Apocalypse Approaches is a roguelite where the world ends in 1 minute, and time is health. The time remaining in a run is represented by the Doomsday Clock. When damage is taken, you lose time, and you can defeat enemies to collect more time and stave off the apocalypse. When the clock strikes 0, well, the apocalypse has arrived: game over. 

Our roguelite meta-progression is focused around time manipulation. Your best builds don't just make you stronger; they let you master the flow of time itself. Since time is health, the world exists on a timeline. The apocalypse gets scarier as time approaches zero.

The setting is in the great Kingdom of Ankerrad, a civilization built atop an ancient ruined clockwork superstructure. At the foothills of the apocalypse, the world is stuck in a time-loop. One that only the player and certain NPCs can perceive. Uncover the mystery of the time-loop and save the townsfolk by successfully navigating the dangerous landscapes brought on by the end of the world!

Apocalypse Approaches is a spiritual successor to another game, sharing the same name (called The Apocalypse Approaches). That game was originally released in the summer of 2023 on itch.io, and developed by a few core members of ideo ame. It was a turn-based RPG with rogue-like mechanics where your skills cost time from a depleting clock. When the clock ran out, you would be thrown into the game's final boss with whatever build you'd managed to make in that period of time, with five in-game minutes to defeat the boss. 

A year after the release of the original game, ideo ame was formed in the summer of 2024. We decided to take the core concept of time being both your health and source of magic from the original The Apocalypse Approaches, and apply that to a top-down action roguelite. After spending a year ironing out the concept, taking demos to various events to test the core mechanic along with run progression, enemy designs, and combat ideas, we settled on a vision which we are currently in full-scale development of.

ideo ame is an independent game development studio based in North Carolina formed by a group of college friends. We were all members of the Video Game Development Club while in school at NC State University, and many of us held leadership positions in the club. Over the years we worked together on various game development projects, particularly for game jams either hosted by the club or more widely recognized jams such as Ludum Dare.

In the summer of 2024, we created a Discord server called "ideo ame evelopment lub" after graduating from college. It was named as a nod to the existing Video Game Development Club server, and to the club that brought us together. The purpose of the ideo ame evelopment lub server was to get together and develop a video game over the summer, with the intent of releasing in the fall while we all searched for jobs in the industry. Of course, the project we agreed to work on was a roguelite, so three short months quickly grew to several years as we learned what all we wanted to put into the game, and how serious we were about completing it to its fullest potential.

Fun Fact: Our company heart logo was inspired by our studio name, ideo ame, very roughly resembling the Latin words ‘ideo’ and ‘amor,’ for ‘therefore’ and ‘love.’ This was in combination with the idea that hearts are a widely known video game symbol that represent a player’s number of lives or health!