The Year 2020 In Review
/It’s the end of one of the weirdest years we’ll (hopefully) ever experience, and we’re feeling reflective. Here at Auroch Digital we’ve had to adapt to lots of changes whilst still making awesome games. We’ve moved to a more permanent working from home situation, and it’s been challenging but good. We’ve got a lot of positives to share!
Let’s look back at what we got up to in the year of our lord Cthulhu, twenty twenty.
Don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date with us (and to be entered into our Birthday giveaway🎈) Or join us on our Discord to chat about all the things we’ve done this year. Plus check out our podcast to get a look behind the scenes!
In January you helped us save loads of lovely animals - THANK YOU!
When the massive bushfires spread in Australia, we wondered what we could do to help from our studio in Bristol, UK. We decided that 100% of the proceeds of the sale of our board game, Mars Horizon: Blast Off would go directly to Australian Animal Rescue Inc.
We chose Australian Animal Rescue Inc (AAR) as the charity we’d be giving our proceeds to as we are big animals lovers and they work incredibly hard to save wildlife and domestic animals. Auroch Digital also made a separate donation to AAR on top of the sale money.
AAR is a non-profit organisation run entirely by volunteers who came together after the devastating April 2009 bushfires. Since then, its members have been working to rescue wildlife from bushfires and provide as many supplies as possible to affected people and animals - both wild and domestic.
When Covid hit in March we did our best to support each other and our community
We’re very fortunate in that we’ve been able to work from home, so projects have been moving ahead on schedule and our day-to-day work life - is still going ahead as if life were mostly normal.
With all the stress, worry, and time spent at home we wanted to help our community. We put together a list of some our favourite free games. Some are experimental indies, some are open source projects, others are commercial games now free, and some are our favourite old flash games from way back when.
Mars Horizon’s beta launched in April & we announced our publisher: The Irregular Corporation
If you took part in Mars Horizon’s beta in April - THANK YOU SO MUCH! Through the beta, feedback, and survey we ran afterwards we made big improvements and changes to the game based on what you told us. By taking part you helped to make our game the success it is today! Since the beta, we’ve been hearing all of your best stories in our Discord and seeing your favourite screenshots over on Twitter. We’ve loved watching your streams and YouTube videos too. We can’t thank you enough!
In April we also announced that we were working alongside The Irregular Corporation who are Mars Horizon’s publishers. Working with The Irregular Corporation has been amazing - they’ve helped us expand the scope of Mars Horizon and what we were able to do with our game.
In June there was the Steam Summer Game Festival
The Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition was from June 16th - June 22nd. This was the first time we had a public demo and loads of you played, streamed, and made videos of Mars Horizon and gave us awesome feedback which helped us improve the game.
During the Steam Summer Game Festival we also had two very special streams - one was with Andrew Kuh, who’s Head of International Spaceflight Policy from the UK Space Agency. We talked about what it’s like working at a real space agency, as well as space worms, crumbless nuggets, bacon sandwiches, and Sun Ra.
Our other stream was with Emmet Fletcher, Head of the ESA Branding and Partnerships Office at the European Space Agency. Emmet talked to us about the astronauts he’s met, including Neil Armstrong, how they design spacecrafts to cope with the harsh conditions of space, and how ESA collaborate with other countries in missions and research.
Both of these streams got on the front page of Steam and were watched by thousands of people which was very exciting but also nerve-wracking! Please note, if you re-watch these streams both of them feature the beta build of Mars Horizon - the game has come a long way since then!
The UK Games Expo was in July and we did a panel on games about Mars
Due to the ongoing pandemic this year the UK Games Expo went digital. During the expo we ran a panel about games and Mars. It was hosted by our own Tomas Rawlings with 3 incredible experts from different areas of gaming and space.
Tomas was joined by Dr. Jacob Fryxelius, Game Designer at FryxGames, Creator & designer of Terraforming Mars, Dr. Sian Proctor, Professor at South Mountain Community College, Geoscientist & Analog Astronaut, and Paul Smith, Robotic Exploration Programme Manager at the UK Space Agency.
In September we were part of PAX Online x EGX Digital
PAX and EGX also went digital this year and formed the world’s largest digital games event. It showcased the latest and best games, as well as all the brands you’d expect to see if you were physically on the show floor. Who else misses expos? Raise your hand!
We not only had a PAX Indie Booth, we also gave a talk about gaming and the space industry!
We were part of the Autumn Steam Game Festival in October and we helped organise and run the very first Digital Tabletop Fest
At the start of October we were part of the Steam Game Festival - Autumn Edition, which ran from 7th until 13th!
Thousands of you played our Mars Horizon demo. We got loads of awesome feedback to help us improve our game further and got Mars Horizon in front of loads of new people.
It was also where Allie and Jem debuted their sassy space agency for the first time. The stream was a great success, the sassy space agency, not so much…
The Steam Festival was closely followed by Steam’s first ever Digital Tabletop Fest - which we helped organise and run!
We put together all of the different panels, as well as behind the scenes technical bits and bobs. We featured on a several talks including this panel about Mars games, with Sue Horne, Head of Space Exploration, UK Space Agency.
Watch the whole panel here, and catch up with all of the VODs over on Steam’s YouTube channel.
Mars Horizon was released in November and a real astronaut played our game!
Mars Horizon launched in November! Players across PlayStation, PC, Xbox, and Switch could all start their journey to the Red Planet. The launch was amazing, we had thousands of people playing and streaming the game and so much amazing support.
We are so proud of the final game, and we can’t thank our wonderful players, and The Irregular Corporation enough for making the launch as big and exciting as possible!
We have surpassed well over 1,000 reviews on Steam and we’ve absolutely loved receiving your feedback, hearing your suggestions, seeing your screenshots, and having you share your favourite moments with us.
Also in November real life astronaut Tim Peake also played our game live over on Xbox’s Twitch channel. Watch the stream to hear his stories from space, to hear him telling us about what it’s like training to be an astronaut, and hear him talking about watching Alien on a real space station! Couldn’t be us.
And in December it is our 10th Anniversary!
Auroch Digital turned 10 this year! To mark such a special occasion, we are currently running a giveaway, where one lucky newsletter subscriber could win a whole haul of digital goodies. This ends January 11th so make sure to sign up asap.
Check out this post to read all about Auroch’s history, from our early days of working on mobile games, see what tabletop games we’ve made, and check out all of the digital games you could be winning in that giveaway we mentioned earlier!
And of course, all throughout the year we’ve been making podcasts about loads of different topics, from how to get into streaming, to what it’s really like to work in Mission Control. You can catch up with any you’ve missed here!