Wow! 2017 was a HUGE year for us! Even wist the rest of the world outside these studio walls not doing so well, in here everything’s coming up Milhouse! With this post, I wanted to take a trip back through the year and a brief look forward into next. It’s been an eventful year, so I hope you’re all comfy! ALL ABOARD!
Events: Everyone knows that we do a lot of events every year. This year was no exception! It saw us at: “UD Con” and “Municipal Brew Work’s Saint Patrick’s Day” in March, “Vector Conference” in April, “Future Awesome Camp” in June, “Indy PopCon” in July, Matsuricon in August, both “GDEX” and the “Kentucky Fried Pixels Launch Party” in September, “Pop-Up Con #2”, “Kabo”, and “Lexplay” in October, and “PopUp Con #3” in November! Holy cow!
On top of that, I also gave talks (a couple being Skype-based) at “Louisville Makes Games”, the “Fairfield Rotary Club” and the “West Virginia Game Developer Expo” as well!
Now, I bet you’re asking yourself, “which event was the best”? Well jokes on you: we don’t do that around here! Ultimately, big or small, long or short, high budget or low budget, we love all these events equally! Events like these are an opportunity to show off our games, make new friends and fans, han out with firends and fans from events past, and give cool industry talks… you just can’t beat that! As hokey as it may sound, no matter what event we’re at, we’ll be having the time of our lives because of all of you!
Press: This year was also a GREAT year for press! We got to be on NPR’s WVXU twice, on Fox19 here in Cincinnati, over on Louisville’s WHAS11, in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Journal News (a few times, in fact), and a digital piece by Dayton Daily News! We were also interviewed for a few blogs, podcasts, and Collapsus was even streamed a few times!
All-in-all, I think that the message of Collapsus and Wraith was really spread this year! We can only hope it will be even more so next year!
Awards: This is pretty near and dear to our hearts. While we did secure “Best Overall Game of Indy PopCon 2017 – 2nd Place” from Slickster Magizine, the award that sticks out most was the AbleGamers’ “Most Accessible Game of GDEX 2017”. I know I already talked about how important this was to us when I blogged about it before, but I just have to say that this feels like one of the most important things we’ve ever earned and it will be our mission to make sure we keep living up to it (and even surpassing ourselves) year after year!
Studio: Oh, yes! The studio! 2017 saw us go from a ~300 sq/f box to ~1800 sq/f! While we’re still not done with it, it’s allowing us to all work there more often, do in-house recordings, have meetings, store our equipment, and all of that other wonderful “we have space”-stuff!
It may not look like much now, but 2017 planted the seed of something huge! Collapsus: The very end of last year (December 27th, 2016) gave birth to the rise of the Collapsus “Weekly Builds”. Now, AS of Dec 27, 2017, there are, in fact 27 builds (28 should be out when this gets posted). That’s basically 1 build every 2 weeks. Sorry about that! Both mental and physical health of team members, events, other projects, and school could be to blame; but they’re not. That’s squarely on us.
However, these builds have done what they were intended to do. Now all the Challenge (formerly Special) modes and Plus modes are done (bar some tweaking here and there), over 200 (out of 300) puzzles are done, the Puzzle Maker has been added, many accessibility options have been integrated, almost all the soundtrack is in, so many graphical and bug fixes (as well as game-play tweaks) have been implemented! It’s a MUCH bigger game than it was back in 2016.
Because of all this, it was Steam Greenlit (and the, of course, Greenlight died not too long after), we became Sony and Microsoft licensed developers, and even made the PC builds public for that sweet, sweet HD action!
Collapsus is wrapping down internally; our to-do list is getting small and smaller, to the point where soon nothing will be left to do but ports and translation. We’re still aiming for a Q1 2018 release and judging by our to-do list, you’ll see Collapsus out in the wild very soon! We still have a ton of new surprises before then, though, so stay tuned!
Other: 2017 was an awesome ride! In addition to all those “normal” things, we started work on the app for Galatune, an awesome card game (as well as started talks with other tabletop games people about making their apps/games a digital reality), we worked with a handful to both start and/or make their game development programs grow, we finally printed shirts (then sold out of them) and made a partnership with our friends at The Monetizr to handle our merch, and some more things I’m probably forgetting about! 2017 was a busy year, wouldn’t you say?
So what does next year look like?
Well, we will be bringing this blog back to weekly (with the help of some other team members), bringing a podcast to life (with the help of Grant from “Game Over Game On” and Cajun from the “IndieView Podcast”), and vLogs, dev/art/gaming streams.
We’ll be finishing up Collapsus, and working on Cave Worm, Burst Lancer, Jet Pack Hero, Radarkanoid 3000, Physix and more! We’ll also be working on launching our very own event here in Hamilton!
The studio will be theoretically finished up, the new website (and online merch store) will be launched, and (of course) we’ll be going to TONS of events as well! So… same old biz.
What was your 2017 like? What are you planning to do for 2018? Let us know on our Facebook or Twitter! Until then, see you all in 2018 time travelers!