Status Report Archives • Whales And Games

Three Years in the Making! Happy 3rd Anniversary, Whales And Games!

Posted on March 31, 2020 | by Whales And Games

Happy 3rd Anniversary, Whales And Games! It’s been three years since we founded our studio and have developed over ten games since! We can’t thank every enough for being part of it!

Going into our 4th year, we want to focus again on games. Primarily, Bunny Splash Casino but we’ll also be developing other one-off projects for Whales And Games such as Roboto Repairaton! We’re also celebrating with a dedicated server event and participating in the GDC Relief Bundle helping developers in need!

Happy 3rd Anniversary, Whales And Games! Just a few weeks ago we were celebrating the first anniversary of Whipped And Steamy. Now, mere weeks later, we’re commemorating the three-year milestone of our studio’s founding! 🥂

It’s been one huge adventure ever since we’ve gotten started with Whales And Games, from the time we got started with game jams and academic projects, to kicking off this new year full-time with the studio. We’ve had a lot of highlights over these past years releasing ten different games, supporting our ever-growing community and expanding our cast of characters!

While this year we don’t have any surprise announcements like sudden game releases, we still wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate this milestone! And it wouldn’t be a celebration of ours if we didn’t have some stylized artwork to share! Here’s Whalechan with a bunch of wrapped gifts picked just for you for our 3rd Anniversary! 🎁

Last year, most of our attention was focused on Whipped And Steamy • Cosplay Café, and its aftermath as well as the elusive Colossorama • The Champions Update. However, as you know, the development of both of these projects didn’t go as smoothly as planned. Instead, we felt most of the shine last year was in the footnote details.

From our server activities, the crazy aftermath of Whipped And Steamy, to being spotlighted in events, to participating in Art Fight, having both of us co-founders meeting up in person for the first time! When we think about those, it looks like certainly had an eventful and thrilling year! For example, we constantly remind ourselves of some art we’ve received as part of Art Fight! Seeing so many people celebrating our characters fills our hearts with joy up to this very day! 💙

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*

However, we feel the actual ‘Games’ part of Whales And Games could have gone been better during the past few months, and we feel we could definitely be pushing for more game-related content! This year, we want to make a complete 180-degree turn, and put (almost) all of focus on the games again.

If you’ve caught up with our anniversary post for Whipped And Steamy from earlier this month, we’ll now be focusing our attention mostly into Bunny Splash Casino, our new adult-oriented management simulation novel and its new sub-brand of the Bunny Copulation alongside it!

Welcome to the #BunnySplashCasino, a full-blown, adults-only erotic management simulation novel game where becoming rich is secondary to pleasure in this paradise of splashy lust!

We’ve only now begun work on it and we’ll showcase more of the game as it starts taking shape! ❤️🐇 pic.twitter.com/kfTOOL80w9
— Bunny Copulation 🔞🐇 (@BunnyCopulation) March 18, 2020

We’re currently getting started with the proper development of the game, and over the next few weeks we will be closing in concept art, key art, finishing off design decisions and getting started with prototypes!

If you haven’t done it yet, follow our new Twitter and Discord for Bunny Copulation as well be sharing progress on it as they start happening!

While we will be relaying most of our attention on Bunny Splash Casino, we will still continue supporting Whales And Games and making new character-focused art! ✨

Like we’ve mentioned in the Bunny Splash Casino announcement post, we’re also currently getting some final changes done to the post-jam version of our Global Game Jam game, Roboto Repairaton before we get it released. These changes are practically done and once the game gets out there, it will mark our 11th Game!

In case you haven’t seen some footage of Roboto Repairaton from our social media yet, Roboto Repairaton is both a single-player and couch co-op robot assembly game! There’s a barely functional factory that can mend and fix all kinds of robots, but putting them all into repair assembly is easier said than done! Grab robot pieces across conveyor belts and assemble robots together, but watch out for factory malfunctions! 🤖

Roboto Repairaton will be the first of the game jam games we’d like to get underway this year, and we hope to get even more done as the year progresses! However, if there’s anything that experience has told us from this past year, is to stop promising bogus-dates until we’re absolutely sure. You’ll have to keep an eye out for those!

Like all of our major celebrations, we are also running a small Discord server event alongside all of this! Participating on it will grant you the Anniversary Guest 🎉 role!

Head over to the #commands channel in the server and leave a nice celebratory message using the !celebrate command to claim it! We have all the instructions over at the server!

We also have some of our games as part of Game Dev World’s GDC Relief Bundle over on itch! Like many other developers, our opportunity to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was postponed because of COVID-19 pandemic concerns. While it didn’t affect us as much, a lot of disempowered developers were financially hit hard with travel and visa cancellations. Thus, we wanted to help contribute to ease their woes.

While you could already play them for free, the bundle features our Whipped And Steamy • Cosplay Café, Jazzy Beats, Onigami and Super Sellout, alongside a bag of 163 other goodies including games, assets and music! Bundle donations are purely for charity and will go directly to developers in need to help cushion the impact that the sudden changes across the world have caused!

If you have some extra pocket money around that you’ve saved for having stayed at home, we’d be thankful in the name of all of the game developer community if you could dedicate some of it to the cause! 🙏

We have a great year on the horizon, and we want to make sure we start the year on the right note and aim to continue helping the world! Over the next few weeks we will be getting development in Bunny Splash Casino and sealing-off Roboto Repairaton for shipping, and we’re looking forward to a year full of pleasant surprises!

Thank you once again for a happy 3rd anniversary and year year, and we hope that you stick along for another one discovering a sea of fun! As always, you can keep up with our Discord community, Twitter or Facebook page for more!

Finally, remember to wash your hands and stay safe! Cheers! 🐳

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

Posted on January 25, 2020 | 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 December 6, 2019 | 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! 🐳

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

Posted on August 9, 2019 | 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! 😊

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 July 5, 2019 | by Whales And Games

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!

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.

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!

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! 🐳

Tag: Status Report