Broken Alliance News

Hi everybody! Oak here ^_^

Broken Alliance will release in Early Access on October 24th 2024! Very happy to finally be able to announce this, since it's been a heck of a ride. We will release the game in Early Access with a base price of $14.99, and plan to increase it by around 20% for the full release.

I hope you've already seen that we have now finally released our public demo here on Steam! Do try it out if you haven't yet, any feedback about it is more than welcome!

Without beating around the bush anymore, let me get into the reasoning of us deciding to go for Early Access.

As is sometimes the custom in game development, the vision and the scope of the game can change. Such was also the case with Broken Alliance. We started it out as a more casual, shorter, smaller experience, but we quickly realized that in order to make something unique and more aligned with the values that we have as a creative studio, we needed things to be different.

Our lead writer Märten came up with a brilliant storyline for the world going deeper into the conflict that we wanted to initially showcase in the game. Instead of making something that would resemble a regular skirmish map setup in, say, Heroes of Might and Magic games or Age of Wonders and such, we wanted to give a more focused narrative experience. This ended up with the game taking an approach closer to the King's Bounty or Disciples series. We came up with a whole world for you to explore, wherein you can play as one of the four factions in the game, and have a different experience with each one. All the factions will be played on this one large world map, but with quite different starting conditions and very different questlines and narrative experience.

As the idea was fleshed out more and more, we realized that we're definitely going to need more time to realize our new vision. We're very happy with the direction that we took, because we didn't see any point in trying to emulate the masterpieces that came before Broken Alliance, but rather forge a completely new path. This is also the point where we agreed that we would have a form of deckbuilding in the game, not as complex or vast as dedicated deckbuilder games, but something that could have the intuitiveness of such games with the strategic and tactical depth that adventure strategy games are known for. One of our core focuses on this game has been to try and make it easy to pick up, with depth being added the more you progress in the story. Which brings me to my next point...

Making games is hard, yo. We knew that we had bitten off a big piece once we adjusted our vision, but we didn't really exactly know how much time it would take to take it across the finish line. Now, we have come quite close to it. However, to make sure that we make a game for you that both you as players and us as creators can be happy with, we decided to open it up for Early Access. This way we can get your feedback as we take the final steps together to create something awesome. We are going to launch Early Access with the Prologue (that you can play right now in the demo!) and with one faction, Anchorage, being playable throughout most of Act I. In total, we plan to have 3 acts for the game, with Act I and Act II making up most of the game and Act III serving as the final climax.

As we update the game, we will bring you the other factions available to play, and also unlock progression systems step by step, so we can get your feedback on both the content and the balance of the game. We want the game to be challenging, but not impossible! So, any criticisms about that is going to be extremely valuable once we launch into Early Access.

We want to be in EA for at least 6 months, so we would have time to react to your feedback and also take our time to polish Broken Alliance as much as possible. We have launched our dedicated Discord server for the game, which will also be our main channel for gathering feedback. So if you're interested in that, you can join right away ^_^

The hope is that we get a strong initial following as we launch into Early Access so we can get a lot of valuable feedback and much needed scrutiny about the game. If you feel like you want to participate on this, honestly, once in a lifetime launch with us and join the Early Access process, I would appreciate it immensely. This is our biggest project yet, and will probably stay as the biggest project we undertake with our studio for the foreseeable future.

If you want to know a little bit more about the decisions that led us to Early Access, feel free to browse the "Why Early Access?" section on our store page.

For now, I hope that you're as excited as I am for the initial release. I can't wait to show you what we have in store!

Stay tuned for more blogposts like this one soon, where I give some details about the four factions that we feature in Broken Alliance.

Thank you all for your support so far and I hope we can create something you have a lot of fun with!


Much love,
-Oak

Hola everyone, Wisak here.

First of all, thanks to everyone who has downloaded and played the Broken Alliance demo so far. We have been monitoring the feedback and we have been hard at work identifying problems, and trying to solve some of the most common issues players have had since the demo release.

From now on, we want to try to make the communication with the community as open as possible. For that reason, we want to start sharing patch notes whenever we update content moving forward.

These last 3 days we have been hard at work and we have made some fixes based on your feedback. We are committed to improve the game, and while some of these fixes address some of the problems, we will probably revisit some of those solutions once we have better ones.

• We have improved the visibility of interactable objects in the adventure map. We realized that many players were having issues seeing them and was causing confusion in how to proceed with the demo. Here you have a glimpse of how interactable objects will look like when travelling the world of Eol.




• We fixed one problem with enemy units respawning in some of the combats
• We fixed a bug where players couldn’t cross adventure map tiles which were previously blocked, like the doors and the bridge you repair
• We made the Town Screen closing button more obvious and moved it to the bottom of the screen
• We fixed a problem where units were still displaying health and stamina bars after being defeated
• We added a voice volume bar in the options
• We made the quest log and the first dialogue “next” button to glow to let players know they are there
• We lowered the volume of the sound when a player hovers resources in the puzzle screen
• We fixed the team colors showing all as white
• We added a bunch of tooltips to help players navigate and understand some of the elements and mechanics of the game. From combat information about the units, to more information about how to use the mana refinery, to how to use the spell, to several more.
• We fixed a problem where some texts were showing in Chinese
• We fixed a problem where champions would not be usable in combat if they were defeated in previous combats and healed at the Alm.
• We fixed a game breaking problem where the game would freeze if the player lost a fight, not allowing them to start the demo again
• We fixed a problem where Mandy had only 1 health point in the fight to recover the Artifact
• We added a gold pick up next to the Alm in the final area in case players didn’t have gold, so they wouldn’t have to backtrack.
• We updated Prior’s combat SFX
• Players will also now draw one extra move card per turn based on some of the feedback we got.
• We disabled the view dwelling button from the army screen since players can’s see it…yet.
• We fixed the army tooltip staying forever if you close the army screen with ESC
• We fixed the unit bar not showing freshly added soldiers to the army
• We increased the speed of the projectiles from the Siren and Puppet Master ranged attacks
• We fixed a problem where sometimes damage display numbers would disappear

We know that there are still some issues out there that we want to address in future patches, but those will take longer due to the complexity of the systems associated with them.

For example:
• Lack of general tooltips, like the artefact or units, or during combat to see the positive, or negative effects applied to units
• We know the demo ends a bit abruptly and we are working on improving that
• The voice lines from Yorick have lower quality than the rest
• No save games yet
• Ultrawide screen is not yet fully supported
• It’s unclear what the AI is doing in its turn during combat, since there are no visuals provided for when they use special attacks. This can be specially confusing when they affect your units with status effects.

We want to close this by saying again thanks for your feedback, we were able to achieve all of this. We want to work with all of you to make Broken Alliance the very best version of what it can be. We are a very small studio with limited resources, so any and all feedback is extremely important for us and we will do our best to handle it, while trying to maintain our vision for the project as much as possible. At the same time, some things might take a bit longer because of it, so we ask for some patience.

Have fun out there and see you back in Eol!

Hi everyone! Oak here.

We're happy to be part of the Steam China Showcase, and I have some exciting news for you! As soon as our demo page gets approved here on Steam, you will be able to play the demo yourself! Hopefully this will happen in the coming days. The demo will be available in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Stay tuned, and hope to see you playing soon! ^_^

PS: This recording of the demo does not have the voiceover yet, so you have to bear with me there, but for the demo release, all of the dialogue is voiced :)

Hi everybody!

Oak here from Placeholder Gameworks. It know we've been quite silent recently, but we've been hard at work with both Broken Alliance and CraftCraft, and we're getting close to the finish line ^_^

It will be a stressful time to get everything done and polished, but we're giving it our darndest to provide you with a memorable experience! Tune in to the stream to see a sneak peek of the demo we've been working on.


Join us now at the PixElated Festival, wishlist and buy games that pique your interest, and do give us feedback on what you see ^_^

Many thanks to our friends at Brave At Night studios in organizing this wonderful event, and a big thank you to them for including our little gem, Broken Alliance.


I hope to have more to share with you as we get closer to release. We will have an official announcement soonish about when the game comes out (it's this year!), and we will have a demo ready for you as well, starting from the middle of August for you to try. Just a few things left to finish (mostly the voiceover work).


Stay tuned, and give us a wishlist if you're interested in keeping up to date with our development.


Much love,
-Oak