Gameplay Award Nomination and Continued Console Work

We've been nominated for Best Gameplay at the Brazil Indie Games Festival! You can find out more about the nominees here. The BIG festival is the largest international indie game festival in Latin America, and it's quite an honour to be nominated! Even coming from Canada, we know how important the indie game industry is to Brazil as we've seen a large representation of Brazilians at trade shows, conferences, and even met with trade commissioners from Brazil on several occasions.

What about console development? As you may know, we're working on console ports for PS4, XboxOne and Nintendo Switch at the same time, which isn't a simple task. Next month I'll include some information about what's involved in porting the game to these consoles, but for now I'll just update you on where we're at. 

Right now, the game is functional on all platforms but still missing some things. I'm not sure what we're allowed to say or not say, but basically we're working on some known issues / improvements that involve player displays, links to accounts like PSN or XboxLive, and we're waiting on some third-parties to update their software so that it works with the newest version of Unity (our game engine).

The next steps, once these things are sorted out, is to send to a company for pre-certification testing. What they'll do is look at all of the requirements that the platforms have (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) and make sure to test our game with those specific things in mind. They'll work closely with us to tell us what we need to fix to pass certification, and then we'll send to cert with the hopes of passing on the first try (most games take a few tries to pass).

As you might also know, we're working on new content which we'll announce when we announce our launch date but we need to pass certification first so that we don't end up in trouble with not enough time to do what we need to do. This is actually something that's important to note here... often times teams will get in trouble having promised launch dates and then they need to either delay their launch (which messed up their PR and press coverage) or they work 16 hour days for 2 weeks and burn out and quit games and hate their lives. We'd like to avoid either of those things, so this is why we're making sure not to announce too much too early.

More updates coming soon!

Console Work and Other Affairs

Hello friends!

We've decided to change these development blog posts from weekly to monthly, as we've realized we don't have that much to say when we're not allowed to talk about the new stuff being worked on.

Console work is moving along, and we've recently taken a step away from the consoles to finish up the new feature that we're saving for console launch. What's left to do on consoles is to implement the social features (signing into PSN and other networks) and some console-specific features which we haven't created yet. Then, we go through the list of requirements for each console and make sure the game handles everything correctly before sending our game to official certification with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

As we work on the console ports and the new feature and as we continue to receive bug reports, we've been making smaller changes that should help the online stability and make for a smoother play experience. This includes a bug that we recently pinpointed that wouldn't allow players to join lobbies properly sometimes, and as we keep working we keep finding new things to fix (such is the life of game development).

There's also been some slightly more boring and slightly less game-related news. We've been preparing for localizing (translating) the new content into different languages, setting up for worldwide ratings (there are many different systems in different countries that require different application forms and documentation), and we've gotten a company insurance plan so that we can all be healthy and keep making great games forever (hence the picture of fruit, cause we eat that, cause we're healthy... or something).

Apart from that, everything is going great with our new artist Fabio, and despite the fact that it's been raining non-stop every day for the last month, our spirits are high and we're pushing forward toward console launch with confidence and with excitement about what's to come next for both PC and console users.

Short Update on Development

Hi everyone! Short update this week since we're not allowed to talk about the new content that we're making. I mean... what? What new content?

Things are going well as we approach our console launch, slated for this summer. The Switch was giving us the most difficulty as we were getting weird crashes without any information in the output. Well, we got some information, sometimes, but it was often in Japanese and didn't help much even with Google Translate. In the last few weeks though, we've gotten major Switch functionality, and it's almost on par with the other consoles. We're waiting on some plugins from external partners to be updated so that we can hook up the online play and move forward with the social stuff.

Apart from that, we're working on new content that we'll announce at some point in the coming months. In a world of games press, it's important not to divulge all of the information immediately, as press doesn't like to cover stuff that's been "public" already, even if that's just on our site. It's exciting though, you'll see! 

Our new artist, Fabio, has been working out wonderfully (not like working out at the gym, though maybe he does that too) and we've been super impressed with his quality and speed of his work. We're really happy to have him on board and it'll help make the future of the game more full of cool stuff.

That's pretty much all we have to update you on today, but we'll be back next week with... something!