Announcing Ashes to Ashes

We have just announced a new game, Ashes to Ashes, which to some may seem like quite the turn compared to our previous games. In this blog post, we want to take a closer look at why we started working on this, what we think sets this title apart, and our general approach as a company to making games.

Ashes to Ashes marries a setting we came up with years ago but didn’t end up using with fresh gameplay mechanics inspired by the recent emergence of “bullet heaven”-type of games. All of that is imbued by our approach to progression, creating games with high replayability and a ton of content to unlock over time. 

“Ever since trying out Vampire Survivors, we were really excited about this seemingly simplistic gameplay direction combined with a strong progression aspect. Internally, we fiddled with a few ideas for our own take on the new bullet heaven genre, and as soon as we prototyped Ashes to Ashes, we fell in love with it. We can’t wait to hear the player feedback once we launch the demo for ATA. And that demo’s not that far away, you know!” said Dushan Chaciej, the Creative Director at Ancient Forge.

The game has the player work hand in hand with an ancient AI tree, which barely resembles a plant amidst the ever-growing corruption in the world. It harnesses energy to create a perfect challenger to save the defiled land. The process involves gathering data from the fallen heroes and honing the generation algorithm to make the ultimate champion. Initially, we used this setting for a prototype we built in 2016 that was more of a classic roguelike title. However, we decided to go with something else at the time.

For what it’s worth, you can check out what it looked like these 7 years ago:

Ashes to Ashes is also an opportunity for us to try out something new, not only in terms of the game itself but also in the development approach. We always want to be as involved as possible with our community and decided to start before releasing the game to the public. As a company, we have some bigger titles that we are currently working on, and smaller projects like this give us something we can quickly build to freshen up our portfolio and stay in touch with our players.

Hence, with the game’s official announcement, we have also launched a special page you can follow to receive extra rewards and get notified when we launch our crowdfunding campaign for Ashes to Ashes in the next few months. Make sure to drop a follow to support our development efforts!

The Plan

The smaller scope gives quick turnover time, and we are pretty far into developing Ashes to Ashes, so you can expect things to happen quickly. Our biggest next step, for now, is to release the game’s demo as part of Steam’s October Next Fest. There’s a possibility, too, that we will launch the demo sometime before that to start adjusting the game based on your feedback as soon as possible.

Head over to our brand new store page for more information and development updates: