The inception of Boxelware

History

Recent


The second DLC for Avorion is out now! Explore the rifts in new missions, experience a new story line, hire new captain classes and and much, much more! Check the DLC out on Steam!

Early History

Avorion started out on December 31st 2011, when koonschi had an idea for a game that would combine two of his most loved games: Minecraft and X. It was developed as a one man hobby project alongside his studies of computer science at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen Nuremberg. Six months later a website was set up, a name was found, and the first demo was released. More and more demo versions have been released over time, building a small community of fans.

 

Steam Greenlight

During this time of development, Hannes, the musician for Avorion, joined Koonschi and started composing the first tracks for Avorion. The development of Avorion continued, slowly but steadily. Finally all the boring stuff had been resolved and enough features and visuals were in, so the trailer could be made. Avorion was put on Steam Greenlight and got greenlit!

This first success made it clear: Avorion had a chance. So Koonschi got a second developer, Philipp, to help out and together they started Boxelware!

 

Kickstarter Campaign

Next step in the development of Avorion was to produce a playable demo. Version 0.8 got released January 2016 on the Avorion Website. After a few more updates to improve gameplay and visuals the team decided to start a Kickstarter campaign – and got funded!

 

Early Access on Steam

In January 2017 we released Avorion in Early Access on Steam. Since then a lot of development happened – Tons of new features like alliances, a multi-threaded architecture, new combat mechanics involving specialized enemies, torpedoes and fighter squadrons, story missions and bosses and many more! Check out Avorion on Steam if you want to know more about the game.
During this time the team grew, and now features four developers, a game designer and a community manager. Additionally we have a part-time developer that helps out with the technical bits and always one or two interns.

 

Full Release on Steam and Humble Store


On March 9th was the big day! Avorion left Early Access! With a tremendous 91% positive review rate, Avorion is now starting into its final phase. Boxelware will further maintain the game for at least a year. Several free content updates and one or two DLCs are planned.

 

Update 2.0

Avorion has now undergone so many improvements that it was ready to have a 2 in front of its version number. This update contains so many Quality of Life features, e.g. a much improved UI, so many improved features and tons of new features. The gameplay feels smoother than ever!

Avorion Launch Trailer

We're the guys bringing you Avorion.

The Team

Meet the Team! We’re also working closely with our composer, Hannes Kretzer.

Konstantin ‘koonschi’ Kronfeldner 
Founder, Lead Developer

Inventor of Avorion, jack of all gamedev trades, coder and driving force of the game. Big fan of C++, Star Wars and heavy metal music. He’s the main Avorion game designer, idea maker and in charge of the gameplay development and performance.
Nick is pronounced ‘konshi’, just in case you were wondering.

Philipp ‘qui_sum’ Erhardt 
Developer

Gifted with a calm, analytical mind, he’s the one who always knows what to do when things get stuck or out of control. Walking library for all things unix and technical, Philipp is the dev for tools, linux, backend and graphics features. Master of silly puns.
He also wrote his own pdf viewer.

Margareta ‘cepheni’ Schieber
Developer

Maggy has many roles: She takes care of the community, develops, is our hard-working team assistant and takes care of all things that sometimes occur outside the normal development cycle, such as conferences. She also takes care of bug reports and all other things the community has to tell us.

Hans Spath
Developer

He always had a passion for games and software development and recently took the courage to combine them in his profession. Hans likes playing around with tooling, algorithms and debugging. Also, he sometimes participates in competitive programming events for fun.

Felix ‘schiebi’ Schieber
Game Designer

Walking encyclopedia (“I recently watched a documentary on YouTube about…”). He not only loves playing video games – especially multiplayer – since he was a little “schiebi”, but also regularly attends live role-playing events. Twice a week he has to eat Dürüm kebab. That’s his law.

Mark Lacina
Game Designer

He was born into gaming, one of his oldest memories is playing Mega Man 2 on NES together with his father. Since then his love for retro games and pixel graphics has only increased over time. Besides gaming his passions include: Horror Movies and Heavy Metal Music. His duties include Game, UI and UX Design.

Sydney Murphy
2D/3D Art Generalist

Sydney works on the visual aspects of our games. She identifies as some sort of artist and aspires to either become an expert at something or good enough at everything. Working towards this goal, she has become a serial online course buyer and starter, though she has yet to finish one…

Kai Schüz
Junior 2D/3D Art Generalist

Kai is very passionate about art and likes to work in both 2D and 3D. Besides ever-shifting interests he’s into Game Jams, Creature Design, Tabletop RPGs, and coming up with stories and worldbuildings.

Anja Heinzelmann
Team Assistant

Anja takes care of all administrative and organisational tasks. Allowing for our team to work without any distractions and making sure that we are represented at conferences and other events. Besides taking the heat off our team, she likes to repeatedly re-watch and re-read her favourite TV-shows and books, since she is convinced that you can never do this too often.

Jan Martens
Working Student

Calm and too tall for the seat spacing in public transportation. A big fan of RPG‘s and Strategy Games since childhood. Knights of the old Republic, Battle for Middle Earth and Empire at War started it all. When he isn’t nerding out about games, he probably geeks about movies or music. Jan wanders around the depths of the bugtracker hunting for bugs and takes every opportunity to help with game design.