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 Gamesserver, 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! 🐳
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 town 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!
Fire up for an experience that only a cosplay café can provide! Here’s hoping your time at the café is just like we like our coffee: Hot, steamy, and with skimpy clothing! ☕🐳
We’ve worked for a month during Strawberry Jam 3 on one of our dream games Cosplay Café, a light business simulator that doubles as a visual novel mixed in with a good dose of adult parody. You can play it right now on itch.io! Obviously NSFW. For adults only! 🔞
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 Twitterand Facebookpages you can follow!
2019 will be our waggy-iest year yet, and we got a whole sea of fun planned in advance! Cheers! ??
Hey you. Yes you. I see you browsing the Ludum Dare front page looking for treasure. We’ve got goods in the form of fun facts of our sponsored-fueled avarice marathon of a game, Super Sellout.
Stick around, for this ought to be interesting, and insight about how a team of five can somehow crunch a game in 72-hours while barely clinging to anything that loosely resembles a spec of sanity. Here we go!
Chin-Scratching Inspirations
After our long back-and-forth brainstorming session we settled on a superhero theme. As such, we wanted a protagonist that looked heroic but somewhat goofy in line of our previous characters. Our inspirations, for an early concept, included Crimson Chin from Fairly Odd Parents and Captain Qwark from Ratchet & Clank.
We didn’t truly like the cyan colored suit for the protagonist, so we kinda took Crimson Chin as an inspiration, making him red and black. However, we also gave it a logo of a white triangle on the chest. Since someone jokingly said he looked like a YouTube inspired hero, we ended up calling him Monetization Man, the hero who “demonetizes crime”.
Grandmas? On trees? On my rooftop? More likely than you think!
Early in development, Moski made grass assets for walking around, fire hydrants and an old lady stuck on a tree. However, since the programmers thought a runner-type game would benefit from jumping, the park got replaced for rooftops, inspired by another piece of trivia in this post. That’s how we got stuck with grandmas stuck on trees stuck on rooftops.
At that point, we threw common sense out of the window (like we normally do as a team) and added dogs, a bunny-suited bunny-girl and a lot of ice cream, beyond the added-in cosmetics that Monetization Man gets when different sponsors are equipped.
Incredibly Paper Inspired
While we were discussing the superhero thematics and were starting to turn the game into a runner, one piece of oddware that was brought up as an inspiration was The Incredibles (yes, the animated picture) video game adaptation for the Gameboy Advance.
While the theming and actions you can perform in that game are vastly different from the ones you can perform in Super Sellout, the game did provide some inspiration as to how to tackle the gameplay perspective and ultimately, how we should design and implement the different rooftops.
And of course, two looks at the game’s style, remove half of the halftone we put on top of everything and you can also see some direct inspirations for the comic-book art style not only from comic books themselves but also from the likes of Paper Mario, with the characters outline with the white outlines and soft shading.
Overbearing Whales And Games References and Internal Jokes
If we were able to give teams human traits, then our team at Whales And Games would be guilty of not having any self-awareness at all. In similar fashion to our previous projects, we cramped our game full of internal jokes and references. Of course, we don’t think anyone will really be able to name them all, but we keep putting those jokes in for self-amusement. Guess we’re the true super sellouts in the end, eh? ?
As an example, Dapperfish is a recurrent character in our games and conversations. You can see a muggler with a Dapperfish mask, and he even appears in his own panel in the main menu. You can even click on him there for a goofy surprise. ?
Of course, the self-referential fun doesn’t end there either as there’s plenty of other situations where we took the opportunity and cramped even more self-love into it!
On the main menu, beyond Dapperfish in his own tile, there’s also Whalechan, one of our main mascots, in the credits panel.
All of the billboards you can find when you activate the Whales And Games modifier, are as expected, mostly Whales And Games references, including three of them to previous Ludum Dare projects, Colossorama(namely how the 1.3 update has been in development for a while), Petty Puny Planetand Jazzy Beats.
Other billboards also have other miscellaneous references, with Maid Dragon parodies and Egg.
While you might think that Rob Boss is simply a direct reference to Bob Ross, they have actually appeared in Colossorama, as a playable character. We decided to throw in a reference to the character in Super Sellout as we thought it’d make for an interesting sponsor.
And last but not least, there’s also a sticker in reference of Wool Pit which despite not being a Whales And Games project, was Moski’s saving grace from whatever happened during Ludum Dare 42.
A Design as Crazy as a Goat
When the “Sacrifice” theme was announced, each member of the team brainstormed ideas for what to make the game about. And we brainstormed a lot. One of the most popular ideas among us was to make the game about a dating game show, where contestants would get sacrificed if they were not selected for a date.
While that idea never came to be, one of the things that remained as a left over was having a sick goat with a sick goatee as the host, which we later wanted to repurpose to serve as a sort of tutorial for the players in Super Sellout and even interrupt the player based on some sponsors.
Unfortunately, wiring out text-systems into the game were quickly ruled as being too out of scope for the time we had in the jam, and instead we kept the goat as one of the rescuers as a callback to our original idea. Mayhaps the day will still come where he will actually get to be the host.
And that’s your fun time fun facts trivia of today for Super Sellout! We always have a stupid amount of fun working on our games despite the occasional hiccup that happens here and there. In fact, we actually left our development text and voice channels for the game completely open for public-reading over at our at our team’s Discord server!. We’d love to see you (and your games) there!
If you haven’t tried Super Sellout yet, we’d love for you to give it a try and tell us what you think!. We’re still going around and playing as many as we can, and would love to check yours out! Make sure to share it with us, and we’ll get to them first opportunity! Cheers! ?
