What kind of game is Causeway?
It's a lane-pushing game: an online team-based battle in which you play as a powerful character and work with your team to lead an army to victory.
You can discover more about them over at Lane-Pushing Games.
When is this game coming out?
When it's ready. Our roadmap looks like this:
- Technical Alpha — our focus is making a functioning platform for a game. That means implementing all the complex game logic required by lane-pushing games, as well as having a working client, editor, and patcher.
It also means solving crashes, tuning netcode and responsiveness, and ensuring we have your favourite hotkeys and settings in place.
- Closed Alpha (← We are here! ) — we iterate the gameplay and experiment with variations on the rules and ideas. This lasts until we are happy that the game is fun, AND we are happy that the community is healthy and would stay so with further growth.
Up to this point, we will be operating under NDA and using mostly placeholder assets.
- Closed Beta — the public gain access, but with limits. This may be paid "early-access", crowdfunding, or simply us limiting keys.
Scaling the things that are good about the game may not be easy, and it will help us to have a degree of control over player numbers while working through these issues.
- Open Beta and Beyond — we work on scaling and sharing the game to reach everyone who might like it, including localisation, improving server regions, and enhancing the visuals.
We will be taking the advice of our testers when deciding when to advance to the next phase, or whether intermediate phases are required. For this reason, we aren't sharing projected dates.
How do I join the alpha?
If you are part of a community that shares our values, we encourage you to reach out to us by email or on discord. We are generally happiest to engage on a community or content creator basis.
Alternatively, sign up for testing, and remain patient until we circulate an alpha participation survey.
If you want to help us out — there's always more people out there who haven't heard the game yet. Why not find somewhere to share a link or start a discussion?
Is there any gameplay footage? Can I see some pictures?
A small glimpse of the alpha can be seen in one of the recent blog posts. Bear with us though — right now the game uses almost entirely placeholder assets.
Sharing footage with placeholders runs a real risk of people mistaking it for the final or intended look, leading to them passing over the game. That would be a shame! We appreciate your patience.
How about lore? Lots of games share that early!
Yes, you can find a few stories on our Characters page.
Lore is something we care about, and our approach has been to invest in the foundations of world-building and our characters. Refining this into exciting content is going to come later.
We want lore which has depth and planning to reflect that we'll be telling and sharing stories with you through Causeway for many years. That means we need to expand the team with very talented people and then spend time on it together.
This is all planned for — our character design framework allows us to keep the narrative side of characters very authentic while still being able to progress their mechanics.
You may also enjoy the Tend and Befriend design article which shares our approach to narrative design.
Is there any concept art?
You can see a peek of our character concept art on the front page! We know art matters and makes games easier to share.
The icons you see around this website should also give a sense of the tone we're aiming for.
Who is making this game?
That's us — Kybolt, a small game studio based in Dublin, Ireland. Our background is in making experimental, ambitious lane-pushing games.
We're experienced modders, and you will see that reflected in our community focus and our tools. Our best-known games include:
Dota Outland (2003–2005)
One of the original DotA maps! It had lots of fun characters, bridges which could be raised and lowered, quests, and upgradable towers.
Rise of Winterchill (2007–2013)
A rich exploration into fluid character combat. It was the first in its genre to use vector targeting, captured merc camps, and to eliminate stuns.
Note: As they were mods, the accompanying art for these games includes materials that are copyright of other companies!
These are lane-pushing games which went through years of development, iteration, and polish. Ask us about them!
The lead designer for Causeway is Softmints, who has been writing about game design and history at Lane-Pushing Games since 2013. You should check it out!
Much of the knowledge and research accumulated there informs Causeway's design.
What do I most need to know about Causeway?
If you want to know if you will like the game, check over here.
As for the basics:
- The game is played 5v5, or in co-op survival mode.
- Matches are expected to last 20–30 minutes.
- The game will not be pay-to-win. If we go down the hero unlocks route, there will be an affordable "buy all the heroes" pack.
- It will be moddable. We hope to see people make new games using our tools and platform.
- The game will be available for PC, and can reportedly run on Linux with Photon.
What is this 'RoW' or 'Rise of Winterchill' that I see mentioned?
Causeway was originally planned to be a stand-alone version of a mod called Rise of Winterchill. Many of the older blog posts talk about working on "RoW" for this reason.
In 2020, we announced the new name of "Causeway"!
How similar is Causeway to the mod 'Rise of Winterchill'?
It will be similar in some areas, and very different in others!
Rise of Winterchill was known for its dynamic player-versus-player combat. This is alive and well in Causeway too.
Many of the old Rise of Winterchill characters are being disassembled for parts, and some of these may appear in Causeway. We keep an emphasis on flexible build options, an interactive environment, and gradient abilities.
At the same time, Rise of Winterchill didn't have the most compelling objectives, pacing, or opportunities for team-wide strategy. Causeway takes lessons from a number of Warcraft III lane-pushing games which were better at those things. We are proud to stand on the shoulders of giants!
All of this is combined under a tighter direction and vision for Causeway, which we talk about in the Design Principles.
What specs does my PC need?
We aren't spending much time on optimisation and performance at this stage in development. In our experience, a CPU with 3+ cores and a mid-range graphics card should be okay.
Can I get involved with your studio?
Feel free to explore our Careers page to see if our vision resonates. If you are looking for any other arrangement, please email us.
If you have further questions, the devs hang out on discord. Ping us, ask us, we are here to chat!