It’s Auroch Digital’s Birthday - We are 13 years old! 🍰

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Auroch Digital Turns 13 years old!🎈

It just seemed like yesterday when we turned ten and were excited over the launch of Mars Horizon and now, we are talking about Mars Horizon 2! Times flies when you are having fun! 

In the past three years, as the world changed, we adapted to the times too. The studio changed to remote first, we’ve massively grown in size, and we were acquired by Sumo Group which has helped us go from strength to strength! 

Keep reading to hear more about what we’ve been up to since our humble beginnings, all the way to now, our 13th birthday. We are also holding a brilliant Birthday Giveaway to celebrate so make sure to enter, details on how towards the end of this blog! 

2010 - 2020 – The early years 🌱 

Aurochs hard at work in the office - 2017

We were founded in 2010, at the time our studio was only two people, Tomas and Debbie Rawlings, and our studio was based out of their home.

We had big dreams, and we started GameTheNews to help bring current news and issues into gaming spaces and create a new way for people to take in world events. We were also a co-founding member of Bristol Games Hub, started to to nurture gamedev talent locally. 

We dabbled in mobile games, then started working on porting mobile onto steam and even made a game with the BBC!  

From the very beginning, we always related our games back to the real world. This can be seen in our first gaming projects through GameTheNews right up to one of our recent games, for example Mars Horizon 2: The Search for life and Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator.

One of the first group photos of the team, visiting Bristol Aquarium to celebrate the launch of megaquarium - 2019

Our small studio slowly kept growing and we kept making games. We moved into an office finally, and then moved offices again as we grew. We also branched out into card games too, as well as making digital games across various platforms.

In 2019, we delved into realm of console porting with Megaquarium. 🐠 Once we started porting, we karp-ed it going! We now do porting work as part of our ‘work for hire’. 

At this point, the team had grown so much, we outgrew our first proper office and we relocated to a slightly bigger one just as lockdown happened. We became a remote studio during the pandemic, thinking it would only be temporary.

We rounded off 2020 with our very first Steam Festival – Digital Tabletop Fest, and we’ve gone on to host many more since then! Get more details on our 2020 in our lovely 2020 round up blog! 🔐 

moooove on over, it’s Auroch Digital’s new logo coming through

2021 – Auroch Digital gets a new look ✨

We started off the year with not one but TWO free Mars Horizon updates while also announcing Brewmaster. 

Summer came and we ported The Colonists over onto consoles (we love those robots) and changed our logo to the amazing Auroch you know and love today.  

In the last part of the year, Auroch Digital was acquired by Sumo Group, who we have an amazing relationship with. By this point our studio had grown to 48 people, and joining Sumo Group allowed our studio to go from strength to strength. We’ve enjoyed having a whole host of talented and experienced colleagues to work with and learn from, from across the Sumo group studios. You can see below what Sumo Group’s CEO Carl Cavers had to say about the acquistition:

“I’m delighted to welcome Tomas and the Auroch Digital team to the Group. Given our increasing focus on Own-IP, we are particularly excited by Auroch Digital’s pipeline of original IP. So, while this is a relatively small acquisition, it is a highly significant one for us strategically.”
— Carl Cavers, CEO of Sumo Group

Steam digita tabletop fest 2021: RPG Edition - 2021

How did we finish of such momentous year? By hosting the second edition of our amazing Steam Digital Tabletop Festival that ran in October, this time with a special focus on Role-Playing games.

Our Steam Festivals are a great way for us to connect and work with other developers who specialist in genres and games that we do. We love showcasing all the best and most exciting games in this space, not only from us but from many other talented developers, studios, and publishers.

The end of year blog for 2021 goes into more detail about everything we got up to! 🌈 

2022 – We keep getting bigger and better 💪🏾

If you asked us to describe 2022 in one word, it would be: sensational 🤩

There was so much happening we pulled it into an easy to digest bullet point list:

🚀 Mars Horizon got a new update  
🐠 Megaquarium DLC Freshwater Frenzy went out on consoles  
💙 We hosted our first SimFest on Steam  
🍺 Brewmaster had a ton of partnerships 
💥We announced Warhammer 40,000 Boltgun - this is steam page but I move it to our page 
🏅 We completed Tough Mudder as a herd and raised over £3,500 for Sunflower Ward at Bristol Children’s hospital. 
🍻 We launched Brewmaster on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch! 

2022 was also the year we decided to go full remote as a studio. We had become a remote studio due to the pandemic, but we thought this might be a temporary change. It turns out we can still make amazing games from the comfort of our own homes. All the staff were surveyed about their preference for where they work, and we loved working from home, so it was decided that we would become a remote first studio. We still have an office where we have meetings and some staff choose to work from there, but most of our staff do their best work from home and we support that.

Want more details on this bumper year? Check out our round up of 2022 blog to learn more about what we got up to. 🥰 

2023 – We are excited for the future 🚀

Our little studio has grown since it’s humble beginnings, the Auroch Digital herd is now around 130 people strong! We remained a remote first studio as this allowed us to hire amazing talent from around the world, but it does mean that some of our staff had only ever seen each other through a computer screen. One wild thought came to mind which was, why not have an Auroch Digital conference gathering everyone from near and far together?   

From this, Moocon was born. This was an internal conference for all Auroch Digital employees to spend time together, learn from each other, do game jams, and have fun together in person. See our Moocon round up video here. We got to share ideas, inspiration, and make even stronger connections with each other. This is what Nina, our Operations Director, had to say about Moocon:

“It’s the first time we’ve all been together, over 100 of us. We’ve got people from India, we’ve got people from Brazil, we’ve got people from all over the country all joined together to actually meet in person, see each other, recognise each other for the first time and collaborate and see how we can move forward and keep making games brilliantly.”
— Nina Adams, Operations Director

However, it wasn’t just other Auroch Digital herd members we wanted to spend more time with, we wanted to get to know our amazing Sumo Group colleagues better too! So shortly after Moocon we all travelled up to Sheffield for SDC, Sumo Developer Conference, which just happened to coincide with Sumo’s 20th anniversary!  

We gave talks, attended work shops, networked, partied but most importantly, connected with others from Sumo Group. Being part of a big collection of gaming studios is amazing as we can share all our knowledge and experience from across the breadth of projects we’ve all worked on, and SDC was the perfect place to do this. We can’t wait for SDC 2024! 

Now during all this, we snuck in a long-awaited announcement from the community, Mars Horizon 2: The search for Life 🌌 

Mars Horizon 2: The Search for Life is an authentic space management game where you take on the role of the head of a space agency on your mission to Search for Life. So far we’ve announced that we are Partnering with ESA on the game and also that we are working with Professor Konstantin Batygin, but we have loads more exciting things in store for our Mars Horizon sequel. Keep up to date on all things Mars Horizon 2 by following our newsletter, socials and of course our discord! 

We kept blasting forward in 2023 and we released Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun our first boomer shooter. In glorious boomer shooter style, unleash your devastating Space Marine arsenal as you blast through an explosion of sprites, pixels and blood. Run, jump and charge across huge levels to shoot, shred and slice the worst heretics across the galaxy! This game is a real labour of love from our team, enjoy our launch trailer here.

2023 ain’t over yet 

Even though the leaves are changing colour and its nearly time for clocks to change too, we still have a lot more to do. So far this year we have also; 

⏰ Ported Wobbledogs onto consoles 
⏰ Run Digital Tabletop Fest 3, Blood and Dice 
⏰ Run Simfest alongside Stray Fawn Studio 
⏰ Raised even more money for the Sunflower ward by completing Tough Mudder again

Some of the Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun team hold up the key art - 2023

Award Season 🏆 

We don’t like to brag but we are a pretty great studio.  Throughout these 13 years we have got some amazing awards and nominations, and we can’t wait to see what other awards we will achieve together.  

🏆 2014 GI Biz Innovation Award
🏆 2014 Media Innovation Award 
🏆 2017 best place to work in tech SPARKies  
🏆 2019 Nominated for a TIGA award  
🏆 2020 Grads in games  
🏆 2021 2 x Gee Awards for Mars Horizon
🏆 2021 Famistu Gold medal  
🏆 2023 Nominated for 4 Tiga awards 

The people of Auroch Digital 🎠 

One thing we value above all is our people here at Auroch Digital. We love to empower people to use their voice to nurture the next generation of games developers. We could talk for HOURS about this, but we will just link some of the amazing talks, panels, blogs we have done over the years: 📚 

Talks and panels 👀 

Tomas Rawlings giving a talk on sustainability

Blogs, articles, and interviews 📚 

Self care and pets: how auroch digital deals with stress

We also do a bunch of talks in schools and higher education facilities, as well as in person talks at Bristol Unity meet ups and Bristol Unreal meet ups for other developers. Make sure to follow us on socials to see when we are attending these and come by to listen. 

The Auroch Digital podcast 🎤 

Lastly Don’t forget our podcasts which you can find here, which we are 8 seasons deep and have no plans of stopping. We do episodes on all sorts of interesting topics in and around game development, plus plenty of advice on how to get into the industry.  

Auroch Digital’s 13th Birthday giveaway – How to enter! 

Boltgun key art with auroch logo with party streamer and party hat on top. The text says Auroch digital Birthfay Giveaway and the games listed below

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun key art with auroch logo with party streamer and party hat on top. The text says Auroch digital Birthfay Giveaway and the games listed below

Now the bit you have been waiting for, the giveaway! 🎉

To celebrate the fact that our studio is now old enough to have it’s own Steam account, we are doing a giveaway to our loyal Aurochnauts. Enter our giveaway and you could win a digital bundle of a bunch of Auroch Digital games from over the years. 

The Auroch Digital Birthday Bundle prize includes: 

How to enter 

But how do you enter this awesome Auroch Digital birthday giveaway? 🥳 All you need to do is sign up to our official Auroch Digital newsletter. We will be randomly selecting one lucky person, who is signed up to receive our monthly Auroch Digital newsletter, to win the Auroch Digital Birthday Bundle prize as a thank you for supporting us.  

What is the Auroch Digital Newsletter about? 

The Auroch Digital Newsletter comes out around the end of each month and is full of all the latest news about our studio including new game announcements, launches, beta and alpha invites, giveaways, jobs at the studio, as well as loads more exciting news. So by signing up you’ll get to stay up to date with all of our great goings, as well as be in with a chance to win the Auroch Digital Birthday Bundle prize. 

Ts and Cs 

The giveaway closes on 26th October at Midnight so make sure to sign up before then to be in with a chance to win. Please see here the giveaway terms and conditions. You can see the Auroch Digital Privacy Policy here for more info: Auroch Digital Privacy Policy 

The Auroch Digital cow looking happy

🧡Thank you for supporting
Auroch Digital! 🧡

Thank you for supporting our studio through our games, socials, Discord, newsletters, or however else you interact with us. We are working on some amazing announced, and unannounced, games that we know you will absolutely love!

Make sure to stick with us for 2024 to see what we get up to next! 

Timeline Of The Company ⌛

Oh you thought we were done? Me too…

Here is a timeline of all our major events (that we can publicly say) so that you can see how a small indie company like us grows 🌱

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Ladell Smith