Hello Kickstarter! 

Today, we're excited to announce that next chapter in the Godus franchise, Godus Wars, releases into Steam Early Access for Windows and Mac OS X platforms.

All Kickstarter backers will be receiving Godus Wars as a free update to Godus on Steam within the next 24 hours.

“Godus Wars is the exciting, new addition of combat into the Godus universe; mixing intricate real-time strategy gameplay with the unique land transformation of Godus. The development of Godus Wars proves that 22cans are never a company to back down from a challenge. All Kickstarter backers and previous Godus owners on Steam will be receiving Godus Wars as a major, free update.” said 22cans CEO, Simon Phillips.

In Godus Wars, the task before you is simple - Conquer the world. Choose between FOUR playable Deities, each with unique play styles, powers and abilities as you battle against a range of devious and dangerous opposing Deities.

Use your God-like might to battle over SEVEN varied continents, through 150+ uniquely designed and modifiable levels.

Collect over TWENTY different Power Cards with thousands of variations and use them to gain the upper hand in battle.

Control expansive armies with up to 50 different unit types from Archers to Catapults.

Wield EIGHT mighty God Powers to bring devastating destruction or protection to your followers.

Maps that change as you play with the unique deformable land - No two battles will ever be the same!

The initial Early Access release includes: Over 70 unique and deformable levels, 4 playable Deities with a range of abilities, 2 base unit types - Archers & Catapults!, 20 cards - God Powers, Troop Buffs and Power Card, 2 Deity opponents - including Bryan Henderson and the original Godus included.

FAQ

When is combat coming out?

Right now! With the release of Godus Wars, combat finally makes it’s full introduction into the Godus universe. Peter has always considered Godus being two games: one tranquil, peaceful and the other war-like with bloody battles taking place across the unique lands.

Have you abandoned Godus?!

Not at all! The release of Wars proves that we are still dedicated to Godus and everyone who owns or has previously purchased Godus, already has Godus Wars! Yes! Godus Wars is free for all previous Godus Kickstarter backers & owners.

How many people have been working on Godus and what are their roles?

12 people have worked on Godus Wars.

Peter and Konrad - Design

Dimitri, Gary, Ryan & Richard - Programming 

Annah - Art 

Ian - Audio 

Anthony & Turner - Production

Martin - QA

Tony - GUI

What about the winner of Curiosity - Bryan Henderson?!

Bryan is featured in Godus Wars! He can be seen as an opposing deity on one of the continents.

Why Early Access?

We’re using Early Access to gather balancing feedback and gauge player reaction as we work towards a feature complete release.

Early Access will allow our users and loyal Kickstarter backers to try out and provide detailed feedback in order for us to deliver a more polished, optimised and balanced game upon release!

The release of Wars demonstrates that we are still dedicated to Godus.

Everyone who owns or has previously purchased Godus, already has Godus Wars! Yes! Godus Wars is free for all previous Godus Kickstarter backers & owners - It should auto-magically appear in your steam library, if it doesnt please let us know!

What's the plan with the Godus backer rewards at this point? When will people be receiving those?

We're continuing to work through the release of the Kickstarter backer rewards. The Art of Godus backer book was sent out to the appropriate tiers last year and the Early Access launch of Godus Wars brings with it a large collection of Godus design documents (Coming next week) and Documentary has been completed and be released soon.

What will you do with Godus Wars feedback? 

We will be collecting all detailed and relevant feedback posted and while we won't be replying to all posts individually, we will be reading everything. Be sure to keep an eye on the Announcements board for Feedback updates!

What is happening to the Godus Steam page now that Godus Wars is out?

Now that Godus Wars & Godus are both available as one package, we will be closing the Godus Store page and removing the higher price from sale. The discussion boards will be left untouched.

And remember - All Kickstarter backers will be receiving Godus Wars as a free update to Godus on Steam!

Hello Backers

It's been a few months now since we last spoke about the Art Book and over the course of the Summer, our concept artist Sara has been feverishly collecting every bit of art, information and excerpts from staff new and old. 

It's taken a significant time investment to track down those little bits of concept art, those original images from cameras and speaking to each member involved with the Godus project and allow them to shed some light into their creative and technical work on the project.

Now, we understand that a significant time has past since the Kickstarter finished and so we've sent a message to the Backer Tiers that the art book was featured in asking for an updated address. Please check your Kickstarter inbox and associated email inbox for this message! We don't want to send your reward to an old address and for you to miss out!

This week we'll be signing the books by hand, packaging them up and sending them on their way to backers around the world! We've take a few pictures of the book which you can find below:

The Godus team have been working on including combat into the world of Godus and we've been posting incremental developer updates over on our Steam Announcement page - http://steamcommunity.com/app/232810/announcements/

We'll have a full post on Kickstarter regarding combat in the coming weeks! 

We've got a extremely busy month ahead and we can't wait to share more with you.

22cans

Hello Backers!

We recently sent out a message asking for feedback on our Making of/Art Book Reward. As previously mentioned, in our initial pitch we may have put forward a mixed message on the direction book by mentioning an art book in the Kickstarter pledge tiers and a ‘Making of Godus’ book in the detailed pledge image.

And so we set up a little questionnaire asking the relevant backers for their input on the Book Reward with two options listed. Would you prefer to see The Making of Godus or The Art of Godus?

*drum roll* .. And with 57.7% of the votes The Art of Godus has officially been chosen as the finalised reward.

Conor has been in touch with numerous printing companies and has been ordering samples in order to get a feel for how the book will look in it's finished form. He's currently heading up the Art Book production and should have a few sample pages ready to share soon. 

Along with the sample pages, we also publish a basic Art of Godus Book proposal that we will be working from.

Recent News

Have you seen the recent Combat Design Documents that Konrad has put together for the community? He's released two docs and will be showing off another very soon!

Combat Design Document 1  -  Combat Design Document 2

Interested in keeping up to date with the team's daily doings? Take a look at the Daily Dev Activity on the 22cans website - Click Here! 

Thanks for your continued support and keep sculpting!

Hello Kickstarter!

It's 2015 and it's time for our first update of the year after an adventurous few months here at 22cans. The Godus team are working hard to design, create and implement new features, bug fixes and work with the community to push Godus forward. It's all full steam ahead from now on!

Update 7 is just round the corner and it'll bring single player combat and Pavle's new battle formations into the mix. Pavle's been shouting about those a lot recently and we're all getting quite excited about it.

What exactly has happened between January and now?

In January, the team returned to studio after the Winter break and Konrad Naszynski stepped up to the role of Lead Designer for Godus and started his plans for the implementation of the story into Godus.

In February, the story of Godus found its way on to the Steam Opt-In. This covered the events of a past Deity learning about their powers and followers (The Astari). While the Steam Community didn’t seem too pleased with this, the 22cans team took your feedback and concerns on board and we're continuing to look into ways to redefine the way we deliver the story.

The team is a little smaller this year and this has raised concerns amongst some community members. We want to reassure everyone that we’re all fully committed to making Godus the game it deserves to be.

So who exactly is working on Godus?

Andy - Production

Andy is our Production Manager and has been in charge of the day to day team activities. He likes to make sure stuff gets done on time and the team have anything and everything they need in order to get the job done. Andy also manages all of the builds and releases to Steam and Mobile.

 Konrad - Lead Designer

Konrad, the community member turned powerhouse designer, has recently been working on the combat design, producing relevant design documents and tweaking the story elements. We’ve also has some interest in Godus from Korea and Konrad has been hard at work making sure the localisation is correct.

Martin - QA Lead

Martin is the QA Lead on the Godus team and is forever testing, breaking and destroying the game. His daily tasks usually involve shouting at the other members for breaking Godus whilst regressing their issues and readying desktop and mobile builds for release.

Conor - QA & Community

Recently Conor has been working on the Zendesk support system, dealing with support tickets and interacting with our numerous Facebook community groups. Conor has also been writing up the proposal for the Art of Godus/Making of Godus Kickstarter reward and investigating printing options.

 Richard - Programming

Richard is our newest edition to the development team has already broken the game once. He’s been squashing all of those pesky bugs that appear when you’re not looking, cleaning up all the builds of Godus and will soon be moving on to programming Combat features.

 Pavle - Programming

Pavle is hard at work on Combat and this week we’ve all been woo’d by his impressive battle formations. Our daily development Twitch stream watchers are always on Pavle’s back for having a messy, food covered desk. So much so, that one member set up a petition to get Pavle to clean that unsanitary workplace. You can join the cause here: Pavle's Dirty Desk Petition

 Fabs - Programming

Fabs has been doing what ever Konrad tells him to do. Which recently has involved with testing new rendering options and animations, work on the Combat update and working on something top secret. Shhh!

Dave - Community Manager

Our Community Manager Dave can often be found loitering around the Steam forums, our community boards and other social media channels. He has been updating the community with the Daily Development Activity on the 22cans website, generating our community reports and crying himself to sleep.

Onwards and upwards!

Moving forward, the team are busy implementing Combat for Update 7 which will be available soon on the Opt-in branch and Konrad has created a design document that we have decided to share in order to gather feedback and ideas from the community.

The first document we’re releasing details 'Phase-1' of a '3-Phase' combat implementation. This document focuses on Warbands, Unit Generation and Controls. It’s a 33 page PDF file and probably isn’t going to interest everyone, but feel free to have a look over it and tell us what you think!

All of these designs and ideas are subject to change.

The Document is available to view here - Combat Design Document

March is shaping up to be quite an important month for the Godus team and we're always looking for feedback and ideas from the community. Thanks for your support and keep sculpting!

You’d better watch out, you’d better not cry because Santa has added some gifts to your God Power menu!

Turn your followers into happy little elves to do your bidding, give your world a touch of sparkle with the Winter Wonderland gift…

 …or laugh at the Astari after dressing them up as penguins!

This festive content is available for everyone playing Godus on Steam, iOS and Android today, so you can go grab it right now!

Known issues (that we’re looking into):

iOS:

• Rotation speeds/sensitivity needs tweaking.
• Certain unexpected touch inputs while squashing settlements together can cause them to turn invisible until the game is restarted.
• Certain Christmas cards can be purchased twice if done in quick succession while only seeing the benefits for one purchase.
• Some users are experiencing a crash if they have loads and loads of God Seed trees in their world.

Android:

• Certain Christmas cards can be purchased twice if done in quick succession while only seeing the benefits for one purchase.
• Rotation speeds/sensitivity needs tweaking.

Steam:

• Some users are seeing an issue where low-end settlements are building in high-end areas.
• Gems sometimes float in the air after using the Meteor god power to uncover them.
• Some users are experiencing a start-up crash on Mac OS X.

New Godus mobile community contest

Following the supremely successful and enormously enjoyable civilisation-themed competition by Godus Community Gallery Facebook group, we’ve teamed up again for a wonderfully wintery competition.

The challenge:

Can you build the “perfect” Christmas landscape? This new contest is all about how beautiful a Christmas landscape you can create in your world. This includes natural beauty, houses, villages, water… everything you could possibly include to make your landscape feel like Santa’s own neighbourhood.

The prizes:

• 1st prize – 100 gems
• 2nd prize – 50 gems
• 3rd prize – 20 gems
• 4th prize – 10 gems
• 5th prize – 5 gems

How to win:

It’s easy! The picture with the most likes and shares wins. Each ‘like’ counts as 1 point and each ‘share’ counts for 2 points.

We will only award points for the number of times you have shared your own post once; however every time your post is shared by other it will be counted as 2 points.

The rules:

• You need to be a member of this group to participate: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Gooduus/
• Only one entry allowed for each contestant.
• Each entry can include up to five photos maximum of your entire landscape. Each photo must be of the same landscape, showing its different areas.
• Your landscape can either be naturally formed, or sculpted from scratch.
• Don’t comment on individual pictures, instead please comment under an entry’s entire submission.

The deadline:

This contest will last for eight days and you can post your photos any time during this period. Any pictures posted after the contest expires will be marked as invalid.

To take part and for more information, simply follow this link: Godus Community Contest: Christmas Theme

Enjoy, and good luck!

We’ll be updating with the studio’s plans for over the festive season towards the beginning of next week. In the meantime, we hope our Yuletide offerings raises a few smiles!