About

Initial development started pretty slow. As it turns out, figuring out all the parts of how an RPG works is not that easy: You need maps, npcs, battles, a story, a main-menu, explosions and a lot more. Instead of using an engine like RPG Maker to hit the ground running, Markus decided to build everything from scratch, because this way "we have more control later on".

A few of the first screens from 2016, including an early map editor (middle)

After about a year in development, we premiered our first demo at the Reversed Game Festival in Vienna, Austria. Seeing people sit down for 30 minutes and complete the full demo was a truly special moment for us 😊Demoing the first time at Reversed Game Festival in Vienna, 2017

2018: A new battle system ⚔

When watching players play at the festival, we realized something was off with the battles! Based on the feedback we gathered, we did a complete rewrite of the combat system to make it more engaging. We kept the classic turn-based nature that allows you to plan ahead, but added a unique timing mechanic that adds a bit of skill to each battle.

Early prototype of the timed-hit battle system

2019 & 2020: Finding Focus 🎯

An RPG is a big logistic undertaking. Until now we got away by just throwing everything in Discord but by 2019 our lack of organization started to show. Things got lost, we had different versions of the game in our head and because a chat like Discord is linear, it creates an ASAP culture which often also lacks context. The way we solved that is using a wiki as a "source of truth" and switch to an async model of communication. We also wrote an in-depth article about it.

Using Notion to organize the game's content

2021: The Last Dungeon! 🗺️

With our newfound focus, we started working on the last dungeon of the game, which would be quite different from your typtical RPG end-dungeon: An office building! Many players have highlighted this as their favorite part of the game, especially because it touches on themes like social criticism, modern office culture, and other aspects of everyday life.

Not your everyday office!

2022 & 2023: Steampage & Trailer 🎬

Until now, few people knew about our game, so we set out to change that! We made a website, a steampage and created a trailer. We got help from the amazing artist Sabbi Tabbi↗ who not only did portraits for our characters in game, but also created our Keyart, which we used on the website & steampage. Because she involved us in this process, you can also see how it came to be:

Keyart Illustration Timelapse

At the end of 2023, we believed our content was nearly complete — about 90% done. However, as tradition goes, the remaining 90% awaited us in 2024 😒

2024: Beta Testing & Launch 🚀

As we got closer to release, our todo lists got longer each week instead of shorter, even though we worked more on the project than ever before 🧐Number of commits/changes we made during the year. From July onwards we entered the infamouse crunchtime period!Early Sepember we started sending out a beta version, roughly 8 weeks prior to launch. Thanks to our testers we were able to catch most bugs before release. Finally, on October 30th 2024, after 8 years in development, we released Frameland to the world 🚀 It's been a long journey and we are very proud of what we have build. We hope you enjoy it ☺️