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A Status Report for Colossorama and Whipped and Steamy! • Status Report – July 2019

Posted on | by Whales And Games

Hey, there! Haven’t heard from us in a while, have you? Well, fear not! While we certainly have been a bit quiet these past few months, we’re still around and swinging in full action, and have a brand new status report full of news to make it clear for you!

We’re currently hard at work in two different updates to existing games: We’re finishing progress on Colossorama – The Champions Update and have also begun working on the first expansion to Whipped And Steamy • Cosplay Café! Likewise, we’ve been revamping our community focus, and have discussed new community events and features we’d like to host. Let’s get into the nitty gritty details, shall we?

The Champions Update is almost ready to make you a Champion!

For Colossorama – The Champions Update, our original target was to release the update immediately after releasing the Whipped and Steamy post-jam patch. Unfortunately, after we released the latter, we underestimated the time it would actually take us to wrap up Colossorama, and have needed a few more months in order to iron out everything!

On the plus side, the game is now feature-complete, making it an all-in-one-package featuring brand  new physics, dozens and dozens of new weapons and upgrades, achievements and scoreboards! What was originally meant to be a small update has turned into an almost full revamp of it, and we can’t wait for you to give it a chance and compete for a spot on the leaderboards!

This means the game is almost release ready! However we still have a lot of small quality-of-life fixes and juiciness we want to add before we ship it to make sure the game is just that extra mile ahead in terms of polish!

Presenting Roberta, the latest gal at the Whipped and Steamy Café!

In conjunction to working on the Colossorama update we’ve also been working on our first expansion to Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café! This expansion is meant to be just that, an expansion of the concepts we’ve introduced in the base release, together with extra polish, quality of life changes, as well as a few new characters and scenes!

And surprise surprise! We’re ready to show off one of these new characters! Introducing Roberta! You might have heard of her before, as she was mentioned in multiple conversations of the original game! She’s Caffie’s roommate, and an extreme mecha lover in every sense of the word you can imagine given the type of game we’re making.

In addition to that, the update also introduces new items, fixes, as well as attempts to streamline the management side of the game even more. It’s still in very early progress, but you should look forward for us doing some important polls in the future in order to help us decide some of the new scenes you’d like to see in this update!

And that wraps it up in terms of the games! In addition to them, ever since our latest Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café patch and the celebration of our second anniversary, we’ve been working on overhauling our working methods and the way we tackle projects and games going forward. This past month our progress at Whales And Games has sped up considerably, and we expect the working rhythm to increase considerably as the weeks go by!

In addition to those, we also recommend you pop over to our Discord Server where we all hang-out and play videogames together frequently! We’re currently planning and setting up a new season of Discord events focused on games and art, and it’d be great to have you aboard for those! 😄

Going forward, we also want to start doing more of these status reports at least every month. We hope that you look forward for them! Cheers! 🐳

Happy 2nd Anniversary Whales And Games! Here’s two more games!

Posted on | by Whales And Games

Happy 2nd Anniversary Whales And Games! That’s right! Today, March 30th, marks the two year celebration from when we first adopted our Whales And Games mantle and set-out to do mindlessly fun games full of whaleistic personality! It’s a milestone that has gone by way quicker than we expected, and since then, we’ve had the opportunity to release eight different games, build a full-of-energy community, and created a wonderful cast of characters, some of which you can see on our celebration picture above! 🐳

Ever since we adopted our brand two years ago, we’ve been iterating on the concept of Whales And Games and what it means to us, constantly. Now, as we’re about to kick-off our third year of activities, we are planning and about to give the next big steps.

However, before we start discussing our plans for the future and what we want to do next, why don’t we look back and take care of some stuff we should have taken care off a few years ago? That’s right, for our celebrations today, we’re doing something we haven’t done before, and we’ll be releasing two games that have been long-time coming, today!

Two new games?! Just like that?!

Yes. You’ve read that right. While we’re celebrating two years of Whales And Games, for the most of these two years, a great part of our team’s doings were experimental, with us being busy with academics and professional undertakings, experimenting with different stuff all of the time, participating on game jams, and developing academic prototypes.

However, two of these prototypes never got to see the light-of-day as we were constantly busy on-and-off and had to constantly be refocusing our attention between multiple ends. Today, we want to fix that. Going into our 3rd year, we wanted to be clear conscience and ready to focus on what’s coming next rather than what we left out to do in the past, so we’ll be releasing both Blueprint Apocalypse and Onigami today, both as a celebration and as a memento.

Both of these games were developed as prototypes for academic purposes, and while we’ve always wanted to polish them to the same quality as our previous games, we never found the right time to do it. Rather than continuing to wait for the perfect moment to come, we’ve decided we’ll be releasing both games today, as they are, with the only changes being some minor polish fixes.

You can play both of the games right now on itch.io, more specifically here for Blueprint Apocalypse and here for Onigami. Guess that’s a banger, huh? Just in a day we went from 8 games all the way to 10! Neat.

What’s the plan for this 3rd year?

In case you missed it, we recently rebranded our game, Cosplay Café to Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café, and shipped the rebranding with a page-long of quality of life improvements and bug fixes just a few days ago. This change so close to the anniversary wasn’t just coincidental.

Our goal for our 3rd year is to focus on improving our existent game collection, turning them into as high-quality games as much as they can be and potentially into full-fledged products as well. Personally, we’ve fallen in love with the universe and characters we’ve built for Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café and would love to continue expanding on it, evolving as much of the community as possible on the process.

Likewise, we still have Colossorama 1.3 • The Champions Update to ship, which we plan to do during the upcoming month, and we also have some minor event plans to assure that the previous games of the more experimental-kind don’t just simply get abandoned forever.

We at Whales And Games fully believe in the concept of iteration, progressively building, changing and adapting to our needs and games as we and them need to evolve. We want to live to that goal, and we’re extremely hyped and excited as a team to make that point across for this upcoming 3rd year.

Like always, we’d love if you could join our Discord community, where we host weekly events and frequently ask for feedback and opinions on our current games, and for you join us in this journey as we tackle a third year of surprises, releases a whale of a time together. Cheers! 🐳

Rebranded and Refilled! Whipped and Steamy 1.0B5

Posted on | by Whales And Games

It’s almost been a whole month since Cosplay Café launched to the world! Over the last weeks, we’ve gotten all sorts of feedback, reception, new community members and ideas for what we’d like to do next. Now, as we start considering and preparing for the future of the project, we wanted to get a few last up for the current version of Cosplay Café before we started moving forward.

As such, here’s version 1.0B5 with a bunch of polish and bug-fixing changes! However, most importantly, our biggest change is that we are re-naming the game and project from Cosplay Café to its new name of Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café.

Why change the name? And why now?

Cosplay Café has been the name of the game  since we’ve first sketched out the first ideas and goals for the project. Over time, and until we had the opportunity to finally develop it, we grew accustomed to the name Cosplay Café and decided to ship it with that name without thinking much about it. However, now that the game has been out for a while, we have realized that discoverability of the project isn’t exactly the best, as searches for the name will frequently take you to real-life restaurants and maid cafés rather than the game.

As such, changing to Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café not only keeps the old name for legacy purposes and clarification, but also gives the game more of its own independence and flavour as a standalone title. It also gives us a work bench for future updates and even other ideas that might pop up later. Whipped and Steamy is not just the Cosplay Café but a whole universe of its own.

Changing the name now also allows us to start preparing and telling the players about how the name for the game is changing, as well as assure that this 1.0 version doesn’t get lost with time for having a different name than the newer ones.

What else has changed?

With the name change in place, and all of the different bug-fixes and polishes we wanted to get out of the backlog for this version of the game, here’s the full changelog of version 1.0B5:

  • Rebranded “Cosplay Café” to “Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café” in preparation of future branding and updates. Desktop save files should automatically transfer to the new name directory.
  • Added “Kink Counseling”, “Sex Toy Fair”, “Hentai Mangaka Workshop”, “Medieval Dungeon Exhibit”, “Free Coffee Day” and “Price Hike” Management Events.
  • Added Fast-Forwarding Messages and Indicator. Messages can be fast-forward by clicking on the button on the corner of the text box or holding the cursor for 2 seconds.
  • Added Importing and Exporting Save Data, mostly to be used for Web builds for making save backups but can also be used by Desktop builds for sharing saves.
  • Added Data Management Guide button to the Settings, explaining how to backup saves and manually transfer old saves in case of necessity.
  • Added Alternate Cursor for when hovering over interactive elements, including background ones.
  • Added preloader scene, assuring that the audio engine has always been started before advancing into the game.
  • Made Interest Difference Clearer. Fixed some ‘Non-Cosplayer‘ definitions showing up as ‘Uninterested‘ (internal name).
  • Changed Event Modifiers to happen on top of the Items, rather than the other way around, which would frequently nullify the impact of the events on the spot.
  • Changed Mop Maid‘s neutral expressions to look more natural.
  • Changed “Inst.” Text Speed to actually be Instantaneous. Displays a message immediately.
  • Changed WebGL to no longer to run in the background, which would lead to distorted music when the player was in another tab.
  • Changed “Relationship Up” Sound to be less intrusive.
  • Changed the Localisation System to not break when changing languages mid-typing.
  • Fixed Chrome and Firefox blocking audio when the project is auto-played by adding manual button to the websites that need it to start the sound.
  • Fixed Auto Speed-Up sales being toggled by default.
  • Fixed El Bidissimo’s profile having some pages bugged out.
  • Fixed “Porn Star Visit” adding Non-Cosplayer Interest +10% rather than Expected Customers +10.
  • Fixed several typos and wrongly set messages in relationship events.
  • Fixed several character facial expressions not triggering properly.
  • Fixed issue where a pending request that has already been fulfilled would still show as the character wanting the café to be equipped with that item.
  • Fixed no decorations from the previous day appearing when loading an existing save.

What happens with my saves?

If you’re playing the Desktop Version, the files from your old Cosplay Café save should automatically be transferred over to the new one. If they haven’t, don’t worry! You haven’t lost your progress! However, you will have to manually move the files from their old save location to their new one. You can do this by following our managing and backing-up save data guide.

If you’re playing the Web Version, unfortunately, save files end up being a bit unreliable, especially when we deploy new patches meaning you might have lost your data. However, with this version, we have also added a way for save data to be exported out of the web version, so that you can import it back at anytime even if we update the game. We recommend you always export your data after you’ve finished playing! You can know how through the same managing and backing-up save data guide.

What’s Next?

We’re just getting started with Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café. While we have over a dozen games of our own now, all of our team has never fallen-in love with a universe and concept of our own so much, and we want to continue expanding it and adding-in new features and content to it overtime. We still have a few things that we need to take care off before we get our hands-in developing the first major update for the game, but when we do, it’s going to be a doozy!

Like always, we encourage you to come and join our Discord Server and discuss or talk about the brand new changes and what you think about them. If you have any sort of quality-of-life or content suggestions you’d like to see in one of those major updates, we’d love to know them!

On other news, our 2nd anniversary is coming up this weekend! We’ve got some slew of surprises and announcements ready, so make sure that you stick around for when celebrations come around! Cheers! 🐳

Cosplay Café Jam Results are here and they’re amazing!

Posted on | by Whales And Games

In case you haven’t been keeping up with the footnotes of Cosplay Café, our recently released adult-themed game, the project was developed under the harsh time-frame of a month, as the game was created and developed as an entry for Strawberry Jam 3, a one-month long game jam specifically dedicated to creating adult and adult-themed games.

Since the game released two weeks ago, the game has been under judgement together with 36 other entries, all of different genres and thematics, by other jam participants. While it’s certainly a lower number of entries and participants compared to our usual Ludum Dare participation (which normally stack up to a total of 2000+ entries) it’s still a very close-knit community and the feedback and ratings we get from it are just as important!

Well, the judging phase is over, and we couldn’t be prouder of our final results!

Not only did we manage to grab the first-place Overall. We also obtained the first place in four other very important categories including Play, Harmony, Sound and Aesthetics! We’re also really proud of the third-place in Narrative and would have actually been worried if we had beaten a certain very unnerving and excellent poem.

And yes, we got a bit lower in certain other jam-gimmick specific categories like Stealth (don’t play this game with your parents in the room) and Horny (as much as Cosplay Café is an adult themed game, it’s still nowhere as exotic as some of the games around of the jam), but overall, they’re still pretty much fantastic results!

These results are heart-warming and validating to us, and we’re really glad we’ve gone through this jam experience. Thank you all for the fantastic support these past weeks, especially to all of the community members over at the Whales And Games server, the extensive feedback from our play-testers, and of course, the Strawberry Jam 3 community that has rated and played our game!

Now that its a real game, we’re extremely excited to continue expanding on it, adding new scenes, characters, mechanics and more! We still have a few things to hammer out with WAG before we get into development, but we’re really excited to continue adding new stuff to it and refining its adult-scented thematic.

If you have ideas for new content or scenes that you’d like to see, we’d really love to see your ideas and suggestions over at our Discord server! We’re always asking for suggestions there, and would love to know where you’d love to see this project headed to next! Cheers! 🐳

Cosplay Cafe’s Soundtrack is now Available Everywhere, You Animals!

Posted on | by Whales And Games

Want to warm your ears with some sexy tunes? Our entire 14-track Cosplay Café soundtrack by Robin is now available for your personal listening pleasure at a multitude of different services! That includes places such as Spotify, iTunes and of course, the ever classic Youtube!

Grab a nice cup of coffee and listen to some soothing music! Of course, depending on the service you’re using, you might need to have a subscription to it, but otherwise, you can always listen to them through ol’ sometimes-reliable Youtube!

Here’s the different places where you can find the soundtrack at:

And of course, if listening through streaming services is not your thing, we also have the soundtrack available as a zip download through Itch.io and Game Jolt! They’re a bit of a bulky download, but it also assures that you get the best quality possible right on the spot! 🎧

It’s been an amazing two weeks since we’ve unleashed Cosplay Café to the world! We have a few more smaller patches that we want to get out for the currently live versions before we get our hands full with the next major expansion, and we’re expecting to know the results from Strawberry Jam 3 tomorrow as well! Hype!

If you’d like to join the discussion around future updates, we totally recommend you join us at our Discord Server! We’ve have been having some wacky ideas for future content and we’d love for you to chime in! Cheers! 🐳