Category «Marketing»

A picture blog for our new game

As some of you may already know we currently work on a new project, which was named "Morituri" for some time but has now the title Behind Stars and under Hills. Its prototype is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the MDM.

Behind Stars and under Hills will be a Dungeon Adventure with detective elements and animal people. It puts emphasis on story and atmosphere, on interaction with NPCs (dialogues) and exploration. While there probably will be fights (of low complexity), those won't be the main focus of the game. Instead, players have to find hidden ways and items, translate scriptures, talk to the inhabitants, trade with them, circumvent and/or find ways around dangers (like enemies and traps), and use the light by placing torches.

There are no real hard facts to announce yet (hopefully soon though), but we started a picture blog for the project, especially for the prototype we currently work on. You can find it here. We post everything visual, i.e. drawings, scribbles, animations and screenshots from the game and the level editor. Our intention is to link the blog whenever we post those pictures on Twitter or Facebook, so people don't see a single slice of the game only, but can inform themselves more about the look of the game instantly. It also makes it easier to follow the project as long as we don't have a dedicated website.

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https://behindstarsandunderhills.tumblr.com

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TRI – new update

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We published an update for our game TRI: Of Friendship and Madness! The new version 1.1 got the codename "QuadraticTriangle" and as usual contains some minor bug-fixes and changes to the game. Here are the more important improvements:

  • Added Finnish language for in-game texts
  • Added Polish language for in-game texts
  • Removed warning about not supporting Intel graphics cards, as it was confusing
  • Added bindable key "Menu" - this is what happens when you press ESC to call the pause menu. (The ESC key will always do it, but now you can add another binding.)
  • Removed some wood surface in a location in Chapter 15, to allow coming back to one of the hidden idols by creating triangles

Bug fixes include:

  • Fixed initial resolution fullscreen change
  • Fixed level timer not resetting
  • Fixed Monk talking through the ceiling in Chapter 13
  • Fixed potential bug with some Steam achievements not unlockable
  • Fixed potential bug with not working door in Chapter 12 - needs level restart (minor fix)
  • Fixed bug with quality settings - low shadow settings would also lower quality of characters

If you find any problems with the update, please leave us some feedback and refer to this older announcement on Steam on how to send us relevant crash logs.

If you own TRI on Steam the game should update itself as soon as you restart the client. If you have the game DRM-free on any other store, you will need to download the package again. At the moment, HumbleStore and itch.io already have the latest version, while GOGcom and IndieGameStand will follow soon!

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Farbenspiel released!

We released Farbenspiel 1.0 on itch.io - have a look!

Farbenspiel Title

But wait, what is this game!? It's true, we never talked about Farbenspiel on this blog here, but it seems we're a bit behind blogging anyway. One reason is that Jana is doing marketing for the Indie Arena Booth 2016 at the gamescom and is writing a lot already that way. (Check it out!)

IAB

But back to topic - Farbenspiel is a Local Multiplayer-Only Deathmatch Action game we did as a side project. 2-4 players with gamepads gather and shoot each other. To make it more interesting, the players collect power-ups (eggs) which allow them to splatter colored puddles. In these puddles they can hide - while the enemy becomes slower in it.

As you can't see yourself in a puddle of your color, and bullets reflect at walls, Farbenspiel becomes a bit of chaotic fun. ;-)

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The game is now officially "version 1.0", which means its fully playable. Just get it for $2.50 on itch.io, the finest indie sales platform there is! But there are a lot of things we'd like to see improved in Farbenspiel, like the balancing, and additional levels. So there will surely be updates in the future! Be aware though that it is still more of a side project for us, while we concentrate on planning, funding and prototyping our next bigger project.

Last but not least, here's a somewhat older gameplay video of Farbenspiel:


Farbenspiel - 2 Player Test, Level 2

(YouTube videos try to set cookies and contact Third Party servers!)

Power of Love now available on itch.io

POWER OF LOVE Although Power of Love, our co-op dungeon crawler made for the PGA, is not yet and might never be finished, we uploaded the current prototype on itch.io, because we thought the game is just too much fun to not have it played by other people. You actually get it alongside the soundtrack, which was composed by Ludwig Hanisch and consists of three crazy songs and a bonus track.

Way Of Love
Even as a prototype only the game is fully playable from start to finish! You and your partner can shoot enemies anytime, but when there are too many foes at once you need to carefully time cooperative actions like the Shockwave or the Laser.

Check the game out on itch.io or the official project page - and in order to give you a feeling for the game and also present one full track of the game, we recorded the following video. Have fun!


Power of Love: "The Way of Love" Music Track

(YouTube videos try to set cookies and contact Third Party servers!)

TRI – Award and Update

Exciting news AND great news ahead!

I still can't believe it myself, but our game TRI won an award just yesterday. So it's now officially the Best Youth Game according to the German Computer Game Award 2015! The award in this category comes with a prize money of around 50,000 Euros - which hopefully helps us to finance our next project.

\o/ CELEBRATION \o/

Dear judges of the Computerspielpreis: thank you very much for this honor. And also a big thanks to all the congratulators!

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Onwards to the other news. We took the time to update TRI. The latest release "PythagoreanBeauty" mainly contains a few minor bug-fixes and changes to the game which hopefully improve the overall experience. Some of the levels improvements and additions are:

  • Added an object force field in "Glimpse of Light" to prevent players getting stuck (minor fix)
  • Added some stepping stones to "A Temple on the Mountain"
  • Added a force field wall to "Overcoming Limitations" to prevent players from getting stuck without the wall-walk TRI (minor fix)
  • Replaced a few of the deadly light rays with less deadly light rays (orange color) to make them easier
  • Added a lever for a gate in front of an idol in "Out of the Box"
  • Added minor visual hints in "The Foxes' Playground", "Glimpse of Light" and "Red Means Dangerous"
  • Changed bottom puzzle in "Glimpse of Light" a bit to prevent glitches

A partial list of bugs removed:

  • Fixed a rare, scale related bug with the elevator in "Wings in the Void"
  • Fixed Monk not talking anymore after collecting the first TRI when moving away from him (minor fix)
  • Fixed subtitles not being shown anymore after pressing Escape
  • Fixed end statistics (played chapters and such)
  • Fixed a bug which caused resetting the statistics when restarting a level
  • Fixed a minor bug in "Out of Space and Time" by replacing an invisible triangle-destroying box with a visible one
  • Fixed an idol in "Wings in the Void" (regression from v1.0.1), should count now for the bonus content when collected again

Other changes include:

  • Improved black border and skip button for cutscenes
  • Added option to deactivate the voice of the Monk
  • Added a text in pause menu screen indicating how many chapters were played in the current playthrough
  • Changed auto-statify (of current triangle) slightly - moving the current corner beneath the player won't make the triangle immediately static anymore (min distance is 1m)

A complete list can be found in the Steam announcement. We tried to listen to what players said in the forums and via mail as much as we could, and especially the less deadly light rays might be very welcome to some of our players! Sadly, some things reported we didn't fix because we just could not reproduce the behaviour. So, in case you found a bug, it would be great if you could send a relevant save game and the last log to us, together with a description of the bug. (The Steam announcements also contains the folders where to find the save games and the log file.)

Last but not least, if you happen to attend the Lange Nacht der Computerspiele in Leipzig this Saturday - Friedrich will be there from 3:00pm, interviewed by the famous René Meyer for 20 minutes.

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