Subworld
Subworld is a two-person independent game studio based near Gothenburg, Sweden.
It has been run since its founding day in summer 2015 by Daniel “Squarebit” Stigsjöö. In 2021, Daniel’s fiancée Marika “Marruu” Assgård joined the team. They are now working multiple projects together, big and small, and will release them whenever they’re done :-)
Chronicon
Chronicon is the first commercial game developed by Subworld. It was originally meant to be a small rogue-lite game, a yearlong project at the most.
However it rapidly grew into something much, much larger, and after a year and a half of quiet development, Chronicon was submitted to Steam Greenlight as an ARPG.
In no more than 2 weeks, Chronicon was approved by the Steam Community, and was soon released in the Early Access program.
Here it spent 5 years, growing from a small and simple game into a fully fledged ARPG.
During this time, a community also formed around Chronicon. Members of the community would enthusiastically share their ideas and suggestions with each other and the developer, and many of those ideas are in the game today.
In August 2020, Chronicon finally graduated from Early Access and became a full game.
Chronicon greatly exceeded both reception and sales expectations, and earned a Silver award as a top Early Access Graduate of 2020.
In February 2022, after a year and a half of free updates and improvements, Chronicon’s first DLC – Ancient Beasts – was released. Following that, more free content updates, and ultimately the second and final DLC – The Mechanist – was released in January of 2023. By April of the same year, Chronicon Complete had launched on GOG.com, STOVE, and GX.games as alternatives to Steam.
Chronicon: Survivors
As Subworld’s next game project entered the prototype phase and artists were hired, Squarebit found himself having a lot of downtime, and decided to start a little pet project in the meantime. Having recently discovered the trending Survivors genre Squarebit wanted to “take a poke at that” and after about 6 months, ended up with Chronicon: Survivors. It was a breath of fresh air to do a 6 month project after a 9 year project, and it also offered an unique opportunity to try some ideas that were scrapped from Chronicon. C:S also features several assets that never made it into Chronicon, such as item sprites and enemies.
Once again composer Michael G. Woodley joined forces and created an original, heavy, energetic soundtrack – mixing in a lot references to the original game.
Releasing on August 21st 2024 – the 4th anniversary of Chronicon’s release – Squarebit would then shift his attention back to the next big game…
Next Big Game
Started in the fall of 2023, the Next Big Game is a big step up in visual fidelity for Subworld. Moving away from pixel art, the game focuses on big, detailed, isometric landscapes and 2D bone rigging for animations.
This is a massive undertaking and a large challenge, but Subworld is up for the task! Even though the team has grown substantially with 3 artists working together to bring it to life, the game is expected to take a while to finish. Not 9 years, but a while nonetheless.
With higher expectations from both Subworld and fans, updates will be scarce until the game is closer to being finished… but keep an eye out, as it’ll surely be worth the wait!