Category: Announcements

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! 🐳

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! 🐳

Introducing Cosplay Café! • A Cafe for Adult Cosplayers with No Shame

Posted on | by Whales And Games

Content Warning:
Cosplay Café contains content that is not appropriate for all ages and is not suggested for viewing at work. While the game contains no explicit imagery, it still contains writing that could be considered explicit and suggestive imagery.

Come and relax with a whipped and steamy coffee! In a city where adult entertainment is the new best thing, the Whipped and Steamy Café is the best fun for all cosplayers with a wild and adventurous side! No shirts, no shoes, no shame and only the best service!

But this café needs an extra pair of hands to stay steamy. Fortunately, our brand new hire Caffie just got the job! With a stoic demeanor and an utter lack of interest on her duties, she’ll have to manage the plans and decorations of the everyday, and meet up with the clientele. And, who knows? Maybe even make some unlikely friends…

Happy Valentines Day! Our team at Whales And Games is honored to reveal Cosplay Café, our mostly-suggestive out-of-our-minds management and dating-sim crossover being developed for this month’s Strawberry Jam 3!

Join Caffie, the brand new-hire turned manager at the Whipped and Steamy Café, a cosplay centric café set on a city where adult entertainment has become the main-stream, and you can imagine just how much people are all over that stuff!

Likewise to other Whales And Games games, we follow our design of picking on two genres, simplifying them and introducing them a twist! In Cosplay Café you’ll have to go through three different phases as you manage your café to incredulous profits (especially when there’s crippling debt right behind you)!

Start the day by Managing your café and picking the coffee, snack and decorations for the day. The choices you make you will cater to different cosplayer groups (including Vanilla, Exotic and Fantasy), increasing their interest to come to the café, as well as how much they’ll pay and tip you for your products, which profits you can turn to unlock even more products!

However, stick to the same choices for too long, and you will see your target audience losing interest for visiting the café! It’s up to you to assure you keep your café a novel place!

Once you’ve made your management choices, it’s time to put it to the test and see how they translate to Sales! Different cosplayers will visit you and show you just how well you performed with the sales catered to that group!

Check your growth compared to the previous day and see where you’ve improved/worsened. Take those lessons, and prepare for the next day!

Depending on the visiting chances of the different groups, at the end of each day you’ll get the opportunity to meet up with a Special Customer from one of those groups. The characters that appear have different chances of showing up, meaning that, if your café catters more towards the Exotic group, the higher the chances of you meeting a character from them!

Talk with these Special Customers and increase your relationship with them to learn more about their cosplays, their origin stories and about them as people. Max up your relationship with them and you might even get the chance to see more of them, if you know what we mean. 😉

We’re still mid-way there and there’s still a lot of work to be done until we are done with the game and ready to release it for everyone to get their hands on at the end of the month! Expect frequent news of it through our social media channels at Facebook and Twitter, and, of course, we made a special channel over on our Discord server just to talk about this game! We hope to see you there! 🐳

Q&A because you probably have a lot of questions?

But Why?

As left-field as it seems, we have actually been wanting to do Cosplay Café for a long while, and Strawberry Jam 3 proved to be the perfect time slot for it. The shock-value nature of the project’s setting, mixed in with the character and character development driven aspect of the game made us sure that this is one game we wanted to make.

Ultimately for us, Whales And Games is about memorable experiences, games and characters, rather than being about ‘being family friendliness’. Our goal is to make you expect the unexpected from us, and we think this project fills in that nature.

What happens after Strawberry Jam?

Cosplay Café is one project that we have tons of ideas for and which we wish to expand! Depending on how it performs on its release and how much people are interested on it, we will more than willing to continue developing it! If you’re already interested on it just from this announcement pitch, let us know! 🤗

That’s cool, but what about Colossorama 1.3?

Colossorama’s Update is taking a bit more than expected, and we’ve been working on it since October non-stop. The game is now on its last 10%, with only a few of the final features we want to include missing from being added, but at the same time, we felt like we needed a break from its development. We will resume it immediately after the jam ends, and The Champions Update will release in March.

Whow! Where did this blog come from?

That’s one more surprise for today! In addition to Cosplay Café’s announcement, we have also decided to release a first draft of the new full website we’ve had in our minds for a while, so we can finally have a blog where we can talk about bigger posts without having our content spread across multiple sites (like Itch.io, Ludum Dare, etc.)

For now. the homepage is just a port of the old mini-site frontpage, but this website will grow over time to accommodate to new content (like a proper about and games page). We have also imported our previous Ludum Dare website posts, meaning you have more than 24 development insights in case you want to strength up your game development trivia and knowledge!

We’ve got Super Sellout results, and our 2019 road ain’t dark!

Posted on | by The 'Moski

Results time! Ludum Dare 43 has come and gone, festivities are over, and it’s time to consider just how did-we-doodly-do! Needless to say, our team at Whales And Games is once again very proud of the results that we have obtained from Super Sellout, our runner where you sacrifice your integrity for sponsor money! Making this the third time that we’ve have achieved a game in the 100-Overall, here are our results!

Rumours say that when we saw the 5th place slapped on the rankings, a collective part of our team screamed on the inside right in the middle of new year celebrations. To get 5th with a 4.6 in Graphics is a really outstanding surprise and one that completely caught-us off left-field. Getting 39th in Audio and 44th in Humor is also heart-warming and validating for each correspondent team member.

However, not all is perfect, and clearly aware that there were both Innovation and Fun problems on our game as we released it, and the feedback and ratings we have received definitely tell us that there’s still stuff we got to tweak and polish further.

Like last time, we’re glad that we were able to experience so many new games and everyone’s creative vision. Although last time we only sneaked in Sebastian’s game into a fanart of ours but this time around we not only snuck theirs from Dark Roads, but also tagged in Dog Dog Dungeon by Bubble Wand Games, Please Player by Noa Calice and Sacrificio Inc. by Reality Blind, as well as ourselves into a single four-seat car!

This is not to say that there weren’t more fantastic entries, much per contrary as proven by the likes of Serial Dater from ColeSlaughter and company, Master Key from Jeremy Ryan, Medic! by Eryph and Rogues Like Beer by Nick Zangus between many others! Unfortunately, they didn’t fit into the car this time, but who knows in the future?

Like always, this wouldn’t be possible without the effort of all of our team. If you’ve read our post-mortem, you might already know that the goal we set out for this jam was to test our synergy as a team. While we will be having to adapt a better labour structure in the future and will have to tone down on desk fisting, we’d still like to thank our team, and, completely agnostic to who was chosen to make this post, thank Moski for his incredible work with the graphics that gave him the so deserved rank, Zak for joining us again handling the game’s on-the-spot audio, Kroltan for his patience and programming expertise, Jorge for wrapping together the project into a fantastic amalgamate, and last-but-not-least Poncho for his support at always being available to take up a task if it needed to be done. And of course, Robin which unfortunately was unable to join us this time around, but still asked if there was any way he could help around.

Thank you for this great end-of-the-year final and for playing Super Sellout. We look forward to seeing more from everyone in the future! If you’d like to come to chat and discuss your results or ratings, we’ve got a Discord server open 24/7, and, of course, if you’d like to keep up with us for future editions, we also have a Twitter and Facebook pages you can follow!

2019 will be our waggy-iest year yet, and we got a whole sea of fun planned in advance! Cheers! ??