FORTS (2017)

Back in 2008, Tim Auld showed me a game he was making where you put guns on little physics based forts and blow things up. It looked like a lot of fun. Our friend and work colleague Nick Smith agreed and had started to add art to it as well. At that point I said I would love to add audio to the game. Being that the game was still in its infancy and needed to cook a little longer, I left them to it while I worked on other projects.

Various things happened to everyone over the next few years including leaving jobs, leaving industries, starting new businesses, starting families, you know, life stuff. The guys kept plugging away at the game in some form or another.

Fast forward to 2015, Tim and Nick showed me the latest version of the game and said they wanted to do an announcement trailer and asked if I could start working on the audio. This was the result…

It was at this point we decided that the game needed more content, like a single player campaign, as well as a bunch of UI refinements. This was fine by me as it gave me time to work on the audio (while juggling other projects). As things got closer to completion we did another trailer to hint at a release…

Then we held a private beta, and started doing some trade shows like PAX and EGX to boost awareness. Then we got a PR company called Stride involved and everything started accelerating. We then announced the actual release date with another trailer (cause you know, we love making trailers 😛 )

At this point the game was more or less ignored by the major press (the low view count on these trailers is an indication), and things were getting a little tense. But, we got incredibly lucky with influencers on YouTube. People like CTOP, JackSepticEye, Draegast and many others all started playing our preview version and people started taking notice and watching Forts on Youtube…

Things we starting to look a bit better, so we decided to throw huge launch party at a local pub here in Brisbane, Australia and celebrate the launch in as big a way we could. A bunch of industry friends, family and work mates all came down to show their support and we pushed the launch button and streamed the moment on Facebook…

https://www.facebook.com/earthworkgames/videos/1109607082479244/

And at that moment the game was out and the rest was history. Of course we needed to release a launch trailer (cause you know, we STILL love making trailers)

And I also released the soundtrack, which you can find out about here…