. VAG
    
15. BuranFarm
    
16. Hazara
    
17. Zbrush_
    
18. Machetta_kz
    
19. Shakert
    
20. Haron
    
21. WayToDie
    
22. Gaba_Gaben
    
23. Marotti
    
24. ScriptureSaint
    
25. Sasalka

[/expand]

• NA-server:

[expand type=details]

1. GoldFarmer_
   
2. KIWI_VEVO
   
3. NoKeyboard
   
4. Shampur
   
5. Kang_Rogue

[/expand]

---

On guard of your safety,
EXBO team.

Halloween is back, partiers!

Add the free House Party - Halloween Holiday Pack to your library and enjoy the terror-filled season all year long, whenever you want, with the new toggle on/off feature!

Enjoy chilling at a decked-out house party filled with spine-chilling ambience, sinister costumes, and much more in this petrifying autumn party pack!



Here by popular demand, the House Party - Halloween Holiday Pack is a permanent version of the limited-time 2022 seasonal Halloween update.

This DLC brings pumpkins, spooky ghosts, a skeleton, tons of spider webs, and one giant furry spider back to decorate Madison's house in creepy fall vibes!

It also dresses all of the NPCs at the party in a chilling succubus costume - including startling horns, creepy bat wings, and a sexy, spiky tail!



Thanks for your patience as we worked to get this ready, doods!

We know it’s taken a while, but we hadn’t originally planned for the 2022 limited-time event to become permanent. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea fueled by season-induced passion, and it really wasn’t built to be in the game year-round.

However, after seeing so many of you ask for it to stay around, our team worked alongside our already-planned development schedule to completely rebuild the Halloween and Winter events so they’d be suitable to be in House Party permanently.

This full restructuring includes:

• Making it so the DLCs are optional and won’t bloat the base game if you never plan to play or install them
  
• Allowing you to toggle the DLC on and off if you don’t feel like enjoying the Halloween aesthetic during a specific play session
  
• Ensuring merging the content with House Party wouldn’t cause any major bugs or issues with the short or long-term health of the base game
  
• And, best of all, future-proofing the DLC so we can add more exciting content in additional updates! 🤘

While the Halloween Holiday Pack will visually look the same as the event did in 2022 (so, no, don’t expect to see any “new” playable content or cosmetics yet), it’s undergone complete restructuring and there are major framework changes under the surface. And these changes will allow us to properly add extra content (cosmetics, decorations, side-quests, achievements, etc.) to the Halloween Holiday Pack in the future as time permits!

Also implemented into this framework beneath the holiday pack are the roots of a very exciting new feature that we plan to bring for free to all players in the future. We won’t spoil exactly what this is yet, but we’ll just say it’s something MANY of you requested in the latest survey we released!

So, get excited, doods and lady-doods, because what’s coming is gonna be amazing - and we can’t wait to share more details as we get further along in development.

And, if you’re still waiting for the snowy season to return, don’t worry! The House Party - Winter Holiday Pack will be ready to play very soon, too!

But, in the meantime, what are you waiting for? Come enjoy the haunted house party!

Hello friends! Due to the fact that many people had to stay at home in isolation due to COVID-19, we decided to add another Let's Play Together competition in the middle of the week, just for fun-with different crazy levels and (alas!) no prizes. We think it is clear by now this extra LPT is a permanent addition too :)

The rules are the same: log in to our Discord server, keep it running, play a competitive level, complete it with 5 stars and have fun!
Visit our Discord server (#lets-play-together channel) to learn more.

This week's level is

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2901941147

Just open the game - there's a link right on the main menu screen.

Good luck everyone!

Creative levels. Custom mayhem.

Season 4: Creative Construction is out on 10th May, adding Fall Guys Creative, an in-game level editor that lets you build custom Rounds. Builder Beans can turn our iconic obstacles into chaotic courses and then share them with the community. And in the spirit of sharing, here’s a sneak peek at the upcoming update…



Grab your toolbelt and we'll see you in the Blunderdome for Creative Construction on May 10th!

The apocalypse forever changed the lives of humanity! They will have to build a new world on the ruins of an old one.
Danger lurks at every corner now.

Season 28. Deadly Pressure. Live now.

Get a truly apocalyptic grenade launcher and crush zombies!