The Ascent
GameBy Neon Giant · Released Jul 29, 2021
Documents about The Ascent
PocketGamer.biz12 min
Understanding what the market wants - Stuart Dinsey from Curve Games
Curve Games, a mid-sized British indie publisher, is strategically expanding its global distribution and market presence by prioritizing direct-to-consumer pathways and emerging regional markets.
- Curve Games is bypassing traditional platform limitations by using Xsolla-powered micro-sites to implement localized payment methods and capture direct consumer data.
- The publisher is targeting the MENA region for growth, which currently represents 1.5% of its business but is identified as a high-potential market due to rising indie developer activity.
- Curve Games’ strategy for emerging markets involves moving away from Western-centric exports to focus on identifying and cultivating regional intellectual property with global appeal.
PocketGamer.bizJul 2025
Game Developers Conference52 min
Building the World of 'The Ascent'
The development of the cyberpunk action game The Ascent demonstrates how a small team can achieve high-fidelity world-building through a strictly constrained, tech-driven production pipeline.
- The development team managed over 8,000 individual assets by utilizing a modular construction pipeline that prioritized shared texture sheets and trim sheets over traditional high-to-low poly workflows.
- Strict adherence to a three-color palette and the use of vertex colors combined with light-baked ambient occlusion kept total texture memory usage under 100MB.
- Procedural tools built in Houdini were essential for generating architectural elements like rooms and pipes, allowing a small team to populate a sprawling environment efficiently.
Game Developers ConferenceSep 2022
Companies behind it
As the documents state it.