The world of :MapOfEdenEmoticon: Rund was born about 10 years ago, after Alexey Bokulev, our game designer, shipped his turn-based strategy Eador. Genesis and started sketching his next project.
The idea was quite ambitious: a trilogy of games where each game has a different atmosphere, and different game mechanics. The protagonist of the series is a runaway mage: the first goal is to survive and restore magic powers; the second goal is to manoeuvre towards victory among competing magic schools; finally, the goal of the closing chapter in the series is to dominate the world, conquering Empire, its Legion and its Inquisition, as well as defeating any other mages foolish enough to oppose you.
Because of the ambitious design, it took nearly ten years before this idea went into development. We set up our studio, Charlie Oscar, back in 2013 with the dream of turning Alexey's vision into reality, and we started with a smaller project: a digital board game Gremlins, Inc., which we shipped in Early Access at the end of 2015, with full release five months later. That project turned out to be not so small, after all. Releasing hundreds of updates for nearly 200,000 players from every corner of the world taught us a lot about making games and working with player community. Finally, in early 2017, we felt that we were ready to travel to Rund.
Spire of Sorcery is the first game of the series and it is currently still in development. We don't have a set release date yet, but we feel like in just a few months from now, we should be ready to enter Early Access on Steam. The game is set in the earlier, darker times following the Cataclysm, with magic under the full control of the Inquisition. You, the runaway mage, face the challenge of survival in the Wild Lands of the east, locked between the Empire (where you'll be burned when found) and the Distorted Lands (where things disappear).
Of the three taglines of the project – "Teach. Explore. Survive." – the first tag has been at the heart of our development efforts. With dozens of young mages as your disciples, you explore the world of Rund through their eyes. Understanding their background stories, their stats, skills and traits is what makes you win or lose the main campaign. And thus presenting to you these characters has been of utmost importance for us: not as a number of preset pictures, but as thousands and thousands of unique character portraits whose looks are defined by their life stories.
Today, we're happy to release a small part of Spire of Sorcery into your hands as a free companion app: this Character Generator introduces you to the kind of disciples that you can meet in the world of Rund. You can generate random characters or design a custom disciple, and write their back story – then share it with others. We hope that you enjoy this experience and we look forward to reading your comments and suggestions here on Steam Discussion Forums or on the official Discord server the game. And if you'd like to follow the development process of the game itself, then make sure to follow Spire of Sorcery on Steam, where we run a regular development blog (available in English, Japanese, Chinese and Russian).
Thanks for stopping by – and see you later!
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:summer_magic: Spire of Sorcery (Steam)
:summer_magic: Spire of Sorcery – Character Generator (Steam)
:summer_magic: Official Discord server
:summer_magic: Twitter (game updates)
:summer_magic: Facebook (game updates)
:malice: Official Discord server
:malice: Twitter (game updates)
:malice: Facebook (game updates)
:music: Original Soundtrack on Spotify
:notebook: Twitter (studio news)
:notebook: Facebook (studio news)
:notebook: "Behind the scenes" Instagram
:notebook: YouTube