Category: Announcements

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! ??

Waggy New Year!

Posted on | by Whales And Games

Happy New Year everyone! 2018 has come and gone, and we’re ready to make 2019 the waggy-ist year of Whales And Games yet! You might have seen some stuff coming from us last year, but we got a whole sea of stuff planned ahead for you! Prepare for a whale of a time! ??

Season’s Greetings from Whales And Games! Happy Holidays!

Posted on | by JorgeGameDev

Happy Holidays, everyone! Season’s greetings from all of us at Whales And Games! While they’re almost over already, we hope they were as snow-white as Whalechan’s hair and we wish you had or are having a fantastic time with yourself, your friends, family and/or loved ones! ??

While the banner is the same as the one we posted last year to celebrate the occasion, we have updated it with a fresh coat-of-paint and made a handful of tweaks. Similar to last year, the banner features characters from previous Ludum Dare entries such as Colossorama, Petty Puny Planet and Jazzy Beats, together with other games we have in development or that were part of our story as a team. Of course, Whalechan and Polite Whale are also present together with other minor characters that make part of our vast array of mascots.

However, if you look closely, we are also added and featured some-brand new characters, most notably, Monetization Man from Super Sellout which was our game for this Ludum Dare! If you feel like giving the gift of saving civilians from an array of different situations, we’d suggest you give it a try! Of course, you might also need to get some sponsors in order to pay-off the bills of the presents you bought yourself…

And that’s really it! We’re hope that you continue to enjoy the upcoming days as we get ready to close off the year! There’s only a few more days until judging ends and we will be replying to everyone that has left us a comment in the game and continue to push through judging and cover as many games as possible. If you’d like to celebrate the holiday mood with some strangers and share your game, you can also do so at our Discord server! Everyone is welcome to join and we’d love to see you there! ❤??

Whales And Games is in! Here’s to a splashing Ludum Dare 43! ?

Posted on | by The 'Moski

What’s up, buckorinos? We’re knee-deep in pre-Ludum Dare 43 jollyness! The Whales and Games team is not only proud to announce that we’ll be wagging our way into the event, but also that, this time around, we’ve got our most all-stars and composed team as of yet, with most of our team members participating for the first time together!

We’ve got Jorge  and Kroltan on the programming key business, Moski on the wrist-wrecking artistic-doodle labor, Zak dropping the beats with audio composing, and Poncho doing whatever he finds interesting to do at the time of the jam because he couldn’t properly identify a role that fit him in time of the event! ?

Our tools of trade for this edition are the same they’ve always been, power-proofed and tested for the event!

  • Unity, most specifically the 2018.3 version that is still in beta, so we get used to working with those sweet nested prefabs during the jam!
  • FL-Studio for the audio composing, mixing and all. In Zak’s own personal words, “it’s good”.
  • Krita, the free open-source digital painting program, for 2D asset making purposes!

Now you know the team and you know the tools. But who exactly are we Whales and Games? Well, we’ve an indie game development team that has already participated a handful of times before in Ludum Dare. Our first game and our first Ludum Dare entry was Colossorama, originally made for LD36; followed by Hyper Holomayhem 37 for LD37; Petty Puny Planet for LD38; Jazzy Beats for LD40; with our latest entry being Wizsnooks for LD41. It makes up quite the portfolio.

We’ve been hard at work during the past months working on a new update to our first entry Colossorama, but decided it’d be good to catch a breath of fresh air to take a break by doing a new game jam game! Not the most solid definition of a break, but that’s what you get from a team of mostly workaholics.

f you’d like to accompany us during the jam, and also a place where you can show off your own progress and projects, we’ve got a whole sea-of-fun community over at our team’s Discord Server. You can also give us a follow at our team’s Twitter account! We’re looking forward for a splashing performance of you all! ?⏰

Whales And Games Status Report • November 2018

Posted on | by Whales And Games

It’s been two months since we last wrote a status update regarding what we’ve been working on here at Whales And Games! To make sure everyone is always up to date with the last happenings, we’ll be posting more of these regularly. That being said, here’s what happened in the last few months, and here’s what’s coming next! ✅

  • We have announced Colossorama’s 1.3 Update entitled The Champions Update and have been working on it daily. The update already adds double the number of weapons the last update did, several new characters and much needed gameplay tweaks. No release date as of yet. Haven’t caught on with the update’s announcement yet? Here is is!
  • Our second planned major update is still in the works, and its base foundations have already been developed! However, most of the attention has been shifted to Colossorama to allow it to grow larger.
  • The same is the case with Shipyard, our set of backend tools. We’ve been working on it as Colossorama shapes up and have been improving its overall underlying structure.
  • We have returned to actively posting in our Social Media profiles, and have been posting new content Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays! If you haven’t followed us on other networks yet, you can follow us on Twitter and on Facebook.
  • We have started hosting Server Events on our Discord server, including events where the community plays online games together (Gaming Night Clubs), our very own Dungeons and Dragons campaign (Dungeons and Dragorbs) and one for collective brainstorming regarding the Whaleverse (Freeform WAG).  
  • Speaking about Discord, we have also gotten Discord Verified! This means we get to show-off a sexy checkmark next to our server name!
  • Last but not least, we will be participating in the upcoming Ludum Dare 43 from Dec 1st to Dec 3rd! We will be developing a new game jam project during this time to keep you holding you tight until the Colossorama update comes out! Please look forward to it!
  • And as you might have guessed it, yes, we’re still swimming in a sea-of-fun!  ?

This new status report also carries on various of the points of the previous one, like continuing to establish a reliable brand and team. For this upcoming Ludum Dare, five of our six team members will be participating, making it our largest team for a game jam yet! If you’d like to accompany development as it happens, make sure to join our Discord server! ⏳?