Category: Announcements

Happy Anniversary, Whipped and Steamy! Here’s ‘Bunny Splash Casino’, its spiritual successor adults-only game!

Posted on | by Whales And Games

Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café is celebrating its first anniversary! One year ago we launched an adult game and it’s been a wild ride since. We’re planning on updating it, but decided it’d be better to focus on a new game entirely.

We’re soft-announcing ‘Bunny Splash Casino’ and the ‘Bunny Copulation’, our new adults-only game and brand. You can start following its channels on Twitter and Discord as we get started on the project!

Happy First Anniversary, Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café! One year ago, we decided to create a completely different game to those we had done before and took a jab at developing an adult-themed game during the one-month game jam of Strawberry Jam 3. 

What resulted from the it was the game we originally called Cosplay Café, an adult-parody visual-novel mixed in with light-management elements. Set in a world where adult media is king, Cosplay Café gave us the liberty to try a whole new level of world characterization and character depth that we hadn’t tried before. Touching on topics normally regarded as taboo gave us a lot of room to explore themes that we felt we’re not often explored in video-games, and opened a lot of opportunities for original writing.

Ever since we’ve shipped the original version of Cosplay Café, things certainly have been a wild ride. We re-branded the game to its new name of Whipped And Steamy, won the Strawberry Jam across five different categories, got awards and selections for events, made a explicit-collaboration with another game and much more. It’s flattering to see how many milestones Cosplay Café hit as a single-month project.

Not only that, but Whipped and Steamy and Cosplay Café have changed us as developers, as a brand and changed the way we look at the strengths and uniqueness of our games. Last year was a very big puzzle in-regards to ‘What’s next?’ but we believe we’ve finally found where we want to go with our projects.

But before we go further, we’d like to highlight the celebratory art we made for the game’s anniversary, of course! 

Happy Anniversary, Whipped And Steamy!

What’s the plan going forward? What’s happening to Whipped and Steamy?

We’ve talked about back in our December Status Report about how we were originally planning on developing updates and expansions for Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café, but we unfortunately hit some personal road-blocks that led us to freeze development on the game. 

During that frozen-development period, we started considering the future of the game and what we could do with its themes. Whipped And Steamy left us with a taste to explore the adult game genre even further, and we felt the management side of the game could see a complete remake from the ground up to feature even better gameplay.

Pool Results for the future of Whipped And Steamy

Taking into account that realization and the different ideas we had for Cosplay Café expansions, as well as feedback we got from the ‘What would you like to see next?’ from the last report, we decided it’d be best to go from Cosplay Café into a completely new follow-up project.

As we started scrambling and putting ideas together, thinking about how we could keep some familiarity between Whipped And Steamy and this new game, we realized that we had already accidentally made the pitch of the game we wanted to make ourselves before. That idea was actually embedded within Cosplay Café all-along!

  • Bunny Splash Casino on Whipped And Steamy
  • Bunny Splash Casino on Whipped And Steamy
  • Bunny Splash Casino on Whipped And Steamy
  • Bunny Splash Casino on Whipped And Steamy

If you haven’t caught on yet based on the screenshots above and from all the build-up, we’d like to make the ‘soft-announcement’ that we’ve begun working on Bunny Splash Casino!

Soft-Announcing ‘Bunny Splash Casino’ and the ‘Bunny Copulation’!

Bunny Splash Casino is our spiritual-successor to Whipped And Steamy, a full-blown, adults-only, erotic management simulation novel! Bunny Splash Casino was designed from the ground-up with a new emphasis on management and simulation gameplay and featuring an even stronger adults-only label on top. It takes all of the ideas we’ve had for Whipped And Steamy and turns them into an even stronger game.

If you’ve gone through Cheqmate’s story in Whipped And Steamy, you already have some idea of what to expect, and sure enough, Cheqmate will be taking the lead as the main character of this new game. You can even notice her (and Buns Buns) new updated design for Bunny Splash Casino featured in the anniversary artwork! Likewise, given the previous familiarity talk, we also plan to have some other characters and ideas from Cosplay Café appear in Bunny Splash Casino some way or another.

As teased in our Lunar New Year celebrations, this is the game we have planned to be our first commercial game, and we’d like to release it on storefronts (Steam, Itch, …) later down the road. When time is right, we’ll be talking about how we plan to manage demos, roadmap and more. Yet, at this moment, it’s still too early to make any formal announcements.

Given how Bunny Splash Casino is going full hands-on with adult content, we thought it’d be best to subsidize it to it’s own sub-brand. This way, you know exactly what to expect when you look up either. 

For that matter, we created Bunny Copulation, our (appropriately named) new brand that will focus exclusively on adult-only media like Bunny Splash Casino. It’s still the same crew you know from Whales And Games but with new channels specifically marked for when nobody’s around!

Despite this announcement, Bunny Splash Casino and the Bunny Copulation are still in their early days. This announcement is more of a ‘Yes, we’re working on something!’ than a full reveal, and we’ll showcase more of the game as it starts taking shape as we’re only now preparing to begin hands-on development.

In case you’d still like very-very-early-access look into what we’re doing, you can follow us on our new dedicated Bunny Copulation Twitter and Discord! Be wary of the ‘Adults Only!’ label on them though! These channels will also be the new place for Whipped And Steamy discussion and art going forward!

What happens to ‘Whales And Games’?

Even with our newfound plans with Bunny Copulation and us beginning development on Bunny Splash Casino, we still want to carry forward with the main Whales And Games branding that we’ve built across the last years. 

While our efforts will be focused primarily on developing Bunny Splash Casino, we’re still eager to continue developing other safe-for-work projects! We want to continue participating in game jams, making Whales And Games art, and to continue developing other one-off projects as time moves forward (we do want to make that Trivia game).

In fact, we’re already currently working on improving our Global Game Jam game, Roboto Repairaton, with some few quality-of-life additions, and that one will be coming out soon as well!

As impressive as it seems, our Whales And Games’ third anniversary is coming up on March 30th and there is a lot changing going forward. Earlier this year, we finally had the opportunity to start investing into Whales And Games full-time, and we will be going hands-deep (no pun intended) into Bunny Splash Casino development and beyond!

We hope that you look forward to what we have in store! As always, you can join our usual Whales And Games discussion channels over on Twitter and Discord, or if you want to keep up with brand new Bunny Copulation news, you can also join its new respective Twitter and Discord!

Q&A, because you likely have a ton of questions again?

You can find the Q&A on the second-page of this post!

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Happy Lunar New Year! Here’s some Micro-Announcements!

Posted on | by Whales And Games

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 Discord server 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 of a Meetup, Colossorama’n’Steamy and Assortments! • Status Report – December 2019

Posted on | by Whales And Games

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 Twitter and 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! 🐳

Three Years Worth of Chopping Heads at Colossorama!

Posted on | by Whales And Games

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 as Colossorama 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 Update on-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! ✨

Artfight-ing, Champion Polishing and a Whipped’N’Seedies Collab! • Status Report – August 2019

Posted on | by Whales And Games

Whale hello there! It’s a brand-new month, isn’t it? And that means it’s time for another Whales And Games status report about what we’ve been up to and what’s next for our in-development games!

In case you’ve missed it, last month we announced we’d start publishing a new status report at the beginning of each month, and this month we have a whole lot to talk about! From a sudden participation on Art Fight, to even more polishing work on Colossorama •The Champions Update to a whole new surprise collaboration around Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café, and more! Are you ready to reel in? 🐳

An Unexpected Artistic Quarrel in Art Fight!

As a bit of a surprise for us, back at the beginning of July a member from our Discord told us about this event happening in July known as Art Fight. In case you haven’t heard about it before, it is a yearly event all about artists drawing each other’s characters, while scoring points for their respective teams! Driven by curiosity, we decided to give a glance at it and it ended up becoming our biggest highlight of the month as we made a bunch of digital art for other artists and received a bunch of new WAG artwork ourselves!

Credits from left to right and top to bottom:
‘Crab-chan’ by nyancatimusprime, ‘Molly’ and ‘Ru’ by MDLune, ‘Luna’ by TrashPandaArt, ‘Madoc’ by Wilderness, ‘Alexander’ by AkayriSakidoga, ‘Lisbeth’ by royalspags, ‘Kane’ and ‘Hinata’ by HeroicOutlaw and ‘Pratlene’ by Prate-Dragon

In the picture above you can see some of the attacks (artworks made for other artists) that we’re made by our artist, Moski, during the event. As part of his goal for joining the event, each of the 26 pieces he made feature some twist in their styles here and there, from cartoonish to chibi designs and from pixelart to lineless artwork. And of course, some of us at WAG helped animate a few pieces here and there! 😊

Credits from left to right and top to bottom:
‘Buns Buns’ by yolk-sac, ‘Jazzy and Bluessom’ by MDLune, ‘Cheqmate’ by CKoenig88, ‘Jazzy and Bluessom’ by Dxmyxix, ‘Whalechan’ by SweetKooky, ‘Caffie’ by tofumeat, ‘Whalechan’ by nyancatimusprime and ‘Monetizationman’ by mot-bot

And to our surprise, we got almost double the artwork we received back (we tried to reply back to all of it but we ran out of time 💦)! We’ve received a bunch of new art of Whalechan, Cheqmate, Buns Buns, Jazzy, Bluessom and others! We’ll be looking for a way to showcase them all for everyone to see (as long as each piece’s artist allows us for it)! Meanwhile, the samples above will have to be enough for you to feast your eyes on. 

It’s been an extremely art-motivating experience and we (especially the artist) have a lot more thoughts about Art Fight and our experience with it that we want to talk about and discuss publicly. However, for the sake of not stretching this post, we’ll be leaving those for its own post-mortem in the future! Keep an eye out for it!

Blood isn’t the only juice flowing around Colossorama!

Like we discussed last month, we have been working on getting Colossorama • The Champions Update ready for release and have been continuously working on its final touches, adding a final coat of polish to make sure we close off the game for good this time!

What final polish is missing, you ask? Well, we’re currently redoing most of the sounds of the game to make sure they have way more extra oomph than the previous white noise samples, making sure that all of the menus are controller compatible, as well as revising final art assets and gameplay features! We’re also adding a little bit of extra juice here and there to make sure even the smallest stuff stands out and feels great! Here’s a look at our fully-polished Leaderboards for example.

Currently, the Colossorama changelog for this version boasts over six pages of changes, from gameplay tweaks to new features and menus, to visual overhauls and more! We’re also working on playtesting the game together with our feedback committee and we can’t wait to get it into your hands and close off a long pending chapter of Whales And Games! Get ready to slay some heads! ⚔️

Whipped and Seedies Together for the Feedies

While we’re currently focused on working on Colossorama • The Champions Update, it doesn’t mean we have no news about Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café! While development has certainly taken a bit of a background note, we’re still very much working on the game and even have a little surprise we’ve cooked on the side for this month!

Recently, we finished all of the main writing for the new character we announced last time, Roberta (Caffie’s Roommate), and we have also started working on the writing of the second somewhat-new character! Likewise, we’ve also worked on implementing and polishing some of the new items and even added brand new item filters (art-pass pending) to the item selection screens, making finding items that target specific cosplayer groups even easier!

And of course, we also have to mention the brand new music track that was composed for the new Support group, which Roberta and the second unannounced character will be a part off! Give it a listen, will you? Its considerably long though, after all, it has all four variations of it in a single track!

As for the side surprise we’ve been cooking, back when we released the game we were invited by the fine folks at Cactus Labs to do a small cross-over collaboration with their also-adult-parody game Draw the Seedies So I Can Has Feedies to add some Whipped and Steamy inspired content to their game’s art assembler! And guess what? That’s coming up next week!

In case you haven’t given a try at the game before, the game is a parody on the age of digital art and being an artist. As you struggle to pay your rent and must take commissions, will you strive to answer only to the safest-of-work ones, or will you go for the extra-spicy requests in exchange for some extra cash? You can pick from multiple preset backgrounds, foregrounds and subjects to assemble art and please your clients. And hey, you can even export some of your finalized art for safe-keeping! 

And, as you can expect from this sort of collaboration, there’s a whole new set of backgrounds, foregrounds and character art all themed around Whipped and Steamy (which materials were handled by both our Moski and Cactus Labs’ Birdpun). Some characters from the game might even send you some interesting requests for you to fulfill! Do have extra caution when we release it next week though! There is actual explicit material in this one. 👀

And that’s pretty much a wrap when it comes to art and games this past month! We are extremely excited for our future plans we have in store for Whales And Games. You can still look for more on Colossorama • The Champions Update, the Art Fight post-mortem and our collaboration with Draw the Seedies So I Can Has Feedies throughout this month! You can keep up with the announcements for all of these over here on our Blog, on our Twitter and Facebook!

On a side-note, some of our team members are also going to be casually visiting both Devcom and Gamescom in Cologne, Germany later this month! If you do happen to be visiting any of the events, look out for some people in extremely royal-blue shirts. There’s a very big chance that’s us! 🐳

If visiting events isn’t really your thing, no worries! You can always hang out with us over at our Discord chat! We just had a bunch of artists join us after Art Fight so feel free to join along and showcase some of your stuff as well! Cheers! 👏