Tag: Status Report

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! 👏

A Status Report for Colossorama and Whipped and Steamy! • Status Report – July 2019

Posted on | 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! 🐳

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 two years 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 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! 🐳

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! ⏳?

Whales And Games Status Report • September 2018

Posted on | by Whales And Games

We wanted to give everyone out a small status update of what we’ve and are working on, and what you can expect from Whales And Games going forward, as the team starts being more active again. ✅

  • We’ve been spending the last few months (including hiatus) in defining goals, vision and team for going forward. We want to start focusing more on iterative and full-of-personality content, while also still putting one-off games out every now and then.
  • We’ve also developed a set of back-end tools called Shipyard for better build distribution, protection and social integration. These will be released as open-source at a latter date.
  • We’ve also been refining the Whales And Games branding, setting up standards and guidelines for future content and showcasing our stuff.
  • We have released a mini-site with all of our currently released games, and have been iterating on it as previous points develop. A full website is still planned to be released at a later point.
  • We’re currently working on 2 Major Updates to old projects we’ve had in the backlog for a while, with one of them going to be announced really soon! Every other game or project we have previously mentioned and posted about are not in active development, being in hiatus or cancelled.
  • We’ve begun #playtesting one of these major updates the past week. In case you want to sign-up as well, apply now!
  • We’re also planning to kick-off Community Events expectably soon at our Discord Server with regular events for community involvement!
  • Yes, we’re still having a whale of a time! ??

Of course, there’s more stuff we’ve been discussing for long-term support, but these are the short-term things we are working on. Once we reach time to put those in execution, we’ll talk about them then! Remember you can always keep up with us at our community through our Discord Server!

Cheers! ?