Renowned Explorers: International Society News

Hello good people!

Maybe you’ve heard it before, maybe it’s the first time you hear it: Next week on the 28th of May our newest game Reus 2 will hit the Steams! We’re happy to see the lessons we’ve learned from Renowned Explorers and Godhood put together into Reus to create a true fresh new Abbey Game!

Except what you can expect from us: depth, colorfulness, and a playful heart.

[h2]Ok, but why didn’t you create Renowned Explorers 2!?[/h2]
I get this question so often, I feel I need to elaborate more.

Photo of Abbey Games trying to defend not working on RE:IS 2 on MonkeyCon, colorized

Renowned Explorers was a creative success. We loved working on it, and we love the game. Every game we made has something special, but for me Renowned Explorers is very special.

However Renowned Explorers doesn’t sell well and was expensive to make. There are too many good games in the roguelite, storylike, turn based genre. It’s also a very odd game: most of you had no idea what you were getting into except if you were enlightened by the eternal TotalBiscuit. Without him, Abbey Games would’ve been long gone after the release of Renowned Explorers. We got families to feed, and we got to make business choices.

To add, Renowned Explorers has more words than War & Peace. It has 3 layers of gameplay that all have their own art, code and UX. It’s a lot to make. We would need to seriously rethink what Renowned Explorers can be in this day and age.

And it has definitely nothing to do with raccoons.


[h2]Take the next step with us[/h2]
Regardless, we’re super excited about Reus 2! It’s a big step for us, and we’re very happy with the result. Of course we want to share it with you who have been supporting us for all that time. It’s a major step up from the original, and we think you should give it a look! We hope you’ll find that Abbey vibe in there!

In any case, we’re grateful for your support in the past years. It’s a privilege to have a shot at entertaining you with our silly ideas. We hope for many more years of colorful creativity!

- Adriaan and the monks at the Abbey

In the previous tales, we shared stories of the start of Abbey Games. Today, we share about the exciting exploration of Renowned Explorers!

One thing was certain; The Abbey was filled with chaotic energy! All the monks, old and new, sat together and basically mashed ideas together to see what would come out. A big difference from the four that basically set the line for Reus! It's safe to say the game went in all kind of directions! It was going to be an action RPG! No, an RTS! No! A turn based game! No, a fighter!(?) One of the early mock ups of Renowned Explorers.

Not only the game was an adventure, we even started making our own tech: AbbeyCore. It was an engine made from scratch. All these factors gave us a lot of fun, but also little to show in one year. And we only had one year left to make something! Safe to say, things were getting hot.... It was time to get serious... Our attempt to getting serious.

The monks double downed on the events, treasures and characters, while keeping the encounters interesting and fresh. Of course, there was still room for fun. One event had the dialogue of an... adult... movie (without obscenity, think of Hildegard!) as a test case. However, it did got sent for review by our editors, who were kind of puzzled on what this whole dialogue was about! Also, have you ever tried clicking on Earl's portrait in an encounter? You should. ;)

The release of Renowned Explorers was rocky at first, but a tight community and the helping hand of a legendary reviewer helped the game to climb to the top! Would the Abbey even still be making games without that review? Maybe we would've switched to the darkside, creating AbbeyCoin or NFT's. Luckily, we don't live in that timeline!
A museum of your pieces, that sadly never made it.

We learned a lot from Renowned Explorers; The humor and character of Renowned Explorers is an important thing for our current secret project! But after two expansions and a lot of fun creating stories and characters, it was time to move to the next game. The development of Renowned Explorers already showed some cracks in the walls of the Abbey, but Godhood would really force us to define ourselves.

Tune in next Monday to see the third chapter of our tales at the news section of the Godhood page!


P.S. If you want to chat with us, feel free to join our Discord or follow the Abbey Games Developer!

- Fixed ice-cream van in Egypt.
- Fixed some missing images.
- Fixed a number of spelling errors.
- Removed outdated Godhood announcement in main menu.

Dear Renowned Explorers!

It is time to end the much loved Community Challenges with a bang! The amazing Challenge Organizers, said to be descendants of Pinkerton himself, have one final enormous challenge ready for you! Not a random number either; it will be the 200th community challenge!

Challenge #200: The Award Ceremony

Of course, we would humbly want to thank all of the Challenge Organizers for their amazing effort. Without them, Renowned Explorers wouldn't be half this vibrant and loved. We are honored to have had such amazing fans helping us out for so long!

Now why would you participate in such a challenge? Well, not only is it the moment to show off one of your many renowned talents. No my good Explorer, it is also a way to eternalize your achievement with a unique wooden figurine that you can win by leading one of the 15 categories!



[h3]The event runs for 3 weeks. Meet your rivals! Discuss strategies, but keep your ace up your sleeve! Impress your dog/love-interest/country with astonishing discoveries. Beat that French clown, and claim your title as most Renowned Explorer!![/h3]

Hello explorers!

The year is coming to an end, and thus comes the ritual of reflecting on the past. As many of you have been following us loyally, we would like to share our thoughts with you! But first; some Godhood news!

[h2]Godhood Update 1.2 Coming Soon![/h2]
We’ve been working on a new update for Godhood, scheduled somewhere early 2021! We’re not going to give away much here, but it will include some new community ideas to add your religion! One important feature that has often been requested is the “Excommunicate” action. Soon it will be much easier to remove an unwanted Disciple from your roster.

Of course, sending a faithful Disciple away will impact morale a bit. But only the best get to serve you!

[h2]Reflecting on 2020[/h2]
Just like most people on this planet, we had a pretty crazy year. In January, we were at the point of calling it quits. Because of the disappointing Early Access track of Godhood and general mismanagement, we were at a total low point with no viable business left. Up to that point, Godhood development had been a true ordeal. We had two separate burn-outs in the team, and the quality of the game only improved at a slow pace. By the start of 2020, we had to let go of all of our employees and friends (You can follow a few of them at Roost Games!) whom we shared so many beautiful memories with. We, Maarten, Manuel and Adriaan, were the only ones left of our original team of over 10 people.

However, we thought Godhood to be in an unacceptable state. It was our duty to deliver you higher quality before we called it quits. So we set on a journey to release 1.0. After that, we would reevaluate our situation.

In that period, we re-learned a lot about making games. We had some critical moments where we compared the production of Godhood with that of Renowned Explorers and Reus. In the process, we found our joy back, and the ability to increase quality at a much higher pace. We couldn’t have done it without the support of the community - it was at one point literally the only thing that motivated us to move forward! We’re very grateful for all your kind words, constructive criticism, and all round fun interaction! In particular, we would like to thank the good folks on the Abbey Discord. It has been a joy. We’re proud of the results!

Lucky for us, this increase in joy and quality also changed our fortunes on Godhood! The game welcomed a lot of new players, and we’re happy to see many more people having fun with it. Because of that, we’re now in the position to look at the future!

[h2]The Future[/h2]
This newfound joy has motivated us to take a look into the future of the Abbey. We’ve started with cutting down some of our ambitions to focus on bringing better quality games. In the past 5 years, Abbey Games was very busy trying to manage a democratic and safe work environment. However, it seems we went too far. Too many of us were more busy managing and doing HR work instead of bringing you quality gameplay. With the 3 of us, we’re going back to our times during Reus and Renowned Explorers. That means more time developing, less time managing. We’re also saying goodbye to our engine AbbeyCore. It was a fun and enriching project, but we want to focus on our game quality. We hope to use more industry standards to make it easier to deliver our games faster and to more people.

This means we will fully devote ourselves to deep and thematic strategy-likes. We’ve received quite some requests for a sequel to Renowned Explorers and Reus. We have a lot of love for these games, and are exchanging interesting ideas about them! We are also very excited to try new themes, too!

So what does the future bring? We’re going to keep you guys in the dark a bit longer! But know that we’re working on deep and thematic strategy-likes, in the spirit of Reus and Renowned Explorers! We hope to use some of Steam’s new features to bring our new prototype to you as quickly as possible. We believe that together, we can make a really high quality game!


[h2]Best Wishes[/h2]
Finally, we want to give you all our best wishes for your (a)religious festivities! We hope you can leave the chaos behind you for a while, and focus on the things that are truly important to you. Be it family, friends, health, or just some really good games! Thank you for reading, and we hope to see you in 2021!

Best wishes,
The Abbey