October Closed Alpha Update

Closed Alpha testing for Stormgate is in full swing and just today we released a video update on how testing has been going. This is our biggest gameplay reveal yet and one you won't want to miss.

Frost Giant Studios is blessed with an incredibly experienced game development team, many of whom came from StarCraft II and other epic RTS games. Our vision for the game and shared love for the genre has helped us hire incredible talent across all disciplines - audio, art, design, engineering, and production.

But our real secret sauce is our incredible community who have been partnering with us since day one to make Stormgate the best game it can be. We have community members behind the scenes who have worked tirelessly to advise us on gameplay and design, creating video content, and building tools to support the game and esports. We'd like to celebrate some of them today.

Chris Culp is an experienced video editor who reached out to offer his expertise and support in creating video like the one above. Not only does he create great video content, but he's also a die-hard RTS fan. If you've enjoyed some of our more recent video updates, you have Chris to thank for them.
Rene Klacan and Robert van Hoesel of "The Casuals" are perhaps best known for their work creating the Age of Empires stats site aoe4world.com. They've been major contributors behind-the-scenes, creating the automated onboarding tools responsible for securely taking NDAs, admitting players to the Closed Alpha Discord, and delivering Steam keys. They are also working with us on our alpha email campaigns and an upcoming relaunch of the playstormgate.com website. Thanks to Oliver Worth of Elite Gaming for introducing us to so many members of the awesome Age of Empires community!
Gerald Lee and Josh Lewis of Core-A Gaming have been at the forefront of the global fighting game community and have provided us with tremendous support out of their home base in Korea. They continue to support us by hosting and shooting video summits and even helped present Stormgate to LG for this commercial (in our humble opinion a groundbreaking triumph of marketing cinema) that's making the rounds across Korea, China, and the Internet. Check it out:

RallyCry.gg and community members CatZ, Scarlett (best of luck with ZeroSpace!), and Awesomsauce, as well as Adico and BeoMulf, have all been putting in tremendous work behind the scenes organizing and casting tournaments for our playtesters since the start of pre-alpha testing. (Members of the Frost Giant team took the afternoon off to grab frosty beverages and enjoy watching some of our very first esports together, which was a really fun treat.)
Dario "TLO" Wünsch and the Shopify Rebellion team have also been supporting us from behind the scenes (and on the biggest stages), offering their unmatched expertise in playtests and even helping to record the gameplay footage that we share with the world.
We're also incredibly grateful to community leader "TNO" who volunteered to staff our press booth full-time at Gamescom, running non-stop hands-on demos and sharing the story of Stormgate with media. Many of you may already be regulars at the Frost Giant Cave--the unofficial fan Discord for the Frost Giant and Stormgate community--which TNO owns and operates. Thank you, TNO, for standing 12 hours a day for 7 days straight and looking like you enjoyed it!
Anytime you see an RTS content creator share their passion for Stormgate, it comes from a place of genuine support--we are not paying for endorsements. Please share some love for these content creators whenever you can, like these here:

Mana

"I believe that Stormgate is in the right hands to make the next great RTS."

Winter

"You know what? I am actually really excited...I'm looking forward to the future."

GhostGaming

"If anyone can deliver a new RTS that lives up to the expectations of RTS fans, it's them."

Read more coverage from our fansites: Stormgate Hub and Stormgate Nexus!

This was by no means an exhaustive list of our valued supporters and we look forward to sharing more shoutouts in future newsletters!

ROLLBACK PLAYTEST A SUCCESS!

Closed Alpha testers recently had the chance to check out our prototype for rollback--one of the most exciting technological improvements that we are bringing to players in Stormgate. Rollback is a method by which games can predict player inputs and successfully mitigate the effects of latency during online play. It's proven revolutionary in the fighting game community and we see it as a huge opportunity for improving the feeling of responsiveness and ultra-smooth gameplay for RTS. You can see some of our testers' reactions in this thread on Twitter/X, but here's one of our favorites:

GAMESCOM UPDATE

Back in August, we were able to show off some of the very first footage for our Infernal faction during Gamescom's Opening Night Live broadcast, reaching millions of viewers around the world.
We rented a very small booth space in a corner of Gamescom to offer the press a chance to play the game and conduct interviews--we even downplayed our presence because it was so small. Imagine our surprise when hundreds and hundreds of you hunted us down anyway to say hello and take a look at the game. We loved meeting and talking to all of you. Your enthusiastic support of Stormgate and Frost Giant Studios was completely energizing and we can't wait to return to Germany.

Before

This was the barebones setup of our humble Gamescom booth space...

and After!

...which was absolutely flooded with foot traffic from passionate RTS fans and content creators eager to get their hands on Stormgate! To reward their patience, many visitors left with a Closed Alpha key.

On Opening Night Live, we debuted the first in-game footage of the demonic Infernal Host faction. This was the first look the public had of new features like the Infernal Host's unique "Shroud" mechanic, a dark magical energy field that their units can use to gain special benefits.

We also shared that revered Command & Conquer composer Frank Klepacki is developing the soundtrack for the new Infernal faction. You can check out a video interview with Frank about his work on creating the Infernal music.

SOON-TO-BE AKA THE STORMGATE HISTORIAN?

Hot off the presses, today the "StarCraft Historian" released an interview with Frost Giant Studios CEO and Production Director Tim Morten, in which Tim discusses the building blocks of Stormgate and how we are developing the future of RTS.

The SC Historian also recently posted a great interview with Cara LaForge that is definitely worth a watch. Cara and her sons, Nick "Tasteless" Plott and Sean "Day[9]" Plott, are considered the first family of RTS. We are lucky to have her tireless efforts and unflagging commitment to the RTS community supporting everything we do. Cara truly is the beating heart of our studio.

INFERNAL HOST UNIT REVEALS

With the introduction of the Infernal faction into the Closed Alpha build, there's been a tremendous amount of work for the art and design teams to get these units ready for playtesters. You can see some of the work going into the Infernals in this recent studio update, filmed once again by Chris Culp.

Featured in the video above, this unit is called the Spriggan (pronounced /sprɪdʒən/), and it's one of the latest units to join our Closed Alpha build. Its idle animation is shown here, but it has a bevy of other move, attack, reaction, and death animations that get triggered during gameplay. Flying units are a staple of diversified RTS armies, and more are coming to the Infernals... including this never-before revealed late-game Infernal unit, the Flayed Dragon

WHAT'S NEXT?

On behalf of the entire Frost Giant Studios team, we'd like to once again thank you for supporting Stormgate. We will finish the current alpha playtest in late October, but we are already hard at work preparing our next build (codenamed Devastator). We're incorporating as much of the valuable feedback that we received from playtesters as possible. Stay tuned!

Here's some good news: we are greatly increasing the number of playtesters in our next phase!

We can't wait to welcome many more of you into the game so that, together, we can continue to build the next great RTS.

Warmest regards,
Your friends at Frost Giant Studios