Hello everyone, Oak here. I have some not-ideal-but-still-kinda-good news to share with you. We decided to postpone the release of Broken Alliance's upcoming Early Access release until 15th January 2025. Why?

• I'm horribly burnt out
• We were close to hitting our Early Access quality and content standards, but far enough to be concerned
• We need more time to test the game

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 Mrten 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 couldnt 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 didnt have gold, so they wouldnt have to backtrack. We updated Priors 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 cans see ityet. 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 Its 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

Hello everyone Broken Alliance is now participating in the Lunar New Year Sale 2024! Nice to meet you all, looking forward to seeing you again in the future!

Hello everyone! Oak here, pleased to bring you some MUCH NEEDED updates! The past *checks notes* quite many months, we have been hard at work to try and finish up the game. We're still a ways away from it, but we are hoping to get a playable demo soon (tm). Hopefully we will have something to share in that regard already next month! We have been cordially invited to participate in the Storyteller's Festival, so you can see our previous game Death and Taxes, and our other upcoming game CraftCraft around a fair bit. Do give us a wishlist and a follow to stay up to date with interesting stuff going on (the upcoming demo probably being the *most* interesting thing of them all. Meanwhile I'm happy to show you some more cool art from Broken Alliance ^_^ Here's some concept art for another Faction we have in the game, called Forge:
These folks are extremely tech savvy, and have decided to try and ascend as much as possible into organic-mechanical hybrids, elevating their abilities, but sacrificing their natural evolution in the process. You might recognize this lil' fella, the Chrysalis, from some of our earlier art!
They're fluffy, but deadly. Welcoming you to the Paradise faction, we have Pico, one of the most illustrious Herbal Doctors of the history of the clans. Don't worry, they're friendlier than they look. Maybe.
And finally, one of my favourite Champions in the game, who you will also be able to meet and recruit: Yorick the Elden Hog!

And yes, Yorick do go fast, if the need arises.

Hello everyone! Oak here from Placeholder Gameworks. We've been hard at work with both CraftCraft and Broken Alliance, and I thought I would share some updates with y'all! We've been setting up the stage for quite a lot of complex systems this year and it's finally coming to fruition. We've made significant leaps and bounds in both the adventure and combat parts of the game, having a lot of new specific skills and events in the game. Once we start pumping all of the good stuff in there, I will have more to share, but so far, here are a few sneak peeks on what we've been doing! Concept art for town buildings for the Paradise faction
The Strawman, a Phobos unit, ready to wreak havoc on the battlefield
Character creation options for the Human heroes from Anchorage
And last but not least, our partner Hawthorn Games has given us the chance to participate in the ChinaJoy festival here on Steam! If you're coming from the festival page, here is a warm welcome for you on behalf of both of our teams :) Also, Artist Life Simulator, a game we helped publish, is on sale right now at -50% off too! And with that, for this time, I bid you goodbye! Do wishlist Broken Alliance and CraftCraft to keep up to date with how the development goes! Till next time. Much love, -Oak

Hi everyone! It's Oak from Placeholder Gameworks. We have decided to postpone the release of Broken Alliance to February 2024. We took this decision because we felt like the game finally achieved the full direction that we want to take with it, fleshing that out took quite some time. We want to ensure that every game we release is at its highest quality in terms of content, stability and gameplay, which is why we decided to keep this one in the cooker for some more time :) We will start releasing regular updates very soon, as we have accumulated quite a bit of content to share! We have a sizeable chunk of the Champion lineup done, special creatures that you can recruit during your adventure and form relationships with. Currently we are figuring out the last remaining pieces of design and working hard on the content that has been decided to be included in the game. I hope you understand our decision! We want to make really cool games ^_^ I'll keep you posted about the game more now! Since we actually know what the game will be like! More or less. We'll see >_> Much love, -Oak

Hi everyone! Oak from Placeholder Gameworks here. I'm going to try and post more about how the game is going in the coming weeks, months, seasons, and such. Lately we've been working a lot in the combat section of the game, and earlier this year, we made a pretty big step of going for a deckbuilding style combat.
We haven't nailed down how it will work exactly yet, but day by day we're getting closer to figuring it out. We're also trying it out in the engine (which totally works)
ok maybe it doesn't totally work yet. BUT WE'RE GETTING THERE!
The goal this week is to have the combat in such a shape that we could show it off at a private demo event this weekend, and after that we want to work on a more public demo, something that y'all can try out yourselves, too ^_^ And it turns out that we're going to be at Gamescom! Somehow. And maybe you can even play a demo of Broken Alliance there >_> ...only time will tell. So, if you like what you see, please do wishlist and follow to keep up with our progress! Till next time! Much love, -Oak