A Look Behind the Curtain
A Map, of Roads?
– Chub, Advisor to the Conqueror
Over the past year the team behind Conqueror: Reign of Madness has grown significantly. We’ve increased the team size to over 25 of the most talented individuals willing to make games. Through the incredible contributions of this team, we’ve increased our work output and built the foundations of our studio.
Today we wanted to take a look back at the past year, explain what is to come for the rest of the year, and talk about our intentions leading up to next summer with launch of the demo for Conqueror.
Thinking about the past my liege?
– Grub, Advisor to the Conqueror
Almost a year ago the team behind Conqueror: Reign of Madness went through several shifts in development. The earliest months of this year marked specific changes in our approach to the game, our community, and our methodology for game development.
As we went back to the drawing board and looked at the game we wanted to make and what was inspiring us, we made two important goals.
1. Take our team seriously.
2. Improve the quality of our output.
What does this look like in practice?
Firstly, we sat down and addressed the state of our team and our priorities in development. To improve the structure of our team, we established leadership across departments, organized our documentation, and started the slow process of legally forming studio, one which can make our team proud.
Secondly, to improve the quality of our work, we stripped ourselves back to the drawing board and rebooted our pipeline. Writers worked hard to expand our existing narrative and world far beyond where we started, concept artists took this new lore and made it into tangible imagery, and our new departments across 3D art and animation have been collaborating between our programming and design departments to create a playable game.
Game development is one massive collaboration.
What Now? Chaos!
– Nub, Advisor to the Conqueror
Across this year’s development updates we have attempted to communicate our intentions and progress with our extremely valuable community. We hope this helps to shape an understandable narrative for our primary audience.
In the past several updates we have been able to showcase our new art direction, assets, models, and with our most recent update, a taste of in engine footage and musical drafts.
While this November update is far more narrative, we are planning for the December update, our last update of the year, to leave plenty for the community to sit with over our studio holidays and the turn of the new year.
We are not yet ready to discuss what this update will include; we are certainly aiming for it to have more development progress to show across our departments.
As in most cases, our development on the game will largely pause for our studio wide break for the holiday season, but you can still expect community questions every Friday and our next live-stream to be the first Sunday of January 2026.
Let’s talk about next year though!
Hm.
– The Conqueror
A few months ago, we made some massive announcements.
We announced the delay of the demo to Summer, 2026.
We announced the ending of the Patreon, which we will be messaging the community update shortly.
Finally, we announced that Conqueror will be unveiling a crowdfunding campaign with the demo’s launch.
Let’s talk about what 2026 looks like for this!
To start, our goal is to produce the best possible version of the demo we can. That is our primary focus.
Secondly, we intend to begin marketing Conqueror more heavily with the turn of the year. This may be reflected in the visual style of our community updates, our livestreams, and our official marketing materials.
Regarding our big announcement, we will be pouring all of our energy into turning Conqueror into a well-established crowdfunding campaign with worthwhile backer rewards and goals we hope excite everyone! Our goal is to effectively communicate the realistic size of the game, and the possibilities for growth with each funding goal reached.
Despite all of this, we want to hold our community very closely to the heart of Conqueror’s production. Having been with us since the start, we want our community to grow with the project, and we also want the voices of our passionate fans to contribute to the overall direction and execution of our work. That said, you will continue to receive community updates as a priority, and as our marketing foundation improves, you will continue to be on the forefront of our ideas around testing, access, and community feedback.
Everyone, that wraps up the November update. Thank you all for your continued support for the team and Conqueror: Reign of Madness. We will have more to share next time.
– Jack, Project Manager
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