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 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 "Old Art", which is entirely 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 getting our beautiful "New Art" in place.
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.
As of March 2023, we are comfortably in Closed Alpha. If you want more details on where we're at, the Dev Blog may shed some light.
How do I join the alpha?
- Sign up
- Remain patient until we need more testers
That said, if you want to help us out there's always more people out there who haven't heard of us yet. Why not find somewhere to share a link or start a discussion?
Is there any gameplay footage? Can I see some pictures?
Not at the moment, sorry!
Right now the game uses entirely placeholder assets. If we show footage with placeholders, some people might mistake it for the final or intended look, and pass over the game as a result. That would be a shame!
Please bear with us, we'll share when we're ready.
How about lore? Lots of games share that early!
We don't have any published lore articles, and please don't expect them soon.
Lore is something we care about and our approach has been to invest in the foundations of world-building and our characters, understanding that turning 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 like to check the Characters page to get the mood for some of the characters, or read the Tend and Befriend design article to learn about 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.
Eve of the Apocalypse: Twilight (2003–2009)
A game of grand strategy across a choice of five battlefields: each with differing objectives. The largest battlefield has five lanes!
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!
All three of 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. (Read more here)
- 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 late 2020, we announced the re-brand to "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?
Maybe! The best place to explore that would be our Careers page. If you are looking for any other arrangement, please write one of us on discord ?
If you have further questions, the devs hang out on discord. Ping us, ask us, we are here to chat!
The details on this site are of course subject to change as development progresses.