Hello everyone! We’re excited to announce that the next version of Colossus will be released on December 1st, 2025. You’ll be able to download it directly through this newsletter once it’s live! This update marks a major milestone for us — not just in features, but also in
Housing in Colossus In earlier builds of Colossus, housing was handled through a single type of building. This house could either be dedicated to one family or opened up for multiple workers. While the idea gave players some flexibility, in practice it created problems. Managing residents required a lot of
Today we want to take you deeper into the economy of Colossus by presenting our newest workshops, their input and output resources, and how they tie together in production lines that shape the lifeblood of your village. To better understand this, we distinguish between two categories of workshops: resource production
This month's status update focuses on something every player sees right away when launching Colossus – the main menu. But first, let me properly introduce myself: I'm Alessio and I joined Emil and Justus specifically to work on and improve upon the placeholder user interfaces implemented by
In Colossus, each villager begins their journey as a Level 1 Settler—a poor nomad in search of a home. As their basic needs are met, they begin to grow families, advance socially, and gain new rights within the village. Children and adults share many needs, though some (like tools)
Defining the art style also entailed the long-overdue revision and creation of the characters for our villagers. With limited experience in 3D modeling tools like Blender, this initially seemed like a significant challenge. However, without any 3D artists on the team and no financial resources to hire external help, we
Today, we’re excited to dive deeper into some of the most important mechanics that shape life in our village: the Family System Let’s start by taking a closer look at the foundation of village life — the family. In the beginning, your starting villagers are individuals without ties. However,
In a previous post, we explored how buildings in our game are constructed step by step, bringing them to life through smooth animation sequences (see: Artstyle Overhaul). 0:00 /0:22 1× But what happens after a building is finished? That’s where building upgrades come into play. Upgrades are
First lets create a new texture from Scratch In our game development process, we focus on low-poly textures to maintain a stylized, efficient, and visually appealing aesthetic. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how we create our textures using GIMP, a free yet powerful tool we’ve relied
We've taken a fresh approach to our art style, moving away from realism in favor of a more refined low-poly aesthetic. This shift means a complete visual overhaul, covering: * Buildings * Characters * Landscape * GUI To streamline the process, we’ve divided the workload: Justus is sculpting characters in Blender,
In Colossus, the foundation of our gameplay revolves around a dynamic economy system. Today, let’s dive into the first iteration of our buildings and production lines, highlighting how they bring the world of Colossus to life. Current Building Categories Our initial build includes four distinct types of buildings: 1.
🎉 Introducing BeerCaller – The Ultimate Thirst Signal App! 🍺 Ever found yourself parched, your beer glass tragically empty, while your friends are blissfully unaware of your desperate need for a refill? Fret no more – BeerCaller is here to save the day (and your thirst)! This is our second mobile app, and we’
Introducing Our First Mobile App: A Fun and Fast Card Game! We're excited to present our debut mobile application, a simple yet entertaining card game that's all about luck! Designed for quick and casual fun, this game is perfect for when you need a little break.
Today, we're excited to revisit our old RTS project, which began as a passion inspired by countless hours playing Stronghold Legends and Age of Empires. While these classics were our primary influences, we aimed to integrate features from Paradox’s Grand Strategy Games and Civilization to create something
We have developed numerous projects and faced a myriad of challenges. Today, we want to share what we've learned from creating our old RTS and how we're applying those lessons to the development of Colossus to avoid past mistakes. This post aims to aid other developers
"Colossus" is the working title for our ambitious RTS project. In 2019, Justus and Emil began working on an RTS, referred to in other posts as the "old RTS." Colossus represents our renewed effort to bring our unique ideas to life in the RTS genre. Below,
* Dynamic Global Illumination Method: None * Reflection Method: None * Shadow Map Method: Shadow Maps (only if you do not use Nanite)
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"General Kenobi".... Hello stranger, as you have stumbled upon this page why don't you stay a minute and see what this is all about. We are Justus and Emil from SparkLaB Studios. We are both Software developers and have been crafting video games since 2015. Since
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This is SparkLaB Studios, a brand new site by Justus Leichtweiß and Emil Bartoldus that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new