This week, we’ve managed to push out a new content update for the Frontline beta. The main focus of the update is the new Marino Encounter, as well as some new cut scenes setting up where the story is heading next.

The update is not massive in size but we are still very much interested in hearing feedback from you guys who are in the beta, especially about the Marino fight. Was it too hard, too easy, any suggestions how to make it more interesting?

The in house testing has been a bit all over the place ranging from it being “impossible” to “I’ve played this game so much I don’t even know if it’s hard”. We’ve set up a thread over at the forums where you can post any suggestions and thoughts you have about the fight, it would really help us a ton!

With this update out of the way, we are already hard at work with the next one. Below are the sprites for the rest of the Season Fae Elders, which all will play a crucial role during your visit in the Winterland!

The cutscenes have stayed in focus this week (to Teddys delight!) so Fred spent some quality time with the Master of the Collectors Headquarters which we showed last week, making her fit to enter the big stage!

Speaking of stage, of course the master has her own room in the HQ. What it looks like? We’re glad you asked! Here’s the place where you’ll find her:

She certainly has interesting taste in interior design..!

Other than creating this room, Vilya has also been making some new portraits. These guys are a bunch of Collector Scientists, working in the HQ:

On a whole different note, both Fred and Vilya just handed in their final school assignment for this semester. Thanks to all of you who’ve supported us by pre-ordering the game, they won’t have to continue their studies for at least another year! This not only means a whole lot of less stress in their life but it also means all of us will be able to focus whole heartedly on the game for now, which in short feels amazing. 

A big bunch of love to all of you who’ve made this possible!

Last week, we all went back to school, but luckily not as students! Wednesday to Friday we attended the Gotland Game Conference as judges tasked with providing feedback to the student projects.

Here’s a showreel of the games:

 

There were lots of fun games present, and we truly had a blast playing them all! Hopefully our feedback was useful for the students as well.

Some of our favorites include Crocodile Chow-Down, which was an arcade game featuring a large crocodile head where you had to align different types of teeth in patterns provided on screen and then close the lid to “chew the food down” and increase your score. It looks pretty fun in the trailer, but actually playing it was a very nice experience! The game won the Pwnage Award (Best of Show) so apparently we weren’t the only ones in love with it!

 

Another game that we really liked was Defunct, a “racing” game where you zoomed through large landscapes in search for your long lost father! …to be honest, we don’t really know why you’re zooming through them, but whatever the reason the game had an awesome sense of speed and was a blast to play. Here’s a gameplay trailer:

 

Playing other people’s games isn’t the only thing we’ve done, although it honestly took up quite a bit of our time! Despite twisting his ankle really badly, Fred managed to churn out some cutscene animations, and Vilya made a couple of portraits! Among them the portrait for the friendly and definitely-not-shady leader of the Collectors:

 

And a remake of Wedge:

 

Hello again folks! This week, we’ve been tinkering with the cutscenes around and after the little bonus Marino arc, where we’ll introduce a couple of new characters that will help move the story forward.

One of these is the Spring Fae, who’s still unnamed but we’re fairly certain it will be some sort of reference to the most famous of all sidekick fairies: Navi from Ocarina of Time!

While waiting for all flavor animations to be planned out, Fred went ahead and created the animations needed for a slightly… different puzzle block than people might be used to:

This week, we’ll take a couple of days off in order to be judges at this year’s Gotland Game Conference, which is basically a pretty cool event where the students at the school we’ve studied at showcase the games they’ve made. Usually there are some really neat stuff to be found (as well as some really bad stuff, of course, but that’s also kind of fun).

Speaking about school, we won’t have to study next semester thanks to all the folks who’ve pre-ordered! Thanks again!

Some people have asked how the pre-orders are going right now, so here are the current numbers:

Copies Sold: 7098
Hats Sold: 1713
Current Pace: 1.3 copies/h

Despite the game having been available for quite some time now, we sometimes get sales bumps from when streamers and YouTubers showcase our game, so thanks for spreading the word!

Now the most interesting metric is probably our estimated survival time based on how the sales have gone! What we know for sure is that we could sustain production for about 10-12 months on the sales we’ve made to date. Some sales are still trickling in, and we’re likely to see increased sales after major patch releases. We’re pretty confident that, thanks to all your support, we’ll be able to keep soldiering on without student loans until the game is finished!

The past week, the Marino battle has been the main implementation focus. Here’s a little teaser gif from it:

Clicketyclick!

For Marino, we wanted to create a battle that was more up close and personal than most other boss battles. In terms of style, it’s most similar to fighting Vilya, but this time it’s not part of some camouflaged tutorial. Marino is quick, slippery and will cut you up if you’re sloppy!

Speaking of boss battles, Fred is already at work with creating assets for another one, which will have the player face new challenges…

CHOO-CHOO, TRAINS YO!!

Last week, we talked briefly about the translation tool Teddy have been working on for quite some time. This week, we are happy to announce that the tool is live and ready for testing! If you are interested in trying it out, we’ve set up a forum section with some in depth guides and information about how it all works. Keep in mind that the tools is still very much in beta, so watch out for any evil bugs and glitches!

Fred have kept the focus on bringing the ever so unlikable Marino to life, so you guys can finally beat some sense into him! For anyone who haven’t guessed it yet, Marino will act as one of the upcoming boss fights in the game and will focus heavily on quick sword attacks, dashes and dodges. Players will have to keep their shield close at hand and try to find openings in between his barrage of slashes.

Below are a few of his many new animations, along side his new and improved portrait by Vilya!

Last week we sent Fred off to RSM, a Swedish retro gaming convention which we had been invited to some time back. The convention took place last Saturday, and it was a blast! A lot of people came to play the game, and for anyone who likes retro games in general the convention was an awesome experience:

Fred ended up doing interviews for PowerGamer.se and the swedish podcast Svamppod Fyrkant. Both interviews should be up later this week!

Back home, Vilya and Teddy kept on working as usual. Over the weekend Teddy has been focusing on getting the translation tool polished enough for some public testing. When we first mentioned it, way back when, we didn’t really plan on releasing it until the game was done. However, due to increased interest in translations, we’ve decided to put it earlier so people can translate the game as we keep working on it. Tools need beta testing as well, after all!

The translation tools will, for most people, consist of three different tools. The first one is for translating regular text, which is basically anything from “HP” to spell descriptions.

Another takes care of dialogues, which are more advanced than regular texts for various reasons. The most important one for translators is that parts of every line can be different depending on if the character is speaking to a boy or a girl, or whether the game is being played in co-op and so forth.

The final tool is a simple file merger, which will let you merge two localization files into one. This is useful if more than one person is working on the same translation, since you can work on one part each and then easily merge the files to create the full translation!

This is how it will work for most languages. For translations into languages that have a huge number of written characters, like Chinese, Korean and Japanese, there’s a bit more work involved, but we’ll delve deeper into that when the tools are actually made available later this week!

Vilya, in the meanwhile, has kept working on a bunch of portraits (as usual):

Next up is a revamped portrait of Marino in order to have him match his new sprite!

Last week was all about PR, customer service and whittling down a horde of bugs, but now things are finally starting to look kind of normal around here! As such, we’ve actually gotten some “new” stuff done.

A couple of days ago we added a feature which we’ve mentioned before on the blog but never got around to implement, namely the memory room!

Many of our bosses drop items just like regular enemies, and will eventually also drop cards. This creates a little Collector’s dilemma, where if you don’t get every drop the first time you defeat a boss, you’ll have eternal holes in your item codex for all eternity! That is of course unacceptable in a modern society, and that’s how the memory room came to be.

For every boss you defeat in the game, you’ll unlock a statue in the Memory Room. By interacting with it, you can then choose to relive the battle in order to farm items you didn’t get the first time around.

Currently, the feature isn’t very balanced since the boss drops are both strong and worth a lot of money. That worked well when the boss items were rare, but less so if you can fight them an infinite number of times! While the economic aspect can be solved by making the items sell for less money, the issue of having easily farmable but very strong items is a bit more tricky.

There are a bunch of ways to deal with this, though. One is to simply add a fee to battle memories, so you can’t fight over and over without cost.

Another is to adjust drop rates when in a memory battle. Boss drops have pretty high drop rates to compensate for the fact you only fight a boss once, and we’d like to keep it that way for when you meet them on your natural journey through the game but obviously it doesn’t work when you can farm the bosses.

A third option is to rethink the drops which bosses have, and only focus on either flavor drops (style hats, furniture, etc) or crafting materials that require at least another rare material. That way we’ll prevent having boss farming be the be all end all way of getting certain gear upgrades. We’ll play around with it until we get something that feels nice!

Marino, our Gary of the game, has received quite a make over! The main reason for this was that the old sprite looked a lot like the officials of the Collector’s Headquarter, something we wanted to avoid to set him apart more.

Since Marino is a recurring character, he needed to be able to do more interesting stuff than just walking around being smug. Below are a few animations foreshadowing things to come!

 

Wow, it’s actually out there! Still far from finished, of course, but out in the garden interacting with the real world (under close supervision).

The impressions have generally been favorable! We’ve gotten some big mentions from streamers and from video game news sites like PC Gamer and Giant Bomb, but what’s making us most happy is the great response from individual fans, and the activity over at the forums! People are reporting bugs in style (good labels, screens/videos) and providing feedback, and also helping each other out which is great to see.

One big worry was that people wouldn’t read up on the game beforehand, and get angry when the Story Mode didn’t have that much content, but you’ve all been very cool about that and spent time doing all the other stuff!

Speaking of other stuff, the Arcade Mode seems to bring a lot of grief and anger, which is great since our Black Ferret Doomsday Device is fueled by our player’s tears! Thanks bees!

In all seriousness, though, Arcade Mode seems to be a very appreciated feature while also being the target of many frustrated tweets and forum posts. So far, though, we’ve found that the difficulty of the mode has a net positive effect on how it’s ultimately perceived! The high difficulty improves the replay value, the satisfaction of getting better and also something for people to talk about. How to beat the Story Mode isn’t exactly something that needs to be explained (for the most part), but the community has yet to defeat Oldman’s Furious Giga Slime!

So, a question that’s come up a few times and we’re sure is on many people’s mind is: how did it all go?

Honestly, we don’t really know as we don’t have any data to compare it to, but we feel it’s gone pretty well so far! We’ve decided to provide full transparency, so here’s some insight into how the sales have been, and what that actually means in terms of paying rent and buying things to eat:

We’ve currently sold 2954 copies of the game over all tiers (4 packs counting as 4 games, of course). Most are simply copies of the game, but quite a lot have been chipping in with some extra funds for the higher tiers. We even have a master collector and a legendary blacksmith lurking about in the forums!

Of these, 2000 were sold the first two days, after which the sales have been slowing down considerably, but we’re still doing fine at roughly 10-15 sales per hour.

Despite the slowdown, we’ve had noticeable bumps when popular streamers or sites have featured us, such as ZiggyD’s stream and a post by PC Gamer. When we simultaneously got featured on Giant Bomb and by this Brazilian dude (you don’t need to know Portuguese to get hyped by this guy), our website went down for an hour. :(

So let’s do some number crunching, giving you insight into what’s actually involved when calculating profits on game sales! We don’t think many people are aware of how this process looks, but it’s actually pretty good to know if you’re interested in how much money people are actually bringing in from their Kickstarters, pre-orders or just sales in general.

We’ve sold for $50,260 before VAT, payment processing and Humble Bundle’s share. VAT differs from place to place. In Sweden, 20 % of the total amount is paid in VAT. Payment processing (Paypal or Amazon) is ~5 % off the transaction. Humble Bundle then takes the very humble cut of 5 % (source). What’s left after this is then wired to our bank.

So, the $50,260 in sales becomes $36,287 paid out. Now, the Swedish state takes over and wants some return on investment for all the free education it’s handed out over the years. On all money we earn to the company, we’ll have to pay employer fees and taxes, which is about 31 % and 33 % respectively. That brings it down to $16775, but we are three people, so in the end, we get $5,592 each. (Formula is SALES * 0,8 * 0,95 * 0,95 * 0,69 * 0,67)

We’re not rich (yet!!) but we’re very happy with those results! Many years as students have taught us how to survive on a low income so that’s quite a bit of money to us.

A handy formula for people who don’t like math is this:

For every copy we sell we’ll all be able to survive for one more hour.

So here’s to hoping the sales stay above one copy per hour! :D

Okay, so it’s not “the date”, but it’s one of them! Namely, the date we’ll open up for pre-orders!

Ready? Ok, here it is:

Wednesday, April 16th

And there you have it! This Wednesday, on April 16th, we’ll open up for pre-orders! More specifically, we’ll open them up sometime in the Swedish afternoon of April 16th, which means in the morning for Americans, and night for Aussies.

In preparation for that, we’ll share some specific information regarding the pre-orders.

First, let’s talk about updates! We’ve decided to split the beta into two branches: Stable and Frontline. You’ll automatically have access to both with your Steam key.

The Stable Beta will be updated episodically. Updates can take everything between 1-3 months. The Stable Beta is for people who want an absolute minimum of bugs. It’s mostly recommended for streamers and YouTubers, or if you don’t really care about update frequency.

The Frontline Beta is, essentially, a beta of the beta. This will be updated whenever we damn well please, which probably means around every 1-2 weeks, like the Steam beta up until this point. People who play this version will help us out a lot by testing and giving feedback on new features and balance.

When enough content and features have been amassed in the Frontline version, we will feature freeze and bug fix for a week or so, and then do a new Stable build. So, in short, if stability is more important to you than update frequency and helping us with bugs and feedback, keep it at Stable.

Second, we’d like to remind everyone that this is in fact only a beta, and that you should think twice before purchasing. If you want to support us, then it’s an easy choice, but if you only want to pre-order to play the game, please be aware of the state of the game: it’s not finished!

And finally, we’ve gotten a lot of requests regarding the purchase tiers! We’ll have something for poor students and rich philanthropists both. Below is a full list of all the tiers we’ll have available:

$15 – Slime Tier
* Full game on release (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Instant beta access (Steam key + DRM-free version).
Also available as 4-pack for $45.

$20 – Rabby Tier
* Full game on release (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Instant beta access (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Unique hat only available through pre-orders (Picture | GIF).
Also available as 4-pack for $60.

$30 – Jumpkin Tier
* Full game on release (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Instant beta access (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Unique hat only available through pre-orders (Picture | GIF).
* Full Soundtrack by Andrew Riley of Lucky Lion Studios on release.

$50 – Snowbacca Tier
* Full game on release (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Instant beta access (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Unique hat only available through pre-orders (Picture | GIF).
* Full Soundtrack by Andrew Riley of Lucky Lion Studios on release.
* Digital Production Booklet (.pdf) with behind the scenes design decisions, step-by-step art, early concepts and much more! Available on release.

$100 – Bottomless Bag Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Design an equipable item (not visible) that can be found in the game!

$200 – Carpenter Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Design a furniture item for the housing part of the game!

$300 – Fabulous Hatter Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Design a hat or facegear that can be equipped in the game!

$500 – Master Sculptor Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* A statue in the game will be made to your likeness (or the likeness of whoever you chose)!

$750 – Legendary Blacksmith Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Design a weapon that can be equipped in the game!

$1000 – Collector Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Become or design an NPC found in the game!

$2000 – Master Collector Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Become or design an NPC found in the game!
* Design a sidequest for the game!

That’s all for now! See you on Wednesday~