Tag: Status Report

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! ?