The first person rogue-like Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox has been released:

Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox

Enter the world of Ahkranox - the first ever genuinely infinite first person roguelike. Become the incarnate form of a magical, sentient Sword, protecting a realm of dreams from the shadows of its own tormented soul, and stand as an eternal guardian against the infinite darkness that threatens to consume all.

Meticulously inspired by the classic RPG experiences of the early 90s, this turn-based roguelike drops you into the infinite realm of Ahkranox, a dream-world in the mind of a sentient sword. The world is infinite, the loot is infinite, the quests are infinite and the possibilities are infinite. Relive the classic adventure experience of the past in this modern day salute to the pioneers of modern role playing.

Be warned! Much like its predecessors, this game does not babysit you. You will learn to run. You will learn patience. You do not start out an unbeatable hero. You will start as a scavenger, doing what they can to scrape by, but that will make your inevitable success even sweeter.

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Features:

• A procedurally generated, yet permanent, world to explore.
• All players experience their own copy of the same world. Share your finds with friends!
• Plunder an infinite amount of procedurally generated loot.
• Compete against your fellow adventurers to prove yourself the greatest hero to have lived.
• Choose from a never-ending supply of quests.
• Interact with your fellow players through rifts in time.
• Relive the brutal difficulty and merciless game mechanics of the golden age of video gaming.
• Claim undiscovered locations as your own for other players to stumble upon.
• A game without an ending and with no level cap! You live to reach greater heights than your fellows, or you die gloriously!

GameSkinny has interviewed Creative Director Alex Norton about the expansion for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox called The Rise of Jeo-Khofar:

Interview with Alex Norton About the Expansion for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox

Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox is a procedurally generated old-school turn-based RPG similar to classics titles such as the Might and Magic series and Stonekeep. Players take on the role of the Guardian of Ahkranox, whose purpose is to rid the world of Ahkranox from evil.

On their journey, the player must embark on quests, delve into various dungeons and defeat the evil monsters that lurk within them. The game contains a classless system that allows the player to play however they please. If they wish to change their play style throughout, they can at any time.

This week we got the opportunity to interview indie developer Alex Norton about planned expansion for his indie title Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox. We discuss all the new features that will be included in the expansion, how long he aims for the storyline to be, and more.

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Visual Outbreak released a new Steam update for Malevolence with information from the main developer about the next patch, and having more time to work on his game.

Hi all, sorry for being quiet lately. It's been for two reasons, mainly:

1) I've been SUPER immersed in this latest update, and it is a CRAZY big one. Easily the biggest, most content-packed update that the game has ever had in its long history. It's adding the new procedural magic system, boss monsters, magical enemies, item crafting, enchanting, new quests as well as the usual bugfixes, etc. The game is going to feel REALLY complete after this, and it will definitely mark the final stretch of the game's development. The new procedural magic system in particular is super cool and I'm very excited to reveal it all to you. I'll be working with the game's test team quite closely to get it looking nice and shiny before putting out an announcement video explaining how it all works. A couple of the team have offered to do the videos up themselves so that the system gets explained by someone new to it rather than myself. I think that'd be better, since I tend to ramble a lot.

2) Unfortunately I no longer have a day job. After a very rough 12 months there I parted ways with the company rather suddenly. I won't go into details but it's been kinda rough on me and my family. On the upside, though, it's given me HEAPS more time to work on Malevolence :P I've decided that I'm going to get a new job that has much fewer hours and try and get by on less to have more time for game development. I think it's super important to be passionate about what you do for a living, and those of you who have followed this project from early on will know how passionate I can get about game development!

So I'll get back to my hermit development schedule (I've been putting in 18 hour days lately hahaha) and get this update done for you all! Thanks again for sticking with it, and I promise you that you'll be blown away by what's in store :)

Visual Outbreak released a major updated for Malevolence on Steam this week.

And it comes with my customary release video! Sorry about the out-of-sync audio. Not sure what went on there... To get the full update notes, please check out this article. Thanks for your patience on this one, guys and girls!

It was a really tricky one to get working!

Visual Outbreak released a short update on Steam about the new Bank patch.

PHEW! What a week! I have been working my poor test team to the bone this past week, sending build after build after build to get these banks working 100% ready to be shipped out to you guys in the latest update, and as you can probably see if you follow the game's Trello our tenacious test team keeps finding tiny things which need tweaking. They don't miss a trick those guys!

However, all of that is finally wrapping up now, and there are only a couple of very minor things for me to sort out before we can push this build out and get back to work on the new magic system.

We've had a few people now ask about crafting, and I'm pleased to say that a big part of the game's crafting system will be coming in the magic update, which is a large part of why we're so excited for it!

Visual Outbreak next update on Steam is an update on the games progress.

I know things have been quiet, but I've been struggling MASSIVELY to get a final couple of bugs fixed over the past few weeks which just kept eluding me over and over, and keeping me from being able to push out the banks/balance update, but I'm very excited to announce that I just sent an updated build to the test team for approval which seems to work just fine!

Anything they find should be a minor fix and I'll be able to get the build out to you all to play with!

Now these two issues have been solved, I can finally finish off the updated magic system, which will be in the next major update after this one!

Thank you all for your patience! And special thanks to those of you who have taken the time to leave supportive comments or give us some lovely positive reviews for the game! We love to read them!

I'll be pushing out the update soon and with it will be one of my customary update videos which will sum up what's in the update. I think you'll be excited!

Visual Outbreak next update on Steam is video preview of the Banking System.

Hi all! Sorry I've been so quiet. Been working hard on getting this new update together, but it involves a lot of back-end tweaking and so there hasn't been much in the way of pretty new things to show juuuust yet. But soon!

In the meantime, however, I'm virtually done with the banks! One of our test team, Shephard, has helped me out considerably by taking the time to do a video preview of how they work, explaining how you'll be interacting with them when the update goes out, so I thought I'd share it here so you can see!

Visual Outbreak released a new video about the current state of development for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox on the games Steam Webpage.

Hi all, I'm back with one of my video updates to a) give you an update on what we've been working on and b) reveal what our next bit of super secret online functionality is going to be! I hope you're as excited as I am, and that you all had a fantastic New Years!

Visual Outbreak posted news about the development of Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox. It seems the game is back on track once again after a few setbacks.

Hi guys and girls, sorry I've been so quiet lately. I HAVE been doing work on the game, working on a couple of particularly large bugs (hence no Trello changes lately) and have been making good progress, but haven't quiet nailed them yet.

Add to that some health issues and other family commitments to deal with and it's basically meant the spare time I've had has either been for posting updates OR coding, and I've opted for coding :)

So you'll see a new update soon once I finally crack these few large bugs, but they'll help the game be much more solid once they're fixed!

Just so you don't think I've abandoned you!

Visual Outbreak has a new update on Steam about a new podcast.

The boys are finally back after Alex's absence from the scene to talk about what's happening with the game, the topic of the show (LAN parties) and discussing a couple of very cool games!

Visual Outbreak has another update from the developers on Steam.

My Absence

Sorry that I've been a little absent the past couple of weeks. I've had a few very "mission critical" things collapse in my personal life recently and I've been working feverishly to get everything back together. I won't go into details, but it's been leaving me with very little ability or time to get much work done on the game.

It looks like things are righting themselves now, though, or they at least are on the path to doing so, so I'll be back in the hotseat again within the next few days.

In the time I HAVE been working, though, I've made some fairly decent strides forward in the big optimization update, and I've still been popping by when I can to see the buzz, but yes I'll definitely be back properly very soon.

Thank you all for your patience during this time, and an even bigger thank you to my amazing team and community members who have been keeping the ship together while I've been off dealing with life for a bit!

Visual Outbreak released a new podcast video for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox.

The Malevolence Podcast

For those of you who don't know, there is an official Malevolence podcast! Despite the title we don't just talk about Malevolence. Every episode we discuss a different topic suggested to us by the community and also recommend old or obscure (or sometimes just great) games to play and give them a bit of a review. Sometimes we have guests on from within the gaming industry, and if you'd like to listen to the back-catalogue, you find all of the links here.

Warning: There can occasionally be some strong language, just so you're warned, but it's all in good humour.

Visual Outbreak has a small update on the Steam forums with some news on the progress of the the Optimization Update for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox.

Optimizations

Hi all! So I've been pulling some late night coding sessions to really try and optimize the game as much as possible. The last performance upgrade I put out seems to be making a big difference for many of you, but I'm not done by a long shot.

I've been focusing mainly on loading times for the past couple of days, and have been seeing some really promising results. Earlier in the week, on my computer, entering Shoba Nohr took approximately 20.2 seconds. Yesterday before I went to bed I was entering Shoba Nohr in approximately 16.5 seconds. Tonight, however, I'm getting in there in around 12 seconds! I'm not done yet, either, I think I can get below 10 seconds. Once I do that, though, I'm going to leave it be and move onto the countryside load times, which I haven't started on just yet.

But anyway, just thought I'd pop by with a quick progress report to let you know how it's all going!

Oh, and I've implemented a new error management and retry system which should greatly reduce those pesky "could not load image/object/sound/music" crashes, if not remove them entirely. The test team will be getting a build once I get the dungeon loads under 10 seconds and we'll go from there.

Visual Outbreak has posted another update for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox this time in a new video where the developer talks about the next patch.

Yep. I'm one of "those" devs who loves to do video updates from time to time.

Visual Outbreak has posted two more updarts on Steam for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox. The first update is about another small patch they released yesterday.

The "Oh wow it kind of works now" update!

So we just pushed out an update which should make things run much, much smoother for people, and fix a lot of crashes.

Now, it's not a fix-all by any means... Please don't mistake it for that... But it's the first step in our headlong dive into optimization, stabilization and overall improvement of the game's performance. I hope that it makes the game a bit more of a pleasant play experience for you all!

More updates will be coming. I realised that I'm spending more time on the discussion boards and forums than I am writing code, so I'm pacing myself a bit more. Sorry if I take longer to get back to you, but I will eventually! I'm just sure you can all agree that getting the game working and looking as best as possible is a pretty high priority right now!

The second update is about the games long load times.

Load Times

Sorry I've been quiet on the boards lately. I'm focusing REALLY heavily on this optimization and stability patch for you all, but I'm making good progress.

It's sounding like the last update I put out has really boosted peoples' performance and reduced crashes significantly, which is great. Also the people who were saying they couldn't run the game at all have been emailing me telling me that it all works now, which is brilliant.

But now I'm working on getting those nasty load times down to a bare minimum. The first stage of that is a heap of analysis to work out what, specifically, is causing them. After tonight's analysis session I have some pretty conclusive data on that and I'm going to be powering through to use that information and come up with various fixes to speed up loading times drastically.

A big thank you, by the way, for the patience you've been having and the nice comments being left sending your support! I hope that my hard work pays off for you all and it brings you more enjoyment in the game! I'll do my best to swing by the boards in a properly thorough fashion very soon :)

Well it's another day and we have another update on Steam for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox. This time they share a user fix to help the game from crashing.

So as I desperately try to scrape together what spare time I can to get this debug app together and sort out people's crashes for them, I noticed this AMAZING post on the discussion boards which is worth checking out if you have problems.

Community member Narkanam has found an amazing way to reduce and even totally stop (in some cases) crashes in the game! Have a read!

http://steamcommunity.com/app/268930/discussions/0/558756255622460397/

I'll be back again soon with more!

Also, thank you to everyone who's made such cool suggestions! You'll find that this is a very community-oriented project so we love listening to you guys, especially since so many of you are old-school RPG players! It's awesome and you're awesome! :D

Visual Outbreak has news of video guide for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox. So if you need help, or just want to preview the game the video may help you.

Your First Steps into Ahkranox

Hi guys! So as I sit here furiously coding up various fixes and such, I was made aware that one of our test team - who has been writing up some really handy guides to the game on the Discussion Board - has done up an hour-long introduction to Ahkranox video for you all! How cool is that?? So I thought I'd post it up here as an announcement so you all get to see! You should check out his other videos, too, as there are some informative ones and also some quite funny ones!

Visual Outbreak released a new hotfix patch for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox.

Mini hotfix update 0.11.862

I'm finally getting on top of these emails and steam discussions, so I'm managing to get more development time in the last couple of days!

Tonight I've just pushed out a build which fixes an error where moving UP floors in dungeons will place you at the wrong staircase.

I've also done some back-end work towards fixing those crashes. I can't remember if I've mentioned this in an announcement but I'm building up a mini debug app which a couple of the people having crashes have generously agreed to help test. This debug app will help me narrow down precisely what is happening and then extrapolate the fix onto the main game build, hopefully stopping it from happening :) I'm hoping to get this finished next week some time.

Normally I'd be working through this weekend, but you'll unfortunately not see much of me over the next 36 hours as I have to attend to a family matter. But I'll be back at the helm again as soon as I get back and we can get the ball rolling again on more fixes :)

Just wanted to give a shout-out to all those who have sent me and the team encouraging emails or left nice messages on the boards. It's very much appreciated :D I hope that I can live up to your expectations as time goes on. Once the next major build goes out the game will feel a lot more stable and optimized, and hopefully we can drop those load times down, too, to get you slaying the evils of Ahkranox faster!

Adios for now, guys and girls! I'll see you again as soon as I'm back! While I'm gone my awesome team will be around to help answer any questions you may have. Those guys are the best!

Visual Outbreak have posted an update on the Steam forums with a follow-up on the release of Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox for Early Access.

What a launch!

Hi all! And welcome to all of our new players!

It has been one heck of a rollercoaster the past 48 hours and I'm incredibly excited to have all of you on board!

The comments and feedback in the discussion board have been spectacular and the team have enjoyed watching all of the new Let's Play videos greatly!

We've already had the permadeath leaderboard go from 0 to full in that time with some incredible loot found, locations shared and people met!

For any daring enough, one forum user, Hyfrydle, has posted a challenge on our forum[www.malevolencegame.com] which I highly recommend participating in!

To help answer a few common questions being asked, I've updated the Common Issues FAQ in the discussion boards to help people along!

Thank you all for making this such a successful launch! It's you guys and girls who make game creation so worth it! More updates soon!

The developers of the kickstarter funded RPG Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox announced on the games forum the Steam release date for Early Access.

As you can see I got the news late so here is the Steam link.

The Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox developers have news about a new update that will add a new quest system. They even released a new video to show it in action.

The developers of Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox have a new podcast.

This week the lads discuss further the ideologies and future of virtual reality.

Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox is an RPG developed by a studio called Visual Outbreak. Here is a video and some game details.

Alex Norton has given a 90 minute lecture last year on how he made his pledge on Kickstarter for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox a success, raising over 500% of it's original pledge. There is a video of 90 minuntes covering this lecture, which might be a bit long, so he summarized it in an editorial for Gamasutra.
He makes some valid points on running a successful kickstarter not addressing the point that he only asked for $6000 to start with, which made raising a lot more maybe a bit easier compared to those who are asking $30.000 to start with.

After doing significant research on other, more successful, crowd-funded projects, I came to the following conclusions:

- Communication is key! Talk to your pledgers and potential customers. Answer their questions when they have them and keep them engaged.

- It all comes down to how you sell your product, and how you sell yourself and your team as people.

- Be aware of your target audience and gear every little thing you do towards them and only them.

- Market your campaign. Send links to blogs, reviewers, journals, magazines and spread it across social networks. Get traffic to it.

- Be willing to put in the hours that it takes to make regular updates, answer all questions and keep the customer engaged at all times.

On top of this, I decided to change my tactics to include the following:

- Show the customer that the project is being made by people. Good quality, friendly, nice people. If they like you, they'll be more inclined to like what you're selling.

- Don't just show them why your product is special. Show them why it's special to YOU, and why it should be special to THEM.

- When you're selling your product, you should also be selling the people making it. It makes the customer feel a part of something, rather than a simple ‘browse and buy' scenario.

- Write lots of updates. At LEAST 3 per week. Show them you're working at it. Show them how dedicated you are. Try and use video where possible. People respond to video. Get your best speaker onto it.

- Talk to the pledgers, not just as someone who answers questions, but really engage them in conversation. Show them you're real.

And you can check out the 90 minute low quality shakey-cam video too.

A conversation on our forums made me realise Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox had ditched IndieGoGo and set up an entirely new campaign on Kickstarter - one that has already been successful ($14k of $6k raised, 8 days to go).

The new pitch takes an entirely different tone and is worth re-visiting, particularly if you looked at their IndieGoGo campaign. Here's the feature list:

If you're just having a quick look, here are the key things that make this game what it is:

• The game is an homage to classic RPGs such as Eye of the Beholder, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master, Stonekeep, etc
• Movement is grid-based and turn-based
• It is set in an infinite, persistent world (yes, persistent, too!)
• The world is rich and full of dungeons, crypts, forests, cities, vast oceans and more
• World is NOT randomly generated, but it IS infinite, so you can share what you find with friends
• Items, weapons, quests, locations, maps, NPCs, even dialogue are generated by the game
• Even some graphics such as weapon images are generated procedurally
• The game is nearly finished, but we need some extra funds to add the final layer of polish to make the game as good as it can be