Speaking at Gamesforum and PC Connects, $5 million raised for charity, what’s coming up in 2018, and more...

We’re back for another year of making games set in your favourite worlds, refreshed after a well-deserved break after a very big 2017. We’re barely halfway through January but already there’s loads to share with you, so we’ll get right into it.

We’re speaking at Gamesforum London 2018, and PC Connects London 2018

If you’re attending PC Connects on the 22nd - 23rd January, or Gamesforum on the 24th - 25th January, then do come and say hello to us!

At PC Connects Auroch’s Production Manager - Nina Adams - will speak about how we translated Ogre from a tabletop game into a digital game, including the challenges we faced along the way and the solutions the team came up with to solve them, meanwhile the studio’s Producer and Marketing Manager - Peter Willington - will be on a panel on the Digital Discovery Track talking indie publishing and why making niche games can be so rewarding for studios.

Then later that same week our Design and Production Director - Tomas Rawlings - takes to the stage at Gamesforum to discuss what happens when games intersect with the real world, highlighting how players engage with difficult subjects through the medium, plus Peter will make an appearance on a panel discussing the future of games media that draws on his experience as a critic and running a successful gaming podcast.

For times and more details of our talks and panel appearances, check out the full schedule for PC Connects and the full schedule for Gamesforum.

$5 million raised for charity with the Yogscast Jingle Jam 2017

Regular readers of the blog will remember that last month we announced we were part of the Yogscast Jingle Jam for 2017. With the opportunity to purchase the bundle now over, we were thrilled to learn that it raised over $5 million for a number of very worthy charities.

Our heartfelt congratulations to Humble, Yogscast, and all the developers involved!

Ogre and Steve Jackson Games celebrity multiplayer session a big success

As a big “thank you” to the Ogre community for supporting us over the last year or so, we put together a surprise for the last AD-organised multiplayer session of 2017 - a day of Ogre online gaming filled with Steve Jackson Games and Auroch Digital players to challenge.

The day featured Steve Jackson (yes, THE Steve Jackson), Winchell Chung (the man behind the iconic artwork of the original Ogre), Drew Metzger (Ogre Line Editor), Steve Martin (Designer on the adaptation of Ogre), and Jake Connor (Community Manager at Auroch Digital), plus Steven J Marsh (GURPS Project Manager) and Devin Lewis (Game Designer and Munchkin Editorial Assistant).

The event went down really well with our players, a big thank you to everyone who turned up and joined in the fun.

Auroch in the media

Though we’re currently all heads down on Dark Future: Blood Red States and some unannounced new titles, we’ve still had a bit of time to talk with the press and even write a couple of guest posts.

We were delighted to find Kotaku featuring Dark Future: Blood Red States in their big round up of British games coming out in 2018, and to be interviewed by Bammsters Rated-R. Plus Tom was asked to talk about his favourite game of 2017 (the fantastic The Shrouded Isle) for IndieGames.com, and Peter also wrote about his top 5 for God Is A Geek.

What’s in-store for 2018?

Quite simply: a whole heck of a lot! We’ll be revealing our plans for this coming year as and when the stars are right, we hope you’ll stick with us in 2018 to see what they are...

Kickstarter success, a board game jam, a Yogscast Jingle Jam, Gamesforum interview, production methods, and fan-made Ogre videos

As the studio begins to wrap up work for the year, December has been an interesting and highly productive month for the team here at Auroch, with a number of projects in full swing, new opportunities coming to fruition, and top secret stuff just on the cusp of being unveiled.

It’s a fitting end to a 2017 that has been intensely busy, occasionally stressful, but most of all a tremendous success for the company.

The stars are right for Cthulhu Christmas Cards on Kickstarter

After our previous success on Kickstarter we always knew we would return to the crowdfunding platform for another project, hence our Cthulhu Christmas Cards. We’re pleased to announce it was 250% funded, deliveries have started to be received, and backers seem very pleased. More from us on Kickstarter early next year...

Auroch set to run The City of Games board games jam

Another Kickstarter success, this time from our friends behind the wonderful The City of Games. The event will be a big part of the board gaming calendar here in Bristol and Auroch has been asked to run the board game jam that will take place over the weekend. We can’t wait to see what attendees create!

Fantastic series of tutorial videos from an Ogre fan

We love when our community wants to make content based on our games, and GranitePenguin’s highly informative tutorial videos are no exception. We can’t wait to see how his viewers take the strategies and learnings from them and apply them to our game.

An Agile Approach to Making Games

Being a proud member of the Bristol Games Hub we’re often asked to give presentations on our processes and internal strategies, to the rest of the development community at the Anti-Social. At the recent November event, our Production Manager Nina Adams gave an excellent talk on how Agile production methodologies have changed the way we work.

Auroch’s artist joins panel on developing within Unity

The Bristol Unity Game Developers Group meets regularly to talk all things concerning Unity, with a recent panel focusing on how people from any background can pick up the tool. Chris Raadjes - UI Designer and 2D Artist at Auroch - was part of the sold out and warmly-received panel.

“You have to find what its heart is - why people love it”

Ahead of his talk at Gamesforum 2018, Design & Production Director Tomas Rawlings has been interviewed by the event organisers. He touches upon a multitude of subjects, including how we work with IP, making newsgames, and the Bristol games development community.

We’re in the Yogscast Jingle Jam 2017

We were honoured to be included in this year’s Yogscast Jingle Jam. This annual event sees the legendary British stream team gather up a load of great games, DLC, and more to raise money for charity. We included Chainsaw Warrior and Golgotha Run, a Dark Future novel in the bundle and they seem to have gone down a storm. You can find more details here.

Huge Ogre update and Mac version, Ogrezine feature, Elections gets open source cards, working with IP, meet us at Gamesforum 2018

An especially jam-packed update for you on what the studio has been doing this month. Let’s just get stuck straight in...

Ogre receives G.E.V. update, Mac version

Ever since launch we’ve been updating Ogre with the most requested features. The latest G.E.V. update brings with it whole new scenarios to play through, plus a number of quality of life updates that should please fans of the game.

You can see more of the game over on Ogre’s Steam store page, plus read up on the full lists of post-launch updates here.

Find out more about how we made Ogre in the Ogrezine

The Ogrezine is an upcoming Ogre magazine from Steve Jackson Games dedicated to the classic tabletop game.

We were fortunate enough to be asked to provide an article for the publication and we decided to do something a bit special: a behind-the-scenes look at the design challenges we faced when making the digital adaptation. You can read the piece that will appear in the magazine here.

Elections of US America Elections: The Card Game gets open source cards

We’ve often been asked whether we could add a specific candidate or political event to Elections and this month we’ve gone one better. Players can now access a number of the cards as open source Photoshop files over on Board Game Geek and we’re hoping we’ll see interesting new cards made by the community. For full details about all this head over to the game’s Kickstarter page.

IP thought leader piece up on Creative England

Creative England asked us to write a piece for their site about why we enjoy working with other company’s intellectual property and we jumped at the chance. You can find our article “IP opportunity: why turning fictional worlds and big brands into compelling games and play experiences can be so rewarding for IP holders and developers” on the Creative England website.

We’re speaking at Gamesforum 2018

We’re proud to announce that both Design & Production Director Tomas Rawlings and Producer Peter Willington will be speaking at Gamesforum 2018 in London. If you’d like to speak with one of us at the event, drop us a line via one of the methods listed on our contact page.

Ogre’s released, the studio speaks, and why we’re already thinking about Christmas

It’s been one heck of a busy month for us! Where to begin...?

The release of Ogre went rather well. Most importantly, the team launched a solid game and then immediately began improving the experience based on user feedback. We always wanted to be completely transparent with the community of loyal fans Ogre has, so you can see the regularly updated patch notes here, which documents feature requests we’ve implemented, bugs squashed, and quality of life improvements made. Ogre is currently enjoying a 'Positive' review rating on Steam, which we’re thrilled with.

Steam, Humble, Green Man Gaming, and Gamersgate all supported the game, featuring Ogre on their front pages and social media channels. The title got into the New and Trending and Popular New Releases sections of Steam too which, again, was a fantastic result.

Press reception was largely positive from a good deal of outlets, with a smattering of mixed opinions too, which we pretty much expected. It was wonderful seeing screenshots and video of the game being featured on sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun, PC Gamer, PCGamesInsider.biz, Bell of Lost Souls, and GamesRadar. We were also delighted to read that the original artist of Ogre - the mighty Winchell Chung - was a fan of how the game turned out.

More generally at the studio, though no doubt thanks in part to our work on Ogre, we’ve been talking with B2B outlets about how we convert tabletop experiences into digital ones, and the process of making games in general.

You can see these interviews on leading publication Gamasutra, non-profit industry champion Creative England, and brilliantly supportive local outlet Bristol 24/7.

And as if we needed an excuse to talk more, we can confirm that we’ll be speaking at international games conference Games Forum 2018, which we’ll share more details about in the coming months.

Though it’s probably slightly too early for most to be thinking about mince pies and crackers, we’ve been hard at work creating a series of Cthulhu Christmas Cards, which we’ve just launched the crowdfunding campaign for on Kickstarter.

There’s loads of details about what they are, why we’re doing them, and so on on the Kickstarter page, but one neat thing some people have missed is that, since we’re games designers at heart, we’ve hidden a puzzle that runs through all six designs that come in the box.

If you’re a fan of all things Eldritch, it’s definitely worth a look and, hey, maybe you should follow us on Twitter and Facebook too, because who knows what other horrors we may have in-store in the near future…?

Ogre storms towards its release, revealing more about Dark Future, and a secret

Since we last spoke, we’ve had a bit of a whirlwind of interest in our Ogre project with Steve Jackson Games. The Ogre community has been wonderfully supportive of the game ahead of its launch on Steam, and the reaction from the game at Gen Con 2017 was also overwhelming.

We’ve generated a bunch of press too, here’s a small sample of the outlets that have covered us so far;

• Polygon
• PC Gamer
• Rock Paper Shotgun
• Rambler.RU
• 4Players.de
• PCGamesN
• Comingsoon.it
• Eurogamer.it
• Games.CZ
• Wargamer
• Worth Playing
• The Dice Tower
• Gameosity
• TGN
• BoardGameGeekTV

As an independent developer, we’re always very grateful for the coverage we receive from the press, and we’re equally thrilled when we see streamers and YouTubers playing our games too, such as this first play of the preview version of the game from Nitebytes.

Our friends at Unity also seem to like what they see, as they championed the game on the front page of their Made with Unity site, which was a huge honour.

Ogre is out on October 5th, so there’s not long left until it launches on Steam, and we can’t wait to see the reaction from fans.

Prototyping... pic.twitter.com/AWenanQlVs

— Auroch Digital (@AurochDigital) September 13, 2017

On other projects, things are equally exciting. Above you see perhaps the earliest piece of marketing material we’ve ever made! It’s a photo from one of our designers of a rough physical prototype he’s been working on of an unannounced digital title we’re working on. We won’t be announcing this one for a while yet, but we’d love to hear theories on what people think it might be...

Plus the Producer of Dark Future: Blood Red States took part in an impromptu AMA on Reddit recently. There’s all sorts of questions in there about how we create video games based on tabletop IPs, so take a look if you’ve ever wondered about how we work.

Ogre is coming soon to Steam, from Auroch Digital and Steve Jackson Games

We’ve been busy at work on our latest video game and its launch is almost here!

Ogre comes to Steam on October 5th, brought to you by Auroch and the legendary team at Steve Jackson Games. It’s a faithful digital adaptation of the award-winning Ogre tabletop game, which has captivated wargamers since the first edition back in 1977.

For more information about the game, and to add it to your Wishlist, head over to the Ogre Steam Store Page.

You can also watch the first trailer below;

Auroch nominated for "best place to work in tech" at The SPARKies Awards 2017

We’re thrilled to announce that we were nominated at the 2017 SPARKies Awards, in the category of “best place to work in tech”.

The SPARKies Awards brings together 300 of the South West’s brightest and boldest from the tech and digital community, for a night of championing the success stories from the region. Nominations are public, with just 15 awards up for grabs, of which our studio was nominated for the “best place to work in tech” category.

This award highlights the companies that have made their company culture a beacon for others to follow, so we were obviously over-the-moon to make the shortlist.

On the night we were pipped to the post for the top spot by Edo - a huge congratulations to our fellow Bristolians! - but just to be nominated for the awards is a huge honour, so a massive thank you to those who nominated us.

If being part of a studio recognised for its work environment sounds good to you, why not take a peek at our vacancies?