Happy New Year! š As the holiday season comes to a close, itās fair to say that the last year wasnāt easy. Even then we all withstood its misfortunes, pulling our best, the world kept spinning, and so did our lilāstudio at Whales And Games!
First off, we wanted to thank everyone for the support that youāve given us through the past year! Thank you for your comments, reviews, art gifts, trades, commissions, and your participation with our community! Itās these interactions that our studio is built-upon, and we treasure each and everyone one of them. š
As we start this new year, thereās a lot of stuff we want to announce and tell you what weāve been up too! If we were to make a quick bullet list, itād be something like this:
Weāve rebooted Bunny Splash Casinoās development, our adults-only management-simulation and visual novel game, back in November! Weāve also ditched the Bunny Copulation brand and want, even with the gameās themes, to be proud that it is a Whales And Games project!
We want to give a fresh coat-of-paint to the Whales And Games branding over the year! Weāve refreshed our characters and some of our presentation last year, and now, we want to bring it to our core brand as well, especially as we start hosting commercial projects.
We want to address our previous projects like Roboto Repairaton and Colossorama! If possible and without conflicting with Bunny Splash Casinoās development, weād like to finally release them.
Global Game Jamis coming up and being online for the first time! We definitely want to get in on that game jam!
And much more…!
These are very exciting times for our team! However, if thereās something weāve learned with Whales And Games is that we frequently get ahead of ourselves. As much as weād like to get into the details of each point, we want to get what weāre working on is bright and shiny before we show it off to you! āØ
Our 4th anniversary will be happening in just a couple of months in March! When we get there and over the course of the next few months, weāll tell you about what weāve got on the blender! š
Hold on a bit longer to your sails, alright? If not, come down to the deck at our Whales And Games Discordor follow us on Twitter! Weāve been sharing development details more casually over on those places, so if you want a few sneak peeks, feel free to join in!
If youāre looking for Bunny Splash Casinonews thereās also its own Discordand Twitter! Since it’s an adult-only game, we thought it’d be better to keep them in separate, age-gated channels.
Hereās to a happy new year, and a whale of 2021! š³
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 celebratingwith a dedicated server eventand participating in theGDC 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, weāre commemorating the three-year milestone of our studioās founding! š„
It’s been one huge adventure ever since weāve 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. Weāve 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 donāt 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 didnāt have some stylized artwork to share! Hereās Whalechan with a bunch of wrapped gifts picked just for you for our 3rd Anniversary! š
Credits from left to right and top to bottom: āBuns Bunsā by yolk-sac, āJazzy and Bluessomā by MDLune, āCheqmateā by CKoenig88, āJazzy and Bluessomā by Dxmyxix, āWhalechanā by SweetKooky, āCaffieā by tofumeat, āWhalechanā by nyancatimusprime and āMonetizationmanā by mot-bot
However, we feel the actual āGamesā part of Whales And Gamescould 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.
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!
Weāve only now begun work on it and weāll showcase more of the game as it starts taking shape! ā¤ļøš pic.twitter.com/kfTOOL80w9
ā Bunny Copulation šš (@BunnyCopulation) March 18, 2020
Weāre 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 havenāt done it yet, follow our new Twitterand Discordfor 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! āØ
Like weāve mentioned in the Bunny Splash Casino announcement post, weāre 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 havenāt 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! Thereās 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! š¤
Roboto Repairaton will be the first of the game jam games weād like to get underway this year, and we hope to get even more done as the year progresses! However, if thereās anything that experience has told us from this past year, is to stop promising bogus-dates until weāre absolutely sure. Youāll have to keep an eye out for those!
Like all of our major celebrations, we are also running a small Discordserver event alongside all of this! Participating on it will grant you the Anniversary Guest š 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 Worldās 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 didnāt 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.
If you have some extra pocket money around that youāve saved for having stayed at home, weād be thankful in the name of all of thegame developer community if you could dedicate some of it to the cause! š
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 weāre 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 Discordcommunity, Twitter or Facebookpage for more!
Finally, remember to wash your hands and stay safe! Cheers! š³
Happy Lunar New Year! Even if you donāt 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! š„ š
Whales And Games Micro-Announcements
Letās 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! š
Find and Join your Chinese Zodiac!
It isnāt called the āYear of the Ratā 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, weāve set up a special #zodiac-table room in our Discordserver you can find what animal is under your Chinese zodiac!
Even better! In that room youāll 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!
Whatās a new years celebration without a loud party? Weāre doing it gaming style! If youāre ready for a good old-fashioned Gaming Nights Club session, come join us on our Discord and weāll 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, hereās 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 āem!
Whale! It’s been quite a while since weāve had a Whales And Games Status Report, hasnāt 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 Augustās 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 weāve got a lot of small but very important milestones to cover! Letās 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 didnāt 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 weāve 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!
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 thereās enough interest for it, we might even make a full-fledged development insight covering the topics of the talk! š
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?
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, thereās an assortment of things that have happened satellite to all the event preparations, decisions weāve been making with our games and thereās been a lot going on with our Discord community as well. Hereās some highlights:
Weāve got stickers! Since weāve been around some events, we thought itād 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 donāt have any games that actually go on your pocket other than Petty Puny Planet, but maybe weāll find a game-changer there! š
Holiday spirit might be around the corner, but back in October we celebrated Halloween with style, pitching Skeletons ā ļø, Vampires š¦ and Witches āØ 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! Weāve been working on a Skeleton Whalechan and sheās practically done (just missing animation now)!
Weāre also changing the way our #creative rooms work on our server since a lot of artists have been joining recently! Weāve now got a room just for showcasing completed pieces, a room for work-in-progress sketches and scribbles and weāre also making a whole new dedicated gallery on this website to highlight some of the best work thatās been pinned there!
Weāre not the types that like to waggle numbers around, but weāve 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! āØ
And thatās just some of the highlights! Honestly, thereās 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. š
That nails it for this time around! We talked about so many things here, yet thereās always more we want to have around coming 2020! Things are shaping up quickly, so you may want to follow us on Twitterand 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! š³
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, itās 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 asColossorama 1.1 ā¢ 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 gameās 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 ā¢ The All-Stars Update, which is the version of the game thatās currently live, we couldnāt 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! āļø
And thatās 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 weāve been working on Colossorama 1.3 ā¢ The Champions Updateon-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! š³
The journey over the years as weāve picked on Colossorama on and off as taught us and showed us multiple lessons, and has validated us in our growth as weāve picked it up and updated it time and time again. For its upcoming 1.3 release, since development is being made on-and-off, weāre avoiding making specific estimates of when it will be ready, but weāre pretty much closing on the final tasks in order to ship it once and for all!
It’s been a wacky three years. Since weāve released Colossorama 36, weāve 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 weāre at the very beginning of a very long race. Weāre 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 weād 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 WAGās third year and weāve been working full-steam ahead to make sure we deliver! As always, feel free to tell us what youād like to see from us over at our Discord and join us for the journey ahead! Cheers! āØ
