Dwellink: War of the Nine
by HighPassionStudios
Development Status: VERTICAL SLICE
A more advanced prototype is developed, incorporating early art, design, and core gameplay mechanics. A vertical slice is produced to demonstrate a polished, playable snapshot of the game.
FACTS
Title: Dwellink: War of the Nine
Studio: HighPassionStudios
Genre: Turn-based creature collection RPG
Planned release: Q4 2026
Platform: Steam first, Playstation and Xbox a few months later
Looking for: Looking only for investors. (VCs)
DESCRIPTION
Dwellink is a single-player creature collection RPG that combines the best the best elements of the “Souls” games, such as Elden Ring, with Pokémon mechanics and is being developed in Unreal Engine 5.
Through mixing the popular mechanics of games like Pokémon (collect monsters, training, evolving and sending them into turn-based battles) with features of the popular Souls franchise (dark and photorealistic fantasy worlds, a checkpoint/bonfire system and a high but rewarding level of difficulty), Dwellink fills a niche that no game has filled yet.
UNIQUENESS
All creature collection games out there are targeted at children (Pokémon, Digimon, TemTem, Nexomon..). They feature cute monsters, cel-shaded graphics and a story with no major stakes or serious topics. First game to change that was Palworld which released earlier this year, that put its focus on an older target group – with huge success.
The idea isn´t new though since we shared our first gameplay of our early Unity prototype for Dwellink as early as 2021 and have been working on a mature Pokémon-like adventure ever since (we switched to Unreal in Q4 2022). In contrast to Palworld Dwellink differs a lot as Dwellink is a Singleplayer game with turn-based battles in a photorealistic graphic style whilst Palworld is a multiplayer game with real time battles and a stylized graphic style. The idea of creating a team of powerful monsters is the same however.
Palworld opened the floodgates for Pokémon-like games and we are now already way ahead of our competition, especially since we’ve partnered with our Publisher Indie.io earlier this year.
ACHIEVEMENTS
- Q3 2022 – Finished Proof of Concept Prototype in Unity
- Q4 2022 – Exhibiting our Proof of Concept Prototype alongside an early version of the Visual Prototype at the Medientage München with great feedback from the player base, enforcing us in the believe that Dwellink is an highly anticipated game
- Q3 2023 – Finished Visual Prototype in Unreal
- Q4 2023 – Overwhelmingly positive feedback for our Visual Prototype from approximately 150 players over the course of three days at the Medientage München
- Q4 2023 – Hosting the Dwellink Creature Sketching Contest at the Medientage München with multiple submissions of different creature designs from more than 50 participants
- Q1 2024 – Securing a Publisher for Dwellink (Indie.io)
- Q2 2024 – Gathered more positive player feedback from approximately 50 players over the course of one day at the Medientage Nuremberg
- Q2 2024 – Official Dwellink Announcement via IGN with 10k+ views and ~5k whishlists gained
- Q2 2024 – Begin Final Production in partnership with Indie.io
ABOUT THE TEAM
The Studio
The team consists mainly of designers and programmers who studied Mediascience or Computergamescience in Bayreuth, Germany. The team currently consists of 11 people, who all work voluntairly on Dwellink in their freetime, until we can secure development funding for the game.
Also, many interns are helping us with development since the beginning of the studio. We have worked on many games before, either together or each of us on their own games before founding the studio.
Our game CybAR got awared the GamesPreis 2022 and our game Humanity won the German Multimedia Award mb21. Our relaxing puzzle game Qupid will release Q4 2024 on Android and iOS and is also published by Indie.io
The Game Hub
Games/Bavaria has been supporting our Studio since 2022, when we first got invited to showcase Dwellink for 3 days at Medientage München. Since then we have been part of countless Games/Bavaria progams such as the “Games/Bavaria X Representing Games Connection Program” or the current “Games/Bavaria Level UP Accelerator” and we have exhibited both our games Dwellink and Qupid multiple times on the Medientage München and Nuremberg through them.
We have also exhibited Dwellink multiple times on Events through Games/Bavaria and currently we have two mentors guiding us in business and game design related topics.
Studio contact: Jannik Fraunholz
Business mentor: Alexandra Palme
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SCREENSHOTS
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