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~

This week, as you can probably imagine, we’ve been pretty busy with preparing for the upcoming pre-order! We just updated the beta with what we hope will turn out to be a stable build we can use for the pre-order launch.

Besides all the administrative work (setting humble widgets up, making the pre-order site, etc), we’ve still hammered away quite a bit on the game! For one, we’ve added a new little main quest to the Pumpkin Woods, to make players experience the atmosphere a bit more before moving on to the temple. If you’re in the beta and have som spare time, please try the quest out and share your thoughts on the forums! It’s supposed to be played between the exams and the first temple, story wise.

We’ve also worked a bit on removing some player confusion. First off, pets now have a small aura so they can be distinguished from their bloodthirsty, farmable counterparts:

We tried to keep it subtle yet noticable, so you’ll
know what cute things to murder!

Another thing that wasn’t all that clear to player is that you can jump down certain ledges! To help with this, we’ve added small arrows that appear when you get close to a ledge from which you can jump down. If this doesn’t work, we’ll probably have to implement escalators instead.

Wait, how did he get up there without turning off the bullets?!

Apart from this, Vilya has kept on updating portraits to the new style! Here are a couple of them, step by step:

As for Fred, he’s been working on some juicy animations for the new quest as well as the enemies of the Season Change Temple, who are slowly but surely being brought to life! The knight has taken its first steps while the Wizard is doing his best not using feet at all.

This week we have so many announcements to make that there’s not even room for game progress to be shown! So let’s dive right into it.

First off, after over two years of development we’ve finally opened up an official forum. Yes, it’s true! We’re using the XenForo forum software, and so far everything is working really well!

The forum is all-compassing and have sections for both general discussion and feedback from all our followers, beta testers or not! Get over there, register and hang out!

Even more exciting – and who thought something could be more exciting than a forum – is that our plans for Early Access have finally taken enough form to be shared!

We’ll be taking pre-orders through the Humble Widget, which means everyone who pre-orders the game will get both a DRM-free copy and a Steam key.

There won’t be a separate beta tier. Instead we include instant beta access in the base price of $15 (about €11/£9). In traditional crowd funding fashion, we’ll also have several reward tiers if anyone feels more money needs to be thrown around!

No, you’re not dreaming. We have a hat as a reward!

Our hopes with this funding drive is to get enough income to replace our student loans, letting us entirely focus on the game 100 % without having to (barely) pass courses! There’s also been a huge community demand to open up the gates to the beta. There are over 3500 posts in the beta application thread, and it’s still growing faster than we require new testers!

Now, people will be able to try out a demo to get a feel if this is a game for them, and then decide whether they want to support the development to get beta access or not!

The exact date for the opening of this pre-order is not set in stone, but it will happen in the next 2-3 weeks!

And so the last piece of news is that we’ll invite 40 new testers later this week! There are some adjustments to the story mode we want some fresh insights on before the Early Access goes live.

The testers will be, like always, selected at random form the IndieDB thread. You’ll receive a message asking if you’re still interested in beta access, and if you are, we’ll send you a Steam beta key!

Hopefully, you’re as excited about all this as we are!

PS: Check out the forum!

With the beta now up and running on Steam, feedback and bug reports have been flowing in like never before, to Teddy’s combined delight and despair! In times like these, the ability to quickly roll out patches on Steam really shines. In fact, it’s so easy to update that a better way of delivering patch notes was in order. As such, one of the week’s additions to the game is an in-game patch note viewer!

Whenever the game has updated and there’s new patch notes, a notice will appear on the start menu informing you about this. By pressing Tab, you can access all recorded patch notes.

The game records when you played it last, and if you have missed more than one update, you’ll have an option to aggregate the patches. This will create a combined patch note showing every addition, change and bug fix in all patch notes since the last time you played, allowing you to catch up easily!

Fred has stepped away from the flavor and NPC-crafting (for now) and started working on some new enemies. Below are some of the enemies that will pop up in the upcoming Season Change Temple (working title).

Like the name implies, changing seasons will be the main focus of the Season Change Temple. Player will be able to change season between Fall, Winter and Summer (spring is excluded for a reason!) with each season affecting the dungeon both visually and gameplay wise.

The season change-ability will be the main ingredient of the puzzles of the dungeon, but it will also effect the enemies within it. As seen above, every enemy comes in 3 different versions that each represents a different season. For example, changing the season to Summer will boost the stats of all summer enemies as well as allow them to use certain skills. The same goes for the other seasons!

To round things up, here’s the idle animation for the Summer Knight!

 

Just like last week, this week’s post will be pretty short and to the point! To start things off Fred has kept hammering away at flavor and environment animations for the HQ as well as the rest of Evergrind City.


Vilya kept working on the portraits, so here’s another of those ‘step-by-step’ thingies, this time featuring Plott the commentator:

 

Steam Beta Update:

Teddy has been spending most of his time in the workshop fixing bugs in pursuit of a reasonably stable Steam Release, and as a result, it’s finally ready to be rolled out to all current beta users who’ve left feedback! We’ve already sent messages on IndieDB to everyone who’ve posted  a “first impression” over at the IndieDB-forum.

If you have posted bug reports, videos or feedback elsewhere, please contact us through Desura or IndieDB and we’ll give you your Steam key!

This week we felt like it was time for a good old-fashioned art dump!

While Teddy has been implementing treasure hunting, Steam integration and new skills, Fred and Vilya has just kept on drawing. Here’s some of the things they’ve done:

These fellows are for the science department in the Collectors’ HQ, a place where you’ll probably return to a couple of times during the main quest… :)

New achievement icons for the challenges in Arcade Mode!

A step-by-step of sorts for one of the new portraits.

Wow, err… What’s going on here? I don’t even…

And finally, a new boss portrait for Vilya, leader of the Black Ferrets!

This week we’ve mostly done stuff under the hood (Steam, testing and tweaking), but we also mashed in a new system that’s long overdue. Since it’s a system that’s easy to implement and maintain (although mostly because Simon has been slacking off for long enough), we’ve “finally” added the Treasure Map system!

When you buy or find a treasure map (currently, they are all bought from Simon) they will appear under “maps” in your journal. Here you’ll get a hint about the reward. Generic treasure maps are simply numbered, while more important maps can have names! Inspecting a treasure map will take you to a screen that looks something like this:

Disregard the text to the left – it’s drunk!

There are three types of maps. Firstly, there are screenshots of some location in the game that you’ll have to find. These are probably the easiest!

The second kind is what you see above: some kind of sketch hinting a location. These could be pretty straightforward, like the one above, drawn from a different angle than the game itself, or even something completely different.

The third and final version are treasure “maps” written in text! These are small stories or riddles telling you how to find a treasure.

When you stand on the spot where the treasure is buried (take or give 10 pixels), a pulsating X will appear beneath your character! Simply press the action button to dig up your well deserved reward!

One of the best thing about treasure maps is that they are probably the only thing in the entire game which actually takes longer for the player to finish than it takes for us to create… :P

Last week in the comments, there were some confusion regarding the Steam beta transfer, so here are some clarifications:

Who? If you’re in the Desura beta and you have posted a first impression, reported a bug or in some other way provided feedback* when we start inviting people over to Steam, you will get an invite. Also, we’ll invite some more people from the IndieDB registration thread. In both these cases we will send a message on IndieDB asking you if you want a Steam key! You should automatically receive an e-mail when we send that message. You can still post feedback (preferably on the IndieDB private forums if you have access) if you forgot to do it when you got into the beta.

* Making a video where we can watch you play is also a form of feedback

When? We have  a small checklist of stuff to fix, but fingers crossed we might invite some of you by the end of the week to test the waters, and the rest next week if the transfer goes smoothly. At that point we might send out a bunch of new invites as well.