Category: Announcements

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! 👏

Development Progress on Colossorama and Whipped and Steamy! • Status Report – July 2019

Posted on | by Whales And Games
Status Report Banner

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!

Colossorama Achievements

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.

New Whipped And Steamy Items

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!

Status Report Trello Board

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 the two year anniversary 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 along our anniversary and 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!