IMMORTAL: Gates of Pyre

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• Patch Notes·11 Jun 2025Official

  Patch Notes - Steam Next Fest 2025

  HighlightsNew Aru Immortal: Atzlan, Prophet of the RootsBots: Play against and with bots in 1v1, 2v2, and PvE modesCanyon (Mission): Procedurally generated PvEBuild Grid: For a more satsifying base building experienceNEWAtzlan - Prophet of the RootsOur First Permanent Hero ImmortalWhen we first set out to make Immortal, the question was raised whether Immortals would be Heroes on the battlefield like Warcraft 3 or Commanders like Starcraft 2 Co-op. To which we replied, why not both? This was eventually refined into 3 distinct Immortal categories. With the release of Atzlan, we now have representation from each category. Ajari, Orzum, and Mala are Commanders; Xol is a Temporary Hero; and Atzlan is a Permanent Hero. As the name suggests, Atzlan is a permanent fixture on the battlefield. You'll start with him in your base, and he'll only disappear when "killed". However, since he is immortal, he can be brought back for the low low price of 25 pyre. We've got some more mobile Permanent Heroes in development, but Atzlan is special in that he has 0 movement speed and can only live on one of his Root Buds. VanguardsResinant: A deployable *Artillery* unit that trades mobility for range and area damage. If you've been with us for a while, you'll remember this guy was once a standard Aru unit that was replaced with the Brood Anchor. Back from the dead (like all reborn) the Resinant features a minimum range when deployed and gets a maximum range boost when deployed on Rootway.Root Shepherd: A fast, anti-light *Skirmisher* unit that helps Atzlan spread the Rootway and can be upgraded to be hidden while on Rootway. The Root Shepherd has a bouncing attack that does less damage on each bounce.PowersSummon Root Bud: Summon a Root Bud at the target location. Over time the Root Bud will spread Rootway to a maximum distance. Root Buds can only be Summoned near Strongholds (Grove Hearts and God Hearts) or other Root Buds and only on Rootway. This spell is cooldown only (no Pyre cost) a...
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• Community & Events·3 Jun 2025Official

  Steam Next Fest, New Immortal & Trailer!

  Hey Immortals!We are excited to announce that we are participating in Steam Next Fest: June Edition from June 9th-16th! Our newest build will be available for all to play, for free, for a whole week. We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed making it!What’s in this demo?New Immortal!From the churning depths rises Atzlan, Prophet of the Roots! Embody the might of the Deep with this powerful positional commander. Spread the rootway and rule the overgrown land as an undying green king!Atzlan’s playstyle is unique among the Aru Immortals, combining powerful spells with an on the battlefield presence. As the Root Prophet, it’s important to grow your territory siege-range zone control and terrain manipulation. Here’s a rundown of his kit!Passive: Green Thrumb: Friendly units regenerate health quickly around the Prophet.Utility: Summon Root Bud: Atzlan summons a rootbud in a location with rootway, expanding more rootway outward in a significant radius. Atzlan can store six charges so you can choose where and when you want to expand the rootway.Ability 1: Prophet of the Roots: The Prophet teleports to any root bud on the map, applying his passive and granting increased sight and full rootway instantly.Ability 2: Wall of Roots: After a brief casting ritual, Atzlan summons a barrier of durable roots, denying pathing to all units in an area. The wall lasts indefinitely when connected to rootway and slowly decays when disconnected. Enemies can attack the wall to break through.Ultimate: Summon Deep Wyrm: After a brief wind up, Atzlan calls a mighty beast from the God-Tree’s ecosystem to do battle! The invincible Wyrm (affectionately called “Steve” by our playtesters), is not controllable, but actively hunts down nearby enemies near the rootway, dealing immense damage and displacing enemies with its powerful attack. The Wyrm retreats to the Deep after 20 seconds.2 New Units Added!Atzlan brings two unique units with him to the battlefield: the Root Shepherd and the Resin...
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• Announcements·18 Apr 2025Official

  Angels and Prophecies: Design Lessons from Q'rath

  Introduction: Hello, dear community! Dylan “ItWhoSpeaks” Kahn here. While we wait for our summer playtest, I wanted to give you some insight regarding our first faction: Q'rath, the Angelic Empire. This article is a bit of a retrospective, in which we often perform post-mortem covering what we did well and where we made mistakes, with Q’rath being a poignant reflection of what we learned in our modding days. This is an expansive topic, so I feel it's important that we start at the beginning. Part 1: Solving Design Challenges & The Vanguard Prototype As some of you know, we got our start as modders in the StarCraft II community, beginning around the late “Wings of Liberty” era in the year leading up to Heart of the Swarm's beta phase. If you played during that time, you will remember that SCII was a very different experience with very conservative strategies. This was due to the high-lethality gameplay where games could just end in the blink of an eye. Additionally, It was just safer (and optimal) to have no more than three mining bases, defending aggression until you could field a large endgame army. In general, matches at the time, as engaging as they were, didn't feel as fun as games of Brood War despite the many advances in UI and pathing. As passionate StarCraft fans, we wanted to learn why the two games felt so different. Generally, it boiled down to SCII having a much shorter time to kill (the time it takes a unit to die in an average match up) relative to its predecessor, StarCraft: Brood War. There were a few reasons for this: SCII pathing was very good, allowing units to bunch up into tight “balls,” allowing more ranged fire-power to be packed into tighter spaces. SCII opted for a simplified damage system where units would deal bonus damage to armored or light targets that generally made “hard-counter” relationships more pronounced. “Area of Effect” spells such as “Psionic Storm” and “Fungal Growth” ended up being balanced against these “death-balls” in suc...
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• Announcements·14 Mar 2025Official

  Ballots and Bullets: Building the Iron Republic

  “Glory, Glory unto Jora, Earned by the blood of the fearless, Glory, Glory unto Jora, May their dreams march ever on!” -National Anthem of the United Republics of Jora, Excerpt Introduction: Greetings community, Dylan “ItWhoSpeaks” Kahn here. It is with great pleasure that we share our first look at what we have been cooking. Consider this our “Jora Faction Preview” complete with mechanics and (some) units! Before we get into it, I want to answer a long-standing question community members (and a few media folks) have asked over the last two years. Since the beginning of 2025, we have pledged to be more open about our development process. Consider us making good on that promise. (Feel free to scroll down to the mechanics and units if this isn't of interest to you.) Where is Jora and why is it taking so long? Many of you have been with us over this long journey to make real this game and will remember we talked about the Iron Republic (along with many other factions). Ultimately, we underestimated the significant workload required by the Aru faction and logistics required to make Immortals at the quality we wanted. In short, we were junior game developers learning how to make a very large and complicated product. As an example, In RTS games, many devs wisely look to reusable rigs and animation sets due to the immense number of assets that go into a fully-fleshed out faction (to put things in perspective, the average RTS faction has about as many animated assets as a smallish-sized FPS game.) Aru doesn't have that. Every unit is a custom rig due to our desire to have iconic and memorable creatures. Since bringing on our veteran Art Pipeline director, a lot of our processes have become more streamlined, efficient, and time-effective and these upgrades have been applied to our work on Jora. A year ago, we decided to focus our efforts on building out more effective systems both internally and on our back-end with the goal to increase the visual quality, UX quality, stabil...
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• Announcements·15 Feb 2025Official

  Masks and Amber: A Developer Blog

  {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45111480/399c12d84477921350ade07893f8f27bb080aa05.png Greetings, dear friends! Welcome to our first Developer Blog of 2025. It's been a hot minute since we last talked about the design decisions that go into Gates of Pyre, so we are taking this opportunity between playtests to give you an update on our fifth (and sixth) immortals. Before we do so, I should probably go over the Immortal system, its history, and why we believe it can make a significant contribution to the RTS genre. Let's get into it. The History As many of you know, SunSpear originated in the StarCraft II modding scene. Taking the lessons we had learned from StarBow, the Community PTR mod: OneGoal, and TheCore, we set about trying to build a game that combined the strengths of real-time strategy with the advantages of the rising MOBA genre. All of us had played DOTA and LoL extensively and in those games, we saw many lessons that could be applied to RTS. Specifically, MOBAs had a face that casual and midcore players could associate with (both emotionally and with a particular play-style within the game's ecosystem.) Additionally, the kits provided by MOBA heroes/champions formed an intricate matrix of combinations, allowing for elaborate team compositions and deep strategy that only grew with the addition of new characters. Of course, RTS wasn't unaware of this “innovation.” WarCraft III put leveling hero characters as the centerpieces of a player's army. However, in our experimentation we found that the design pressures exerted by permanent hero units are extreme and ultimately demand an enormous amount of content be built around them in order to deliver the fantasy alongside satisfying and fair gameplay. We tried many ways of porting hero units into a modern big army context, but none of them worked. It was only when we began approaching these heroes as a commander (like the gods of Age of Mythology), that things started to click. Commander abilities let the player intervene in a...
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