Hi, everyone.

10 years ago, on 20th of August 2015, I published a full version of Castle of no Escape 1 on itch.io, GameJolt and IndieDB.

Today I make Castle of no Escape 1, 2, and the original+arranged soundtrack free, to commemorate this anniversary, and to put a period on the series.

As a D. E. X. Team, we've tried to make Castle of no Escape 3 for 6 years and failed. None of the prototypes were good enough for us to make them into a full game. Perhaps we were aiming too high, or we've lost the team spirit that we had back in ConE2 times. For history, I've uploaded these prototypes to https://xitilon.itch.io/castle-of-no-escape-3-canceled

Then life went completely bizarre. On 18th of February, 2022, Esdeer passed away from complications connected to his alcohol abuse. We knew of his state, but there's only so much two internet friends can do, living hundreds of kilometers away. In fact, D. E. X. Team never gathered in a single room, ever.

In less than a week after that, martial law was introduced in Ukraine, severely limiting any game development or publishing of Xitilon. It's been 3.5 years as of this announcement, and still going.

We were DEX, now we're just a sad DX smiley face, and not really a team anymore. I thought we could envision some new development of the series, but after this many years, I came to conclusion that it won't ever be the true Castle of no Escape without Esdeer, who was the author of just about everything you see in the game except the game's code: the plot, the visuals, the music, even the manuals.

ConE2 went far. It was a long and exciting adventure. I'm grateful to the fans of the game and would like to give a special thanks to those who took their time to translate it to 30 languages. Not even most AAA games have this many. It's a small game, and perhaps some translations are not ideal, but what a trip!

We've got onto Xbox, then PlayStation 4, then Switch. We could've made these ports free as well, but console publishing rules specify that if we make it free, we should monetize it somehow anyway, be it with subscriptions, in-game purchases or something else. This goes against our ideals of game development, so the consoles ports stay non-free.

On another note, we realize that ConE2 has its flaws which we won't be addressing, so we've decided to open the source code of the game, with a non-commercial use license. This means that anyone can compile and run ConE2 using the free version of GameMaker, and mod it in any way desired, but not sell the results. We don't promise updating the game on Steam, though. This game brings up just about too many bad memories as well as good ones. ConE1 code is now also open source for the same purpose, with the same license.

We used to have many ideas in store for the series. "Make your own No Escape game" where you could replace the artefacts, monsters and items with your own ones. "Evilversary" event or update on 6 years, 6 months and 6 days of ConE2 (that would've been in June of 2023). Hero palette customization. Attack animation of Lamia enemy. 14th of February aka Valentine's day game mode where heroes, gold and potions are pink. ConE1 and 2 crossover which would introduce the ConE2 enemies into ConE1 and vice versa. ConE0 the prequel, Heroes of no Escape the Heroes of Might and Magic-like. Tower of no Escape the pre-prequel. Land of no Escape the metroidvania. Something else of no Escape the Ghost Busters like. Some game was isometric. Some game had an open world. But we're too late. Even this announcement is made on 21th of August in most parts of the world instead of 20th. Still, it's here.

https://youtu.be/rAuG_xBjFI0Esdeer's last track, for Tower of no Escape

"DragonLord" - Esdeer's last drawing, of the TonE protagonist.

It's all just a history now. And you're free to build upon ours, if you wish so.

https://github.com/Xitilon/castle-of-no-escape-1-and-2-free