Sometimes, you can still find barbarians who can come and kill everyone in the fields sometimes. You can fish for a living at Clockwork Labs. But it has long-term progress and should have political systems like Eve Online, where there is conflict between civilizations.
It’s similar to elements of free trade in games like Runescape, or changing the world like you might in Minecraft. Focusing more on that means you have to create a dynamic world where the players are creating things themselves. “Building and building things like farming, fishing, trade, free trade, and things like that, which often get cut, is what we want to build at the forefront. It’s less about heroic roles like fighting monsters and more about roles where you’re building or farming. But this community sandbox is like a dynamic world, where players build new things like a road connecting two cities or a sea trade route. Other worlds are more battle-focused and static, Cloutier said.
This time I had a chance to go deeper with Cloutier. Headquarters is primarily in San Francisco, but Cloutier said the studio is working entirely remotely, with employees from around the world. The company had earlier raised $4.3 million in August 2021. Game Design This unique combination of innovation, both in infrastructure and in infrastructure, stands before us, and follows in the footsteps of companies like Epic Games that have been able to innovate along both dimensions.”Ĭlockwork Labs was established in 2019. In an email to Gamesbeat, A16z’s Lai said, “We were impressed by how the Clockwork Labs team is building both a compelling game at Bitcraft as well as new proprietary technology in its underlying database architecture. The company, which is founded by engineers with strong computer science backgrounds, is actively recruiting compiler, database and distributed systems engineers as it seeks to make the basic technology for Bitcraft available as a standalone product to other developers. The company’s first game project, Bitcraft, has received widespread positive reception since it was announced in September last year, the company said.Īlessandro Asoni, co-founder of Clockwork Labs, said in a statement, “Additional capital has been raised that will allow us to expand the team, and we can now create even better ways to meet all the challenges of building an ambitious game world like Bitcraft’s.” are equipped with.” “Aside from the obvious benefits of having additional funding, we are particularly pleased that so many skilled industry innovators share our belief in the BitKraft project.”Īlessandro Asoni is the co-founder of Clockwork Labs.Ĭlockwork Labs is looking to attract engineering and game programming talent while expanding the team to other areas. In Bitcraft, you can become a mason if you want. So they are, in their own way, level designers,” said Cloutier. Whereas what we are doing is we are letting the players change and make the worlds themselves. “If you have to make a static world, doing that requires a lot of artist and a lot of actual level design. Overall, the game is more human directed when it comes to the design. And this is our perspective on player content and procedurally generated. So this is stuff that doesn’t require a huge team to make, but does require some advanced technology. “We are really focusing more on the players creating the content and more on the procedurally generated content. “We set out to make games and it was definitely part of our calculus that we didn’t have the ability to try and build games in the style of traditional MMOs,” said Tyler Clotier, cofounder of Clockwork Labs. Tyler Cloutier is the cofounder of Clockwork Labs. All of this is great for a company that has just 16 people. A16z and Baszucki join an existing list of investors and game industry veterans and leaders, including Supercell, CCP Games CEO Hilmar Petersen, and Unity cofounder David Helgason.Ĭlockwork Labs credits Skycatcher, a games-focused investment fund based in Texas, with providing the first major funding that helped jumpstart the project. Roblox founder and CEO David Baszuki also participated in the round as a private investor. learn more.Ĭlockwork Labs has raised $22 million to develop Bitcraft, its community sandbox massively multiplayer online role-playing game.Īndreessen Horowitz led the round to further develop his community sandbox MMORPG, Bitcraft, with a new unannounced database technology that powers the game. Interested in knowing what’s next for the gaming industry? Join gaming executives to discuss emerging segments of the industry this October at Gamesbeat Summit Next.