Castle Story

In Castle Story, the player is in control of workers called "Bricktrons" which can be directed to gather resources, build castles and fight enemies.[2] The aim is to build a castle that can withstand attacks from creatures and other players.[2] The game takes place on massive floating islands.[2]

Castle Story was the debut game developed by Sauropod Studio, an indie game developer based in Montreal, Canada.[3] The game was first announced in December 2011; around this time, Sauropod was a team of two people.[4][5] Sauropod Studio was formally founded as a company on 24 April 2012 by François Alain (general director), Germain Couet (artistic director), and Benoît Alain (lead programmer and chief technical officer).[6] A crowdfunding campaign was launched through the website Kickstarter on 27 July 2012, seeking US$80,000.[7] This goal was reached and exceeded within five hours of the campaign's launch.[7][8] The campaign concluded after one month, with a total of $700,000 pledged.[9] Sauropod credited Markus Persson, the creator of the game Minecraft who publicly approved of the game, with leading the Kickstarter campaign to the success it had.[10] Beta versions of the game were later shared with backers who had pledged $15 or more.[9] Castle Story was made publicly available as a paid early access game through the digital distribution platform Steam on 23 September 2013.[11] The game was fully released on 17 August 2017 for Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows, with Sauropod shifting to bugfixes and developing post-launch content.[12]

Following onto the release of Castle Story, Sauropod began production on a second game, Mirador.[3] This game had a troubled development, frequently shuffling the designer position.[3] A Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign seeking $60,000 did not manage to get funded halfway and Sauropod failed to find a publisher to finance the game.[3] Instead, the Canadian Media Fund invested $900,000.[3] As Mirador drew closer to release, it came to the studio's employees attention that the money the studio had would not suffice to keep it running until the end of 2019.[3] The game was eventually released on 26 July 2019 without prior early access availability.[3] The idea of using early access was considered but ultimately rejected as the studio did not plan to support the game greatly post-launch.[3] Sauropod's management assured its employees that the majority would move on to the studio's next project.[3] However, on 23 September 2019, it was reported that, due to the foregoing money mismanagement, Sauropod had laid off all of its 20 employees.[3] François Alain and Couet stated in October 2019 that Sauropod was still active, despite having laid off all staff.[13]

• Official website