Happy Lunar New Year! Even if you don’t celebrate it locally, the Lunar New Year is an important day for most of South-East Asia, and like many others, we wanted to join the celebration to spread the joy worldwide! We have a slew of new community activities and micro-announcements to make! Consider this your micro-Status Report for this month! 🥠🐁
Whales And Games Micro-Announcements
Let’s start with the spicy stuff! We have a slew of new Whales And Games micro-announcements to make regarding what you should expect in this upcoming year!
We will begin pre-production of our first
commercial project starting in February with a considerable development time
planned.
We will be returning to game jams this year
making short one-shot game projects, with one of them being a Trivia game. They
can also include updates to old projects.
Colossorama – The Champions Update will
release sometime in the future but falls into the second category of projects.
And even more! You can expect this an even more
announcements going forward! We will be going into more detail about our plans
soon, so we hope you are excited for the slew of new things going forward!
You can expect this an even more announcements going forward! We will be going into more detail about our plans soon, so we hope you are excited for the slew of new things going forward! 👀
Find and Join your Chinese Zodiac!
It isn’t called the ‘Year of the Rat’ for no reason! Every birth-year on a 12 year cycle is associated with an animal in the Chinese Zodiac! Curious to find what’s yours? Well, we’ve set up a special #zodiac-table room in our Discordserver you can find what animal is under your Chinese zodiac!
Even better! In that room you’ll also find commands that you can use over on the server’s #commands room! Using one of these commands will add your zodiac animal to your username and will also let you claim a special Lunar Celebrator and pinkish-red-name for posterity!
Join us for a Lunar Gaming Nights Club!
What’s a new years celebration without a loud party? We’re doing it gaming style! If you’re ready for a good old-fashioned Gaming Nights Club session, come join us on our Discord and we’ll kick off the Lunar Year with style! This rat den is gonna be packed!
Join us on January 26th (Sunday) at the usual time of 9:30 PM UTC for a night-long celebration of south-east Asian culture and gaming alike!
Whalechan and Polite All-Dressed Up!
And to close it all off, here’s our newest artwork with Whalechan and Polite all dressed-up for Celebration! This is one of our proudest and most complex works of art and animation so far, and a good window into the quality of what you can expect from our own game art going forward! Hope you like ‘em!
Whale! It’s been quite a while since we’ve had a Whales And Games Status Report, hasn’t it? It’s been challenging to actually get one of these done lately but it’s time to get back on track and bring out a new freshly-fished December Status Report right before we close-off the year for good!
While you probably expect a ton of game-related news whenever we make one of these posts, ever since last August’s report things have certainly been a bit hectic with a variety of not-game-related tidbits of Whales And Games happening all over the place, hence the delay in getting around to actually write one of these again.
Strap onto your sea-horses because we’ve got a lot of small but very important milestones to cover! Let’s get into it!
A Whale of a Meetup and a Talk!
When we mentioned that we were extremely hyped for this year of Whales And Games we didn’t expect things to culminate with our co-founders meeting up in person for the first time in Portugal after seven-years of internet-friendship shenanigans!
Given how long we’ve worked together, it made for a very sentimental reunion which has started to change how we take-on WAG and our games going forward. Not only that, the meetup also happened immediately after one of us had just been relieved of their college duties and had just graduated!
To make things even more interesting, our meet-up was set up to align with our first public WAG talk at Game Dev Camp, Portugal’s highlight conference for game developers. Our talk was all about Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café and how we envisioned it to break the mould of adult games, refine our character’s writing further while developing it and how we fit everything into an ‘impossible deadline’. We ended up having a total of 70 people in the room, and a lot of them expressed to us how they found the talk really interesting! ✨
If you want to take a peek at the slides from the talk which are almost readable by themselves, you can download them here! If there’s enough interest for it, we might even make a full-fledged development insight covering the topics of the talk! 😊
Colossorama’s Time-Bending Finish Line!
This past month of November, we had the opportunity to showcase Colossorama • The Champions Update, along with Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café at a couple other events in Portugal as well! The idea was to collect feedback and further data that would let us wrap up Colossorama’s development neatly, taking notes of what should be tweaked, typos to be corrected, and which challenges still needed to be balanced.
In the end, we took notice of several small rough-corners, and even had to chance to tackle a few changes between the days of both events. The final high-score for the main Colossorama mode was 171 heads, meaning the overall experience of the game is much more balanced compared to previous versions of the game! Of course, some people also gave a try at other newly tweaked challenges such as Party, Trickster and 1-Hit Wonder.
Aside from just showing our games, we had the experience to live through what so many others in the industry do, by setting up our own booths for our own the first time! Planning, printing, purchasing materials, etc. Overall, it was still a very rewarding experience that also gave us the opportunity to socialize and network!
Whipped and Not So Steamy? What would you like to see?
As for Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café, things have been a bit different from what you are probably expecting. While Cosplay Café was also shown at events together with Colossorama – and got some very interesting reactions while at it – and at our talk at Game Dev Camp at the present moment, further developments with Whipped and Steamy are frozen in place until we conclude Colossorama • The Champion Update’s development. We really want to focus that specific update so we can advance with future WAG plans, including those related to Whipped and Steamy.
A few months ago, we released a collaboration with an adult-project, and we have been considering different avenues regarding what we want to do with Cosplay Café or other similar projects in the same vein. Some of these avenues include updating Cosplay Café including more refined gameplay and more characters to designing completely new mature or adult-oriented games. There’s really a lot of paths we can go down through, and we’ll be conducting several polls in different sites to gather feedback on what people would like to see!
We would really love to know what you think about Whipped and Steamy and what would you like to see us do with it going forward! Would you like to see more updates to it, or would you like to see us see a new project? We would like to know your opinion through this form or over at our Discord!
A Fishnet of Assortments!
Like we mentioned at the beginning of this report, there’s an assortment of things that have happened satellite to all the event preparations, decisions we’ve been making with our games and there’s been a lot going on with our Discord community as well. Here’s some highlights:
We’ve got stickers! Since we’ve been around some events, we thought it’d be a nice-gesture to hand something over to those who came to see our talk our play our games. We designed four different stickers featuring Polite Whale and Whalechan, our mascots to give around! We even made a public vote for the Whalechan design people liked the most!
Can we call ourselves an award-winning studio now? Because at one of the events, we were crowned with a #spotlight award and will be getting an opportunity to travel to Pocket Gamer Connects in London! We don’t have any games that actually go on your pocket other than Petty Puny Planet, but maybe we’ll find a game-changer there! 🏆
Holiday spirit might be around the corner, but back in October we celebrated Halloween with style, pitching Skeletons ☠️, Vampires 🦇 and Witches ✨ teams all against each other-in a set of Halloween Server Events at our Discord! It was some of the most fun of the server so far, and Skeletons took the winning spot! We’ve been working on a Skeleton Whalechan and she’s practically done (just missing animation now)!
We’re also changing the way our #creative rooms work on our server since a lot of artists have been joining recently! We’ve now got a room just for showcasing completed pieces, a room for work-in-progress sketches and scribbles and we’re also making a whole new dedicated gallery on this website to highlight some of the best work that’s been pinned there!
We’re not the types that like to waggle numbers around, but we’ve reached 700 followers on Twitter, 300 followers on Itch and 300 likes on Facebook! Our games totalled have also gathered more than 150K views across all the websites we have our games at! ✨
And that’s just some of the highlights! Honestly, there’s been so much stuff that has happened since our latest report that its hard to keep track of everything that has happened! We believe that rounds up things nicely though. 😊
That nails it for this time around! We talked about so many things here, yet there’s always more we want to have around coming 2020! Things are shaping up quickly, so you may want to follow us on Twitterand Facebook to stay informed about more and other future announcements!
Alternatively, you could get informed or hang out with us at our Discord server! Not only can you meet some of the artists we mentioned before, but also engage in more Whales And Games talk, gaming discussion and much more! Dive in and say hello! Cheers! 🐳
Boo! 👻 Were you spooked? Well, you should have, because we’ve made our Discord and Social Media all festively scary! That’s right, instead of cleaning away the cobwebs, we placed them around all over the place, just in time for this Halloween! And of course, we have to once again feature the incredible banner art from last year from VampyrOfSwords!
Festivities are a bit busy with our upcoming talk, Moski’s trip, making stickers and the upcoming (at this point that’s our actual Halloween monster) Colossorama – The Champion Update but we still wanted to do something special to vary things a little this season on our Discord Server! Here’s what we came up with!
Hope you’re ready to become the monster under your bed because you’ll have to pick between becoming a Skeleton ☠️, a Vampire 🦇 or a Witch ✨! The team with the most members by November 4th will result in a special Whalechan-design themed after that team’s monster, to be posted at a later date!
You can join a team by heading to #commands-cemetery on our Discord and typing !skeletons, !vampires or !witches to join each respective team! You can only be in one team at one time, but you can switch to another team by using that team’s command! You can also leave the competition entirely by using !leaveteam but that would be a bummer. 😱
We want to see your spooky art! No, really, any spooky art that you have around at all! From monster girls that you’ve drawn, to special Halloween commissions that you’ve been making! We want to see what you have been up too, and we would love for you to share it with us on the Server over at #creative-candy channel! In fact, there’s already been some spooky art shared there! 🍭
Also make sure to tweet it over to us , or send us a link to a tweet of some of the Halloween stuff you’ve made so we can share your stuff in all of its glory! ✨ We’ll be making a art-thread later on just for Halloween art, but you can tweet it at us at any moment!
It’s time to bring it back from the dead one of old server events for a one-off! Join us on November 1st (Friday) at 9:30 PM UTC for a night of spooky-scary glorious multiplayer video-game fun through our special Halloween Gaming Nights Club! Don’t know what that time-zone corresponds to? Check this link out!
We’re taking suggestions for games to play so we can announce them in advance for everyone to get ready at hand! Make sure to drop your spookiest suggestions down on the #gaming-ghouls channel!
Who doesn’t like a good crossover? Be it in films, videogames or even wrestling, we fans of multimedia enjoy seeing the multimedia become, well, less ‘multi’ and more ‘uni’. So, we at Whales and Games have been wondering, what do we need to be a part of the crossover craze?
Turns out that, together with the collaboration of the creative minds at Cactus Labs, some exotic characters with lots of personality and inversely proportional amount of clothing would do the trick! On our last monthly status report, we talked about a small collaboration between Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café – our ero-themed visual novel management sim – and Draw the Seedies So I Can Has Feedies – Cactus Labs’ underpaid-commission-artist sim.
As we go into detail about how this match-made-in-a-sexshop came to be, unlike Cosplay Café which has no-explicit imagery but explicit text, this post (and the game) contains visual and explicit Not Safe For Work content from here on out!
Happy Anniversary Colossorama! Three years ago, our original co-founding members joined up together to create a short game that would eventually set Whales And Games and the rest of our game development career into motion. On this day, back in the year of 2016, we released the first version of Colossorama to the world, after an intense game jamming period during Ludum Dare 36.
Being the first time we used Unity to make game jam game, and being our second game overall (following The Farming One), we wanted to keep the scope small. We ended up conceiving a small hack-and-slash side scroller that forced the player to constantly change their weapons and items from a restricted pool of choices and adapt every wave. Looking back at it, we were extremely proud of the result, but obviously, looking at it after three years, it’s hard not to spot the flaws. If you want, you can even play the original build of the game over here!
As it shows, the game gained some moderate attention. A few weeks after the original jam release, we made a post-jam patch known asColossorama 1.1 • The Colossoral Update, improving on many aspects of the jam version we thought were lacking, adding new weapons, rebalancing the game, and improving on some graphical elements. We even had the chance to show it at some events, motivating us to make other games and projects.
Fast-forward to the game’s first anniversary and looking back at the game and its overwhelming reception, we thought it was justified to go back and add even more stuff to it. For Colossorama 1.2 • The All-Stars Update, which is the version of the game that’s currently live, we couldn’t just add more weapons and call it a day. Nevertheless, we added several new ones, added new effects, a whole new cast of unlockable gladiators, and, aside from the main character, added a whole new cast of unlockable gladiators and game modes to complete. As far as anniversary celebrations go, it felt like a big jump! ⚔️
And that’s when we arrive at where we are at now. While we originally expected Colossorama 1.2 to be the closing chapter in the cycle of Colossorama updates, life would prove us wrong, and we’ve been working on Colossorama 1.3 • The Champions Updateon-and-off for several months now. As you might have read in the previous status report, with over six pages of changes, the game feels like pretty much a full reconstruction of the game, adding over eighty new weapons and items, reconstructed physics, several new gimmicky-enemies, more unlockable gladiators, a codex, stats, achievements, leaderboards, more visual overhaul, and more! It’s a whale of an update in size! 🐳
The journey over the years as we’ve picked on Colossorama on and off as taught us and showed us multiple lessons, and has validated us in our growth as we’ve picked it up and updated it time and time again. For its upcoming 1.3 release, since development is being made on-and-off, we’re avoiding making specific estimates of when it will be ready, but we’re pretty much closing on the final tasks in order to ship it once and for all!
It’s been a wacky three years. Since we’ve released Colossorama 36, we’ve made several other small game experiments on the site, finished up bachelor degrees, fostered a community, grew as developers and artists, and yet, it still feels like we’re at the very beginning of a very long race. We’re not stopping any time soon, and over the next few months, after we release Colossorama 1.3 we want to take a step back and rethink the core foundations of Whales And Games. We have tons of ideas in mind, tons of things we’d like to do, but ultimately we want to really turn the page and move on forward to bigger and more whalistic stuff!
We promised one ginormous year for WAG’s third year and we’ve been working full-steam ahead to make sure we deliver! As always, feel free to tell us what you’d like to see from us over at our Discord and join us for the journey ahead! Cheers! ✨
