T-Shirts Shipped, Character and Block Work

Hi everyone!

Wish I had some monumental epic news to report, but unfortunately I don't! We're working on the real "production" now... we know what we need to do and we're doing it. We're not as distracted by shows and events right now, so we're moving along nicely.

One nice thing is that the t-shirts have shipped (last week)! You should be receiving them in the next little while, if you backed at the t-shirt tier and haven't gotten it in the next week or so, shoot us an email and we'll try to figure it out.

Beyond that, there's work being done to create a new website for the company and the game, and setting up the online store! We're pretty much out of t-shirts, but we have hand-knitted hats to sell and would like to have the store up and running for when we have new shirts printed.

Alex is still working on getting the network stuff happening, and it seems to be progressing quite nicely. Look! Network stuff in the picture!

Kyler is at work on Kickstarter backer designed blocks and levels, so there's plenty of work to be done. I'm getting in touch with and following up with Kickstarter backers, so if I haven't followed up with you in a little while about designing a block or character, it's because we're working on the ones that we already need to mock up. Once we have a mock-up and send it back to the backers, we'll get started on the next ones.

That's about all there is to update for now!

Working Hard on Online Multiplayer & Kickstarter Rewards!

Hello hello! Back again this week with a rather short update. We’re in full-on development mode, free from having to prepare for shows or press releases, and working hard with our heads down. A quick update now to shine light on what our three team members are doing.

Our programmer, Alex, has been working on online multiplayer. Unity, the game engine we use, recently put out an update and their network code has changed. Seeing as everything is new, there isn’t much documentation on it so there are very few solved problems. The process is going well though, and we have some basic functionality (i.e. one computer knows the other one exists, etc.).

Our artist, Kyler, has been working on the Kickstarter rewards where backers got to choose to design a level, design a block, or design a character. The character animations have a ton of frames and each one is hand-drawn, so this can take a while. We need to make sure to optimize cuteness and minimize time, and it’s a balance we’re learning.

The write of these blogs, Richard, has been doing all the other stuff. That’s generally what he does for the company. This includes filing taxes for the end of the month, figuring out marketing and PR strategy, starting the redesign of the company site, and cleaning up the game design document so that the rest of the team can refer to it if need be.

That’s all for this week! Next week, as usual, we’ll have another post!

Our Experience at Boston FIG

On the road again… ♫

Feels like we were just in Seattle, a couple of weeks ago. Oh right, that’s cause we were! Well this past weekend we ventured down to Boston, a little closer to our hometown Montreal, to participate in the Boston FIG (Festival of Indie Games)

The FIG is quite a bit smaller than PAX Prime was (7,000 people compared to 70,000) but was still a lot of fun, and we actually had a chance to run around and play some of the other sweet games at the festival. It was quite crowded, and our booth was busy as usual 

The booth looked the same as it has at other festivals, so far it seems to be working alright! The reason we raise the TV is so that people who are standing behind the players can watch; we don’t like to discriminate against short people.

Next step is getting two 52″ TVs… ha. One day.

Oh, and we also won an award! Actually, we won two! Super honoured and thankful to be able to accept the awards for “Best in Show” and for “Audience Choice Award”! Great thanks to the folks who set up the show, and for the wonderful audience for loving our game!

We played some great games there, a couple of the most notable in my mind were the following:

Smorball

Smorball is a typing game that uses words from old scanned images from the Smithsonian library and has you type them quickly to beat up robots.

Fat Mask

Fat mask is an awesome colour-matching multiplayer puzzle brawler speed game. Not sure how PaperCult pitches it, but it’s probably better than that. Anyway in Fat Mask, your goal is to match blocks of the same colours together. You pick them up and throw them at piles of a similar colour to create combos, then throw another block to confirm the group; this puts the number of points equal to the number of blocks into your score.

Many awesome games were played, lots of fun was had, and we really appreciate the FIG organizers for making such a sweet event every year.

Thanks, and look for more updates next week!