Dear Caromble! friends, We just released a small update. We got feedback about the difficulty of Caromble! and some players weren't aware that the difficulty (the number of mercy balls) can be changed in the options menu. Because we want all type of players to be able to enjoy Caromble! we added the 'Difficulty button' to the game over screen as well. Hopefully it will help some players to stay motivated to reach the end.
The last couple of months have been a different kind of adventure for us. Instead of programming and designing we have worked on creating a pitch deck with which we hope to find a publisher or PR-partner that can help us launch the 1.0 version of Caromble!. We shared it for the first time at INDIGO: a Dutch indie game conference we attended in June. With the feedback received there we have completed the pitch deck and we are currently pitching... a lot. We will keep you updated on what's happening on the pitching front. It is completely new for us and we have learned a lot already. We wanted to share a few of our slides, to show what we've been up to:

Dear Caromble! friends, Today is the day. After 15 years of development, Caromble! is completed with all intended features, levels and now finally with all story elements. To experience the story of Caromble! in this update, please replay the Prologue and Epilogue level. Though Caromble! is not a narrative experience and was never intended as one, we are very happy to have these narrative elements in play. For us personally it makes Caromble! complete. We feel that we crafted an experience that now is as complete as we could make it. We hope that the added story brings some joy and somehow deepens your experience with all those multi-balls, explosions, collapses, cam-shakes and those perfectly-angled paddle-ball hits in Caromble!. Here is a video of the beginning of the newly added story elements: [previewyoutube=mMpTzGZzAqo;full][/previewyoutube] We also added our Credits to the game. These can also be accessed from the main menu. This was the final thing we added last week and in a way it marks the end of an incredible journey. We want to thank everybody involved and especially the players who dared to invest their time and money while we are in Early Access. You really helped us finish the game. Special thanks to players: foofaraw and Chiquita(ARF!) and VanAlphen whose input was considerable and invaluable both content-related as motivational for us as a team. So what are our next steps? We will do a final internal beta-test and we will prepare a marketing plan for leaving Early Access. When we leave Early Access we will wipe the leaderboards for one last time. So please make screenshots to keep those eternal bragging rights. From Holland with Love, Crimson Owl Studios

This update contains many small bug fixes, graphics improvements and a few new achievements!

Dear Caromblers! Ever since we saw the first announcement of the Steam Deck, we knew we wanted to make sure Caromble! could run on it. Today we're excited to tell you that not only does Caromble! run on the Deck natively (at the best graphics settings), we might have to admit that we enjoy the game best on the Deck. The work on supporting the Deck began this summer. Since we didn't have our own Steam Deck yet, we used a Steam Controller and a laptop with similar specks for our first beta versions. After we got our own Steam Deck in August, we spend many, many hours optimizing the game, the graphics and the controls. This took a little more time since testing the game on the Deck was simply fun!
Got some extra testing help - forget about that Switch! Trying to beat a mouse as input device is no easy task. While I'm still a bit better with a mouse, I am able to get very close to my high-scores on the Deck (but it does take some practice).
My main goal: getting the controls in shape so I could finish the Race skill level om the Steam Deck. Yeah, beating VanAlphen is hard even with a mouse :) Not have a Steam Deck yet? Don't worry, this update improves the game for everybody:

• Better controller support (especially controllers with track pads like the Steam Controller/Deck)
• Performance improvements
• Better anti-aliasing on best graphics settings
• Fixed many graphics glitches
• Fixed many small bugs
• Fixed selecting wrong (lowest) graphics settings on first startup

Dear Caromble! friends, It's been a long time since you've heard from us, but we are very happy to share great news with you! We released the final chapter of Caromble! into Early Access. Chapter 6 combines everything we have learned as developers into great gameplay and a final boss fight in which you have to apply all your skills. After victory, there is a final Epilogue level that awaits you.
We believe with Chapter 6 we were able to push the limits of what a brick breaker can be further than we had ever done before; e.g. how can there be gameplay when there isn't even a paddle? We hope you enjoy this final chapter as much as we do. Besides new gameplay content, with this update we fixed all bugs reported on the forum, did a lot of performance optimization and added Linux support. We are still waiting for our ordered Steam Deck to arrive. If any of you have one, please let us know whether it runs on it. We can't wait to play Caromble! on it ourselves :) Also, we added a story introduction before the Prologue is started. If you already played the Prologue, you can also check out the mythology intro below. If you haven't and rather want to experience it ingame, don't watch it here :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfmyXFcG9c4 This intro is part of the narrative, which is the final thing we have planned to build before we leave Early Access. It's the last piece of the Caromble! puzzle, which will make our intended Caromble! experience complete. We really hope you like Chapter 6, the Epilogue and the new story intro. We are very happy to hear your feedback, remarks or anything you want to share about this update. Let us know on the discussion forum We are almost there! Thanks for reading and stay tuned. Raymond Thomas D. Thomas S. Peter Pascal

We're very happy to announce that we've released another Caromble! update! No, no chapter 6 just yet (for the Caromble! conclusion you'll just have to wait a little longer - we need to get the narrative elements up and running first). What you do get is a ton of bug fixes all over the game and the first set of achievements! While we are working towards the final release, we're wondering how you want to be involved in further development: would you like us to release very early versions of the narrative+chapter 6 (maybe as a dev-build you'll need to select in steam), or do you want to wait until everything is more polished (to get the 'real' experience)? Let us know! Enjoy! The Crimson Owl team

Dear Caromble! friends, Since our last update, another baby was born in the Caromble! team! Also, Thomas the artist has married and became insta-dad of two. Furthermore, I (Pascal) am about to become father for the second time next October. This means, that since we started working on Caromble!, at the end of this year we will have transformed from fatherless chaps, to all five a father of two. Wow! You might think, if we weren't so busy procreating, we would have have completed Caromble! way sooner... Anyhow... we have made some progress in Caromble as well. We have completed parts of the story and even included a narrator. For a small sneak preview for the atmosphere, check the video below: [previewyoutube=wb9Now7IfVc;full][/previewyoutube] The skybox is still dummy art here, but this intro part is complete now. Last announcement we mentioned that we are gameplay complete. Since then, Peter has worked his magic on prettyizing the final level and the last boss fight. That is almost done now too.
The last big task is completing the story narrative, for which we had shown some concept art before. Unfortunately, our story helper artist was too busy to continue on Caromble!, so that has delayed us a bit. I am currently working on it with programmer art, adding animations and making compositions, so Thomas S. can later replace it with pretty stuff. If you want to see how glad we are with a real artist, look at the next image to see how Caromble! would have looked if I'd make the art:
That's it for now. I hope the next announcement will be for the release of Chapter 6 and the narrative. Hopefully until then! Kind regards, The Caromble! team!

Dear Caromblers!, It's been a while. We hope you are well. We all are. A new (human) baby was born in the Caromble! family. This is the 6th baby since we conceived Caromble!. Wow... how far we've grown.
(this is not a picture of said offspring) Today we'd like to inform you that we are finally gameplay complete! We wrapped up the gameplay of the final boss fight and the interactive epilogue. What's left to do is tweaking the lighting and some environmental art in those areas. Furthermore, we are still working on the narrative intro and outro.
We can't imagine we won't leave Early Access in 2021, so I dare to say, right here, right now: Caromble! will go into full release in the second half of 2021!
We'll share more when we can, but know that we're still working on the first of the 7 Caromble! babies.
Thanks for reading. Cheers!

Hi Caromblers, Here is a little sneak peek into the final boss fight. We have almost implemented all gameplay now. The aim of this fight is to challenge the player to use all the skills the game has teached you so far and in the same time providing something new, fresh and exciting. For us it is also a final practice in applying all game design lessons we have learned in this final area. It's been quite a ride making Caromble! and we have learned a lot, also by making mistakes of course. It's taken long, too long, but Caromble! is nearing completion! We hope this small video (sorry for the low framerate, I have my casual devtop here now) makes you excited for the final chapter and the final battle! [previewyoutube=GdEOJpzA__o;full][/previewyoutube] Stay safe! Crimson Owl Studios

Hi Caromblers!, We hope you're doing okay in these strange and confusing times. All of us are healthy and we are all working our day-jobs from home (in the Netherlands). Due to the situation, some of us had to ramp up the amount of (regular) working days to full time. Furthermore, we're trying to restrict our screentime and increase our family time when we're not working on our paying jobs. This helps keeping us sane (at least as sane as we were). You may understand this also has its effect on our Caromble! progress. We're keeping at is as we can. This screenshot is from the area that leads to the final boss fight. We added ourselves to the game if you don't mind. We even have a gameplay role there:
We're trying to be safe, healthy and sane and we hope you find ways to do the same. We are thankful for games to help us in this time (I'm currently playing Outer Wilds on PS4, love it!), but we are also thankful there is so much joy to be found outside of screentime. These times help us realize that more than ever. We wish you all the best! The Caromble! team

Dear Caromble! friends, Our Caromble! project started as a technical prototype, mainly tot test the capabilities of our self-build game-engine. This was over 10 years ago. We started out as die-hard techies, but as our inner designers emerged and as we grew confidence in our level design skills, we dared to use the potential of Caromble! to investigate the gameplay possibilities of a brick breaker (breakout/arkanoid) game beyond what was done before. We believe that with Caromble! we found ways to add new layers of gameplay, elements of other genres, into a brick breaker game which hasn't been done before. Because of this it is still exciting for us after all these years to be making this game. Because of this it is exciting to play. We hope you'll be surprised in every new chapter with the new types of gameplay we introduce. There are still many ideas to explore, but we're currently working on the final level of Caromble! and we can't do everything. Feature creep is a pitfall we stepped in over and over again. But looking back, it also helped us to make Caromble! into something unique. Something that's become more than a brick breaker. It's a... ehm... well, it's Caromble!. In the final level there is one thing we still wanted to explore: is there gameplay without the paddle? Caromble! provides special powerups in the form of Arkatrons. Are these gameplay elements powerful enough to justify the absence of a paddle? We will now premiere some footage of chapter 6. The development of this level is currently in the gamepay phase, so lighting, graphics and polish are not yet there. Take a look at gameplay from our last level and let us know: Do you think there is interesting gameplay in Caromble! without a paddle? [previewyoutube=FOZ5W2OTQFU;full][/previewyoutube] Thanks for reading and we believe 2020 will be the year!

Dear Caromble! friends, As mostly in our announcements we'd like to say: sorry it's been a while for a progress update. We hope that by now you know Caromble! is always going forward! At the moment we're working on 2 major things: 1. The last level of the story mode
The last level of the game is going to be the largest area we've ever made. We're really trying to come up with new combinations of gameplay mechanics and powerups that can provide new challenges and we're happy to say that there is still enough gameplay to explore. Chapter 6 introduces the last and final Arkatron powerup, namely jump, which gives the player more agency. Here is a sneak preview from our level editor:
2. The narrative/story of Caromble!:
The game will give some more insight in what is happening and why you are trying to beat the red angry alien and retrieve the Arkatrons. It will be told in a comic-book style. We're currently working on coloring the separate panels and after that we're animating separate images in the panels. Finally we will place all panels in a 3D-environment and create awesome camera curves to bring the story to the screen. We hope you'll like it!

Caromble! is still in Early Access. This means that next to adding content we are also still changing levels and adjusting gameplay. Because of these changes we think it is fair to *someday* reset the leaderboards and create a level playing field. Fast forward to today.

Problem

Clean Slate

Wall of Fame

We are very excited to announce we have just released the 5th chapter of Caromble! on Steam Early Access! Chapter 5 introduces a new Arkatron, the Ball Direction Shooter*, 4 new story levels and two new skill levels. On top Caromble! finally runs on MacOS X. We have been working on this chapter for a long time, and we are very happy to finally share our work with the community. As ever, we are very curious to hear your feedback! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD-pqhK33ww * Yes we are open to naming suggestions.

We may be quite from time to time, but rest assured that the ball is still rolling. We will have something concrete to show in the very near future. And here are some sketches for the epic final levels of Caromble! that we are working on for a bit later.

A simple container-crate was one of the first objects I approached and did tests with to figure out the style and working approach for Caromble. It has stayed as this, although the game evolved to more of a line-art style over the next years. Time to bring this one up to date. First, here you can see the original texture I created back then. I tried pencils to draw the details, which gave a nice look in black and white.
The first texture, done with pencil on paper and scanned. But on the final object, when adding color, its actually a bit hard to see. Mostly you would not even get this close. Additionally (and this weighted even more in the decision), it was a lot of work. Its hard to get the inevitable digital fixes to look exactly like pencil. Imagine cutting and rotating a piece the parts would not have the same direction of the hatching anymore.
Screenshot from the game, with a color overlay on the texture.
For better comparison, Ive made a more up-to date real-time shot of the asset. As you can see with more effects like reflections and normal map shading, its even harder to notice the style. And here is the updated approach with just a black pen as base. There is a bit analogue detail in there, like irregularity in the lines, but its more subtle and easier to move around.
The new texture this time done with Substance Painter, with some tweaks. In an earlier posting, I described the procedural workflow for these 3D assets. A lot is automated and then I go over and do manual tweaks. Later the programs help me to create variations like different colors or damaged stages, often with just one or two clicks.
Here is the new version with a texture based on pen line-art. It does have an updated normal map, and the effects, but the line-art shows.
The damaged version its naturally even more noisy, but still reads as stylized.
Furthermore, I generate color variations. Currently as separate textures though we may switch to a shader that allows the programmers to change the color on the fly. All objects have this style, with old objects being updated. I have a series of asset-shots on the Caromble blog, to show them off.

Since we're working with a small team on Caromble!, We have to find ways to optimize the work-flow. In the beginning I did a big degree of the art analog - with pen and paper. But in recent months I've set up a very procedurally. Basically keeping the style but letting the computer do the work for me. Here I'll describe in layman's terms some steps of how I go about it. I should first describe what procedural art means. You can think of it as the artist not doing the actual artwork anymore, but describing rules to the computer that it then executes. This has some disadvantages: it takes longer, and needs a different skill set that you have to learn (e.g. knowing how to program is useful). The upside is that you can then just tell the program: Do some more variations. So the more assets you need, the more the initial effort will pay off. A specific twist in my use-case is that I'm trying to emulate a unique style. Let's first take a look, of what a final object looks like:
Starting out here with the final look of the diesel locomotive, so you see what the target look was. It has a bit of a comic style, but still shading and some little details. Five years ago, there was not much in usable procedural tools out there. Now tools like Substance Painter became essentially industry standard. A lot of texturing-work you once had to do draw by hand in Photoshop - a tool that was made for ... well, editing photos - you get now done near automatically. With Painter you can for example just take a 3D object, and drop a material like "wood" on it, and *boom*, your asset looks like made from wood.
A working view of Substance Painter. You can see for example the swaps on the side that I could drag on an object to give it a specific material. Painter is in essence made for painting details onto the 3D object - so here is the final result I export and then use in our game engine. For the actual process, the program first calculates various properties of the 3D mesh. These I can then use to create rules - like "where the object has little hidden corners ... make it more dark, to simulate shadow". Notice how this is a flexible process. Depending on the object, I could also say "put dust in these hidden corners". Here is the object with this calculated data projected on it - in this case it's called Occlusion-Map.
A map that shows shadows on the object, called Occlusion-Map - like how it would get darker in corners. It makes the object more readable. Another such map shows me the elements of the object. It fills them with flat colors, so that with just a few clicks then I can define unique properties for an element.
This map automatically color codes elements. This way I can then easily say "make all girders yellow". Other examples are a map for showing the thickness of elements:
For this thickness map, the computer automatically calculates every element that is thin (and becomes black here) or thick (white) Or the location:
The position map is a bit harder to read - but you can see for example, how in one corner everything becomes red. This way you can tell the program for example: "Color everything that's on the bottom in a certain way". Specifically for my use-case, a map showing the edges is useful.
Here is the "Curvature-Map" - it shows edges that point outside as white, and inward pointing ones as black. I used this one as source to create the first step of my texture. After all, my style has black lines that mimic how in comics elements are separated - which I try to make look like simple ink line style. Using the map you see above, I told the program to automatically draw a black line on all inner and outer edges. Here is the result.
This outline is completely automatically generated - I told the program to add some distortion, to have more natural look. It all still needs a more detailed artists input. In the following step, I go in and add by hand all details that the program by itself can not know. Like that locomotives have little lines and exhausts.
I went in and painted in the 3D view, to add specific details like lights. Using the earlier mentioned Position-Map, I then add variation to the surface.
This step is now automatic - it adds variation. I'm using the height information from the earlier layers, to tell the program: Add more damage at the bottom (as there would be more dirt and such on a train) I can then easily color it all and export the final result - in this case the flat map with all color details.
The actual texture in the flat view. There are some more twists and turns to it all, for example Normal maps. These are nowadays used in all 3D engines, to show the shape of small details on a flat surface. But for sake of brevity I'll skip some finer points.
The Normal-Map - it shows the 3D engine what 3D shape the smaller elements have. Again, a lot is automatic - I've put for example a wobbly structure on it, to make it seem a bit damaged. With this result I can use another procedural program, called Substance-Designer. I can then process the export images and create new sizes and color variations with one click.
I use Substance Designer to take the base texture and automate the creation of color versions.
[caption width="640" align="aligncenter"] These are colors I let Substance Designer create for me. Another such program is Houdini.
This is a damaged version, which also includes some distortion of the 3D model, which I do in Houdini. And just as an example, here is a completely different object - but since I could just reuse the rules I've set up for the train, most of the result comes for free.
It's a little cabin/exit (kinda like one you would see on a top of a building). It has all the style-elements used for the train, just adapted.
Again, thanks to the automation, it's just one click to get all these color versions.
The damaged version of the building could use the same procedure as the train - with only some adjustments, so that chipped paint for example wouldn't expose metal, but rather concrete.

Here are some more of the shiny new versions of the commercial assets. As shown in the first asset update last time around (thanks for the positive comment about them :)), they all now have a nice default version, a proper damage state and color variations.
Building in Construction
Damaged construction building.
Color Variations of the building.
Little extension building
Broken version
Color variations of the extension.
Apartment block - base version.
Destroyed version.
Apartment colors.
Bridge for Pedestrians.
Curve of the bridge.
Color versions for the bridges.
Wagon for a train
Damaged wagon.
Colored wagons
And as a special building with no destruction or colors: An industrial funnel.

Dear Caromble! friends, We have received questions on whether the development is still ongoing. Well, of course it is! Development is certainly ongoing. We expect to finish Chapter 5 and new narrative content (yes, there will be story!) in December. We plan to release this, with 2 new skill levels, after testing in January. Then there is only one more Chapter left! Development, though slower than everyone in the world would like, is always ongoing. Always! Thanks for sticking around! Until our next release Thomas Schmall, the one who likes art, will share some insights on the asset creation process. In this post and the next, an overview of some of the assets in the Commercial theme featuring in Chapter 4 and 5: Art production for the Commercial Chapter of Caromble went to full steam (pun intended) the last months. Most objects were place-holders before, with the fitting shape, but not much details in the 3D meshes and no proper textures. By now all objects have gone though the final process. Ive made pictures when I finished an asset, so here is a first collection. One version is always the normal block, the next one is a destroyed version (once the ball has hit the object), and the last is the color variations in an overview).
Building with Trims
Damaged version of the trimmed Building.
Color versions of the trimmed building.
Road with curve.
And the damaged road.
Road colors.
Fence Cloth.
Damaged fence.
Color versions of the fence.
A fence made from wood.
Damaged wooden fence.
Wood fence colors.
Brick Wall
Damaged brick wall.
Colors of the brick wall.

Dearest Caromble! friends, As Thomas D. mentioned in the previous announcement, as a team we've had a hard time due to several personal circumstances. Last October we had a major content update and released Chapter 4. We also made a new team video to update you on this Early Access adventure. Unfortunately, due to said circumstances, we never got to actually finish and release it. We thank you for all your patience and we're happy to say that time for Caromble! is finding its way again. We were able to wrap up our update video and are happy to finally share it with you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxzZ8yigZhE We hope you like it and that it shows our appreciation for our community. Chapter 5 is coming along nicely and we'll show some ingame footage in the following announcement. Stay tuned! Happy gaming! Crimson Owl Studios

Our continued absence in communication will have undoubtedly raised some questions. And it is high time we give some answers. But first the important bit; we are still alive and kicking! In fact, you could argue we are slightly more alive than before, almost 2 months ago my son Jonas was born. He's doing his job as a small baby perfectly; he's growing like crazy and is highly effective at keeping his new dad away from is laptop. I'm sure he'll soon get the hang of game-development and will proof to be a great asset. But unfortunately at the moment he is not a net contributor. For the others it has been a challenging year too. One of us has was forced to take some time away from the project. And spread out between the remaining team members, there have been more than a few sick kids and other family members to take care of. And most sadly, in one case even the loss of a close relative. Being a parttime game developer can be difficult at the best of times, but over the past 5 months it has proven impossible at times for us to contribute as much as we want to. Last weekend we managed to meet up for the first time and months and renewed our pledges to ourselves and the game. And perhaps most importantly, we restated our enthusiasm about Caromble!. Meeting every Friday as we used to has proven elusive, and the alternative of doing only remote work has not been as productive as hoped. So we made a new deal of meeting one weekend day every month, besides the remote work. That should give us the continuity we are looking for.
As a consequence there might be less updates on Steam Community however. Instead of the 'regular' weekly post we'll infrequent updates here. If we are slow to respond to a question on the forum (we don't get a notification for a new discussion... ) feel free to shoot an email to info at caromble.com. In the mean time, out of the limelight work is still ongoing! Bossfights are being prepped and crates are being stacked. Thomas S is still cranking out new assets to be put in levels. We are still working on the narrative part of Caromble!. So please give us some time, and we'll 'soon' give you more Caromble!.

As an alert reader you might have noticed a slight dip in the frequency of these posts. We may have missed one or two (alright 11) Fridays. We are unhappy about this lapse. We are part-time developers and there are times when personal and professional lives interact heavily with what should be Caromble! time. It is something that happens from time to time, and every time we see that after a while Caromble! gets our attention again. We might be gone from behind our keyboards from time to time, but Caromble! is never from our minds and hearts. But as the winter of 2018 is ending and a new spring is beginning it is also time to have a quick peak at the buds of another Caromble! spring. Don't judge, spring clichés are fine at the end of winter. Our next release (no dates right now) will focus almost completely on Chapter 5. If our development speed picks up we will look at other stuff too. Besides 4 new story levels Chapter 5 will bring a new Arkatron too. What it will do exactly will be kept under wraps for the time being, but I can share a development screenshot. It doesn't show any of the cool new ideas we are working on, but we will save those for another time!
And another one, the graphics are still in the early stages, but see if you can spot the new Arkatron:
We'll keep you updated on our steam page as we continue working on Caromble!.

As an alert reader you might have noticed a slight dip in the frequency of these posts. We may have missed one or two (alright 11) Fridays. We are unhappy about this lapse. We are part-time developers and there are times when personal and professional lives interact heavily with what should be Caromble! time. It is something that happens from time to time, and every time we see that after a while Caromble! gets our attention again. We might be gone from behind our keyboards from time to time, but Caromble! is never from our minds and hearts. But as the winter of 2018 is ending and a new spring is beginning it is also time to have a quick peak at the buds of another Caromble! spring. Don't judge, spring clichés are fine at the end of winter. Our next release (no dates right now) will focus almost completely on Chapter 5. If our development speed picks up we will look at other stuff too. Besides 4 new story levels Chapter 5 will bring a new Arkatron too. What it will do exactly will be kept under wraps for the time being, but I can share a development screenshot. It doesn't show any of the cool new ideas we are working on, but we will save those for another time!
And another one, the graphics are still in the early stages, but see if you can spot the new Arkatron:
We'll keep you updated on our steam page as we continue working on Caromble!.

This year Caromble! will leave Early Access for its full release and we are very excited! It cannot be stressed often enough that we are very grateful to all the players that support us! Particularly those who take the time to provide feedback and help us to make Caromble! a better game!
For those wondering what keeps us from releasing right now, these are the main features that are still on our roadmap:

• Chapter 5 story levels
• Chapter 6 story levels
• Additional skill levels
• Background story

This year Caromble! will leave Early Access for its full release and we are very excited! It cannot be stressed often enough that we are very grateful to all the players that support us! Particularly those who take the time to provide feedback and help us to make Caromble! a better game!
For those wondering what keeps us from releasing right now, these are the main features that are still on our roadmap:

• Chapter 5 story levels
• Chapter 6 story levels
• Additional skill levels
• Background story

So much work, and only one Friday per week! After the Caromble! Weekend last week was a bit slowish on the Caromble! side. We are currently working on a couple of things; a new video explaining where we are in Early Access (spoiler: quite far), extending the way we tell the story of Caromble! in-game and making progress on the gameplay of chapter 5. Our (perhaps overly optimistic) goal is to have Chapter 5 as good as finished by the end of the year. That may be optimistic, but we are making good progress. It is a bit too early to really share a lot about what we have done. But we can share that we are really happy with how the levels are becoming!
Oh and almost forgot, Caromble! is part of the Steam Autumn Sale! Get it now for 30% off. And please don't be shy in nominating Caromble! for a Steam Award, we have personally (in all modesty of course) voted for ourselves in the category: 'Labor of Love'. Any further votes would be appreciated!!

So much work, and only one Friday per week! After the Caromble! Weekend last week was a bit slowish on the Caromble! side. We are currently working on a couple of things; a new video explaining where we are in Early Access (spoiler: quite far), extending the way we tell the story of Caromble! in-game and making progress on the gameplay of chapter 5. Our (perhaps overly optimistic) goal is to have Chapter 5 as good as finished by the end of the year. That may be optimistic, but we are making good progress. It is a bit too early to really share a lot about what we have done. But we can share that we are really happy with how the levels are becoming!
Oh and almost forgot, Caromble! is part of the Steam Autumn Sale! Get it now for 30% off. And please don't be shy in nominating Caromble! for a Steam Award, we have personally (in all modesty of course) voted for ourselves in the category: 'Labor of Love'. Any further votes would be appreciated!!

Last week we had a Caromble! Weekend! This meant we could work together for two days in real life without interruptions. Day 1 started of with P***** being late and him having his breakfast during our morning stand-up. Just like the old times! Following the release of Chapter 4 we continued our work on our next milestone... Chapter 5! As friends we also paid some attention to the social aspects. As we all know, food and drinks equals fun times. So we had pizza for lunch, Vietnamese spare ribs for dinner and some beers at the end of the day.
Our improvised office for day 1 Day 2 was at our most familiar environment. The attic of Thomas D. It was a cold and rainy day. This provided a perfect background for concentration, hot coffee and hard work. This weekend gave us a jump start towards our next milestone. We try to continue our work as energetic as this weekend felt! Happy gaming!

Great news! A new major update for Caromble! has been released. Besides many bug fixes, game features and general improvements, this release mainly brings you Chapter 4 and a new skill level: Defender.
With these 4 new story levels we move out of the industrially themed chapters from before and we introduce a new theme: "The Neon City". With the latest claimed Arkatron chapter 4 unlocks the power of switches, which allows for more puzzle-based gameplay.
In the skill level Defender we provide you with a crazy breakout-tower defense mashup. Crazy stuff! We are still amazed with how much there is still possible with the brick breaker mechanic and we are very curious of what you think of the new content.
Another big feature we are happy to bring to you is the support for Steam Leaderboards. To celebrate, we started a competition about which you can read in the previous announcement. Below you can find the full list of features, improvements/tweaks and bugs, but first we want to thank you –the community– for all your valuable feedback. Thanks to you we can try to make Caromble! the best game it can be.
This is the reason why we chose to do Early Access and we're still very happy to have gone this path. Here are a few examples of feedback from players which we used to improve Caromble!: Steam user MrInvizible Feedback "Hi Team. Love what you did with 3-1, boss fight, with the backwards facing paddles. That's very clever. Is there any chance that could be introduced a bit earlier though, perhaps at the end of the second stage of 3-1." Action Great idea! This is good game design. Thanks for this lesson. :) We introduce the backwards paddle an area before now. Steam user TriggerWarning Feedback "I miss the option to set the Controller sensitivity" Action We had mouse sensitivity as an option, but somehow forgot that this can be helpful for gamepads too. We added this option now. Steam user foofaraw Feedback So many things. The last few months it almost felt like foofaraw was part of the team. Thank you foofaraw! We are very very grateful for all of your feedback.
We want to thank everyone who chooses to play Caromble! in its Early Access phase and we want to stress our gratitude for all of your feedback, both positive and negative. We hope you continue to do so and we hope Caromble! is becoming the game you want it to be. Many thanks and enjoy the new content! The Crimson Owl Studios team

Features
• Chapter 4 with new 4 levels in the new 'Neon City' theme
• Steam Online Leaderboards
• Introducing Switches allowing for more puzzle gameplay
• New skill level: "Defender"
• Prologue is updated to make more accessible and a better game mechanic intro
• Made the "Mercy Ball" feature more explanatory
• Added controller sensitivity to Options
• Added controller rumble support
• Show percentage of portal in text when incremented
• New font rendering making it much smoother and with outlines
• Created 4 human babies

Improvements/tweaks
• Improved the Cannon controls
• Improved the portal graphics
• Improved several textures / models
• Cam shake a little less extreme
• Finished Screen looks a lot nicer
• Color variations in blocks for the skill levels
• Reiterated all levels to make improvements in gameplay and visual appearance
• Improved ambient occlusion
• Support steam user names with non-ASCII characters

Bugs
• Fixed issues where the game would not start for some players
• Fixed ramp issue where balls didn't reach the other side
• Fixed levels where the score particles moved into the ground
• Fixed bugs with our slowmotion and screen effects where the base setting was not reset correctly
• Fixed bug where an extra ball powerup combined with charged paddle launched the ball into the air.
• Fixed boss head animation glitch
• Fixed issue where scores were deleted
• Fixed issue where GUI was still partially visible after animating it away
• Fixed issue where progress was lost after mercy ball
• Fixed issues with controllers through steam link
• Fixed issue where ball could go in random direction when hitting a wall exactly head-on

Competition

Rules:

• The person ranking highest for score on the global leaderboard for Level 1.1 by 1300 CEST October 27 2017 will win the competition.
• Should there be a draw, all players with that score win.
• Should one of the devs hold the highest score (we might feel inclined to challenge you) we will post the prize key as a reply in this post. First come, first served.

It's been a while since we last posted here. No worries, we're still hard at work getting the next release out of the door! In fact, we are almost done testing chapter 1 - 4 to make sure everything works as it should. When that's out of the way and all game-breaking bugs are fixed we'll release chapter 4! We also had a meeting to discus the next chapter (5). We're planning to release that to you around the end of the year. Sorry for the long wait but the next big update is coming very soon! Cheers!

Even for a stubborn skeptical person such as me it is sometimes hard to deny a certain super-natural tendency in the way things play out. Due to holidays, and the good old 'huh-is-it-my-turn-again', we almost didn't have a Caromble! Friday #404. Page not found… But of course it could also just be that our brains are so hard-wired to find patterns, and perhaps even patterns that don't exist. My inner skeptic just won't let me write a paragraph like this without that disclaimer… Anyway, with the holidays and all, we can perhaps be forgiven for having a bit of a slow week. Weeks do get slow Caromble!-wise easily being part-time developers and all. It just takes a single day of being a bit under the weather, and boom no productivity for a week. Especially in the Holiday season that means that things can get slow quickly. So what did happen… Well we made some progress in our effort to tell the back story of the game. We got a new version of the storyboard, and are working with that. Personally I did some work on the planning towards the final release. Deciding on what will fit in the scope of the game is a continuous and difficult process. As a gamer (which we of course also are) you never know what features, ideas, extra levels and effects didn't make the cut. You either like or dislike a game. Of course you might have feelings like, 'this game would be even better with multiplayer', or great level ideas. But that is not the same as missing a feature. You will definitely notice when a game feels 'off' or when it simply isn't fun. Or when it feels rough and unfinished of course. But when it feels good, but could have been even beter… You just will never know. As a developer, your game is never finished. There is always one more level to make. Every effect can be made even nice. The balance of the game could always be tweaked a liiitle bit tighter. There might always be another FPS to be gained on a particular system. So I guess you will always feel like you are releasing something that is in some abstract way unfinished. The witness feels like a perfectly polished game, but who knows how many things Jonathan Blow cut out that we'll never hear of? So that is our devil's dilemma. We want to made a great game. We have been going at it for like 8 or 9 years. But we also want to release it. We have made estimates in the past and gloriously missed them, because there was always something more to add. So I guess it is time to end this cycle and finally decide on when will be done.

The level editor has been serving us faithfully for a long time. Like our game engine this is also a custom built project. The level editor has hardly seen any changes in the past months. You could say it works just fine! Sometimes we are asked if we will also release our level editor. User generated content would of course be a beautiful addition to Caromble! and sharing this tool is one of those things we would really love to do. However, currently our level editor is not user friendly and undocumented. So without any investment on our part it is not ready to share. So far, the plan is to reconsider this feature until after the final release. So why stir up this conversation? I just wanted to share my enthusiasm about this tool and give it some credit! This is me navigating between different cameras in the editor:
Some details that hint that the level editor is not polished: the black circle is the camera object popping inside its own view frustrum, which is equivalent to blocking the camera lens with your own finger. The red-blue object is a placeholder graphic for the paddle. Why don't we use the actual object? I'm actually not sure why that's still the case :) Happy gaming!

As outsiders correctly assume, indie game-development is a big rollercoaster of rock-and-roll awesomeness. And not at all about staying indoors while the weather is nice and fixing bugs. Not at all. For me, this week's rock-and-roll awesomeness materialized in the form of euhm several bugs that had to be squashed, while being inside. Hmm. Anyway, sometimes there is awesome stuff and rollercoasters and rock-and-roll. But today it is bugs. Glorious bug fixing. It is a well known fact amongst developers that bugs enjoy laughing in your face. However, most of the times you just know that this must be so, without actually being able to see the bug laughing at you. So when I finally encountered a bug that was literally laughing at me, I wasn't sure what to think.
The problem was that at a certain point in our Prologue, just before the boss releases a power-up its head would make a jump. Just a small one, but annoying nonetheless. I 'fixed' that by always animating the head to a 'neutral' position before playing a new animation. However, now I head the problem you can see in the gif. The head would sink before starting the next animation… I figured the reason for that *had* to be that some other animation was also adjusting the position of the head. It had to be. Their effects would combine in some sort of unholy way and cause the sinking effect. Haha, I knew what to do! It only took me an hour to carefully tracking which animations where affecting the top of the head of our boss at what time. And then another 30 minutes to come to a slow realization that there was no problem with the other animations. No unholy combination of translations. Just a simple oversight on my behalf. I calculated the translation vector for the head to move back to 'neutral', and then instead of applying that, I would animate the head towards the animation vector. To the less mathematically inclined, lets just say that makes as much sense as rotating something by a color. At least by now I understood what that evil bastard was laughing at…

We had several people complain about the fact that we do not expose an option for controller sensitivity. The thing is, we played Caromble! with the mouse - always! That was of course a mistake from our side: many people like to play the game from their couch or bed. Therefore, I dusted off one of my PS4 controllers and used InputMapper to make sure my PC was detecting it as a 'genuine' Xbox controller:
After playing the game for a while I decided to make several improvements:

• Add the sensitivity option for controllers (well duh)
• Improve how we detect controllers and buttons - also fixes issues with Steam Link
• Added support for Rumble/Vibration!

Steam summer Sale is here! Caromble! is 30% off now. Get your brick break on! Ok, now the marketing part is behind us, let's take a moment for a special milestone in Caromble!'s lifetime. 400 Fridays ago, the date was October 30, 2009. My days were filled with finishing my Master Thesis. I hadn’t even met the girl that is now my wife. Very few of the things I was doing regularly back then, I still do today. The very notable exception is of course Caromble!. Back then, we didn’t do Caromble! Fridays yet, in this particular period Tuesdays were apparently the day that worked best for us. If I recall correctly, Thursday nights were particularly interesting in town, and that was why we preferred game-development on Tuesday instead. Friday was much better suited for studying. It is important to have priorities. It is strange to think, that we have been going at Caromble! for such an incredible amount of time. A friend of mine once called it ‘Breakout forever’ (it was just after Duke Nukem Forever was released), and that was several years ago. And you can’t blame him for saying that. Projects that have been in development for that long tend not to get finished. We haven’t always been very good at meeting deadlines either. But all of that is factoring out our almost mule headed resolve into finishing the game. I picture our determination as a Caromble! charge shot in slow motion. Steadily, but oh so slowly we are moving straight towards our goal of releasing the game.
Because in all those 400 weeks, we have been slow, but we have never stagnated. The progress wasn’t always visible, but even when nothing seemed to be getting done, we were just laying the groundwork for more fruitful weeks to come. With the Steam summer sale we have had an influx of new players, and that is always a great new impulse for us. Recently we have wrapped up work on some of the bigger features for the next and Early Access release, which we’ll bring 4 new story levels, online leaderboards, a new Skill level (which is a tower defense mini game), and numerous fixes and tweaks. We still don’t know when it will be done, although if I have any say in it (and I will), it will be considerably less than 400 weeks :-).

After a short hiatus, the last few weeks turned out to be rather productive. Of course, the little fellows are unplugging my laptop's power plug as we speak, be compared to a few weeks ago that's a minor issue. Since I knew I was probably sailing into calmer waters, I decided to take on one of the larger projects we had planned for coming release: Steam Leaderboards! It proved to be a lot more work than I'd hoped for but I can proudly say that the majority of the work is done! The biggest issue left is that you guys like to have all sorts of emoticons and special characters in your steam names and our font rendering doesn't like that very much... But I'm already working on a solution and it seems I'll be able to smooth things out pretty soon. So here it is, my second proof of life!
In the final version you'll be able to compare your times/scores with your friends or the rest of the world!

Like every other software development team we use version control software to manage changes in our source code and other computer files. For years we have been using Subversion (SVN) as our version control system. In recent times we transitioned to working remotely; as was mentioned in our previous post. Because of this change in the way we work, we figured it's better to switch to Git as our version control system.

Workflow

GitLab

Migration

Getting the job done is hard. In just three weeks time we'll celebrate the 400th Caromble! Friday, and we still haven't finished the game yet. Admittedly, we are not 100% clear when the first Caromble! Friday was exaclty, but 400 probably isn't that far of the mark. As you are undoubtedly aware, a lot of things have changed in the personal lifes of several of our team members recently, and those changes are not without their impact on the way we work. We have effectively moved from a team that worked together in a single location (ok, the office was actually a kitchen table, but that still counts), from a team that has to work completely remote. And on unpredictable hours as well. That is not necessarily an easy transition. A lot of things that we got for 'free' by being in the same room every Friday are now quite hard. For instance getting time for all the chit-chat that is so essential for productive co-operation is suddenly a thing you have to plan. And the same goes for discussing the little questions you might have when developing. But things are not fun if they are not challenging, so we are happy to embrace all of this unplanned extra fun ;-). We are making a lot of changes to the way we work, so that we may stay productive and at the same time still have fun while working on the game. We try and use productivity tools such as Trello and Gitlab where we can. These tools can greatly structure the discussions you have about various topics. It turns out that Slack is also quite useful, and whatsapp maybe not so much. Another thing that we cannot delay any further is creating a marketing plan to guide us through the final stages of development towards the final release. So indeed, while we have not produced as much visible output as we wanted to at this point, we are still very busy with the game. To conclude this post, I have two images. Of course an image can be worth a 1000 words, but the first image I'll share will communicate at least two messages:
The first message is of course that Defender will be a new awesome skill level to be included with our next release. And the second one is less literal and shows that we'll always eventually get the job done. Ok, and my second image is perhaps a bit cheesy (cheesecake?), especially since I'm not exactly immune to spelling mistakes myself, but still, I could simply not resist making a bit of fun about Peter's spelling mistake in his last post, and showing an image about some actual peace of cake...

As some of you might know, I -Peter- became a proud father of two twin boys nine months ago. Before that, I had to split my time between my day job and Caromble! (and a whole bunch of other stuff like friends/family/household etc.). Which, in hindsight, was a peace of cake! But since August I have to take care of these little Caromblers as well (yeah they still suck at the game). While I can easily say it's the best thing that ever happened to me, you might not be surprised that they come with there own set of challenges and achievements... I was planning to write this blog post two weeks ago but the Caromblers discovered something new: Tag - Team - Tournament. To that day, they were doing a fine job in keeping me away from my computer, making sure I got enough exercise and - most importantly - preventing me from oversleeping. But as the little fellas are growing older and wiser, they are optimizing. See, there always were some moments were I could easily escape their tight schedule: they slept - a lot! They must have realized they could to better. Why sleep at the same time? Why eat at the same time? In fact, they must've realized they could split there time for every-ting... As such, the last two weeks it was back to survival mode. Trying to get a little sleep where ever I could. Therefore, my activity on Caromble! was on a all time minimum. Luckily, it proved to be hard work for the boys as well, as we've finally managed to get them back in some sort of manageable schedule. So here it is, my proof of life! I'm back again and ready to Caromble!!

The retro video game era inspired Caromble!'s gameplay and it's something we occasionally refer back to. One of the associations with "retro" is the lack of many of pixels. Most of our visuals don't lack those, but one of our power-downs does.. behold pixelate:
Making this effect is rather easy and you can try it out yourself! (thanks Thomas D for putting this online!)

Idea

Research

• Download GIMP.
• Scale the image to an appropriate size.
• Create the color palette you want to convert to.
• Apply the color conversion ("Convert Image to Indexed Colors") using your custom palette.

Application

Future work

This week's announcement we want to use to celebrate the birth of Pascal's daughter: Elise. She is now 4 weeks old and a great addition to Earth already. Caromble! welcomes Elise onto this world and we love her already.
This is already the 4th Caromble! baby this year and as you can imagine this has some effect on the development speed. These life events, together with the fact that we only work on Fridays makes the progress a bit slower than you, and us, might have wanted. But bear with us!! Development is still going strong and we are closing in on the Chapter 4 release! We're 8 years in this project already, so it's a serious part of our lives and it will stay that way! Unfortunately we also had to say goodbye to our latest addition to the team: Frank Meijer. Frank took care of our marketing and PR and this helped us to have more focus on the development. He found a great new job at Utomik and realized that he couldn't combine it with his efforts for Caromble!. We want to thank Frank for all of his efforts for Caromble!. Meanwhile, we realize that marketing and spreading the word is essential to find our audience. If anyone knows someone who is interested in talking to us about marketing and PR and looking for a fun challenge, please contact us! To share something that we are currently working on, check this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4Q67o6WU5E At EGX in London, where we were with Caromble!, Thomas encountered a strange bug in the Race level where a ramp didn't give enough force to the ball. It was very difficult to reproduce, but with this custom edited variation on the race level he finally managed to reproduce it. Now we will try and find the cause. #bughunt Thanks for reading and keep on giving your feedback in the discussions and spreading the word on Caromble!. You know what?! Any (positive) tweet about Caromble! that gets more than 50 retweets until next Friday receives a steam key. That's how we roll (pun intended)! Talk to you soon! With Caromble! love, The team

Sometimes you have to look at the past in order to see the future. But before I'll explain what I mean with that, I would like to share this photo of our booth at EGX Rezzed in London. Thanks for the pictures Harriett!!
With the Chapter 4 levels being nearly game-play complete this is exactly what I did today. The last time with touched any of the Chapter 5 levels is probably well over 2 years ago, when we were creating a second version of all levels before finalizing everything through Early Access. And to be honest I haven't given them a lot of thought lately, focussing mainly on the stuff we have already out there, or what we were about to release. But actually, some of my personal favorite moments of the game are in Chapter 5, so I had a great time playing through those 'old' future levels. They will still take loads of work to complete, and some parts will be discarded and started anew. It was also interesting how I remembered a lot of levels very clearly, but also managed to forget completely about some others. For instance, I had completely forgotten about this crazy bit of gameplay. It will look probably look quite different by the time we release it, or maybe it will be removed completely. But still I had to share it with you:

It was only a few weeks ago that Thomas D. and Raymond went to PC Gamer Weekender in London, but Crimson Owl Studios is again sending a delegation to London. This time we're showing Caromble! at EGX Rezzed. This is probably one of the biggest Game Event where we will be showcasing Caromble!, so it's very exciting for us! We will be represented by our heroes Thomas D. (again!) and Frank, our marketing and PR guru. They seem very ready here at the airport don't they:
You can find them on EGX Rezzed at The Leftfield Collection. As you can see on the site, we are in good company. There a lot of good games to check out! This will be the first event of Frank where he can work his PR magic. We expect a lot from him :) Send him your best through the comments! This will help his, as we call it in the Netehrlands, baptism of fire (vuurdoop). Meanwhile, on our kitchen tables in the Netherlands, we are working hard on the final touches on Chapter 4 levels. Also, we are working on the experience of the Prologue level. Good stuff. Thanks for reading and... Let's get ready to Caromble!

Hi Caromblers! Hope everybody has been having a great time with all the amazing games that have been released these past few weeks? Nobody's going to blame you for not logging a few games of Caromble! with all this goodness going around ;). Turns out we've got a little surprise announcement. It was even a surprise for ourself! Sorry to disappoint you that it's not related to a Chapter 4 release date, buuuut...There was a last-minute opening to attend EGX Rezzed in London in two weeks and showcase Caromble! there, so we jumped on it! Rezzed is a big opportunity for us to get the game into the hands of more players, get direct feedback and hopefully attract more attention to it. If you're going to Rezzed, don't be shy and come say hi to us. I'll (Frank) try not to bite. Can't promise anything about Thomas though, he looks hungry. There's still tickets available. Progress on Chapter 4 has been a bit slow as of late. Pascal is in the middle of moving houses and Raymond and Peter still have babies to take care of next to their jobs – shouldn't those creatures be self-sufficient by now? - so Caromble! time has been a bit more limited than usual. That doesn't mean nothing is happening though! Bugs are being squished and the final area for Chapter 4 is being tweaked. Not leaving without a WIP shot of an area from Chapter 4 though, so here you go!

Hi Caromblers! Last time we spoke we were showing the game at the PC Gamer Weekender in London. Hope some of you got the opportunity to go to the event and enjoy either Caromble! or one of the other cool games on display. We had a lot of fun showing the game there to players and press. We also did a few interviews, which you can watch back here , here and here (starting at the 00:41:51 mark). One of them got so addicted to the game's intro that he made it into an hour long loop . Guess Caromble! can really get to you :D. Now we're back to regular scheduled programming (pun intended). We've been hard at work at getting Chapter 4 ready for release and we're happy to say that the finish line is getting closer and closer. We can't say a specific date yet, but hopefully the levels will be gameplay complete by the end of next week. Then starts the process of balancing, tweaking and sprucing things up. That can still take a while though, but as soon as we have a final release date we'll announce it here. In the meantime enjoy this WIP tease shot of the boss fight level in Chapter 4.
There's a few new threads in Discussions that we'd love to get your feedback on, so please don't hesitate to get involved. We value your opinion very much! Oh, and there's still a week to enter a competition by Snappy-Tech to win a copy of Caromble! So if you don't own a copy yet, that's a great way to maybe win one. Or just to give away to someone you know is in need of Caromble! in their life. You know they're out there ;).

Well in fact only Raymond is larger than life, or at least taller. I (Thomas D) think I'm only just about life sized. The paddle has landed and the PC Gamer Weekender ball is rolling in Londen. Raymond and I have taken our positions at our booth and will be looking to show Caromble! to as many people as we can.
We are looking forward to seeing you as well! Come find us at booth E20. And very hush-hush: we might be selling the game at a discount from our booth.

If you're in London next weekend make sure to come and visit us over at the PC Gamer Weekender event. Apart from playing Caromble! (awesome) you'll get a chance to talk to the developers in real-life (super awesome). Thomas and Raymond will be there the whole event to answer all your questions and collect any feedback. So how do you recognize them? Well that's easy, take a look at our website! Apart from playing Caromble! there will be many other great games to check out. PC Gamer made a great selection of title to play. Chapter 4 is coming along nicely as well. This will be the first chapter in our Commercial theme (see below). [img=http://i.giphy.com/nf1Pp5JePnQUE.gif][/img]

Hello Caromblers and Caromblers to be. Last week we have been on the retro game fair in Tilburg. Unfortunately Frank couldn't come, because he was in the hospital. It was a bit scary, but it seems he is doing better now and that he can go home next week. So I went to Tilburg alone and as you can see I was having a great time :P
More importantly, we are redesigning our Level Complete / Game Over screen. One important aspect we want to include is Steam leaderboards. Now we have local highscores, global highscores and highscores of friends. Furthermore we have a best score and a best time. Besides all of this we want to show whether you have unlocked the medals with your score. This is a lot of information! I would like to focus on the unlocking of the medals. Another team member on the global highscores and yet another one wants to focus on the highscores of friends. But what do our players want? That's probably more important! Therefore, this request for input. I have made a concept of how we could do this (the purple text is added for explanation and is not part of the concept):
Or only one list where you can click the medals to change between Best Scores and Best TImes:
So what do you think? Is this what you want to see in a Level Complete screen and as Leaderboards? Please leave all of your feedback and suggestions in the comments below. It's very much appreciated.

No way, a Friday announcement on a Friday! Does that mean we will start writing them on time again? Well you better believe it, because that is indeed our intention. So what did this week bring? First of all it brought the chrono gg sale. It was an awesome experience for us. We got a lot of very positive feedback, and we reached a lot of new people who had never before heard about the game. It also brought the Caromble!'s first appearance on Twitch. Thanks Brotatoe! Another thing that is coming up is the Retro Game Beurs Tilburg. So right after I finish uploading this post, it is out with the laptop, and in with the scissors and glue. We will sell gamekeys at the event, and we will create some nice boxes to put the keys in. And of course there was also some good progress on the levels as well. We are polising up the first two areas of the next chapter, and finishing up the gameplay of the last area. We have been working on the last sub-area and the boss fight at the same time. Finally a gif, that gained a lot of traction on FaceBook last week: