TotalBiscuit just tweeted about Crashlands... You guys are great. UPDATE ON THINGS WE WERE WAITING FOR:

• Kotaku posted a glowing review
• PC Gamer posted a not-quite-so-glowing but still good review (73/100)
• TotalBiscuit tweeted about Crashlands
• We got TouchArcade's Game of the Week
• Over 1500 concurrent players on steam alone, and growing!
• Current Metascore of 83 on PC and 100 (!) on iOS
• Adam (the tools and web brother) seems to have fixed most of our server problems. It only cost him 6 months of longevity due to the stress! SYNC AWAAAAY!

One last thing we'd like to get to wrap this launch UP:

• A freakin' review from IGN. Tweet them!

NOW GATHER ROUND FOR SOME DEV CHATS! There's something I'd like to note about our design choices with Crashlands that I see in some of the comments and that the PC Gamer review touched on somewhat: This game was designed to be platform agnostic, meaning to play equally well on PC and Mobile. This put us in the precarious position of possibly being unclaimed by EITHER platform, since gamers on each occasionally have hard biases against another platform. Initially, this took the form of us stepping into threads to clear up the dual points of the game either being "A shitty mobile game trying to get on PC" or "a PC game trying to get a shitty port onto mobile." Now that the quality of the game has been established this is less of an issue, but for those here who are concerned that Crashlands' presence on mobile SOMEHOW means it is an inferior game on Steam, it doesn't; what it means you can play it wherever you want however you want and it remains a great, cohesive experience. Further, nearly all of our Beta testers (whom we used for the final tuning of the game's balance and design improvements) primarily played on PC - that's what the game is actually most optimized for, from a feedback standpoint! Which leads to the question of pricepoints on Steam ($15) vs Mobile ($5), for which the answer is 2-fold: 1) We believe Crashlands is easily a $20 value. But we want people to play on everything they have (crossplatforminess!), so we split the price for a buyer between the two. 2) The mobile market has massively suppressed pricing - putting a game on that market for $15 from a generally unknown studio would be a complete financial disaster. Trust us - we did it with our first game (for $2.99) and it fell on its face so hard it burst through the crust of the earth and nearly destroyed our fledgling studio with the resulting magmic eruption. Hope that answers a few of the most frequently asked / assumed things! Thanks for helping make this launch RIDICULOUS. (Seriously, we made high-pitched yet-still-extremely-manly noises when we saw the Totalbiscuit tweet). Feel free to drop your thoughts below, but remember to not be a jerk. We're all humans here, playing games because we love them or making games because we love to. Stay frosty, samuel 1/3rd of our 3 brother studio

[ 2016-01-23 20:13:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

TotalBiscuit just tweeted about Crashlands... You guys are great. UPDATE ON THINGS WE WERE WAITING FOR:

• Kotaku posted a glowing review
• PC Gamer posted a not-quite-so-glowing but still good review (73/100)
• TotalBiscuit tweeted about Crashlands
• We got TouchArcade's Game of the Week
• Over 1500 concurrent players on steam alone, and growing!
• Current Metascore of 83 on PC and 100 (!) on iOS
• Adam (the tools and web brother) seems to have fixed most of our server problems. It only cost him 6 months of longevity due to the stress! SYNC AWAAAAY!

One last thing we'd like to get to wrap this launch UP:

• A freakin' review from IGN. Tweet them!

NOW GATHER ROUND FOR SOME DEV CHATS! There's something I'd like to note about our design choices with Crashlands that I see in some of the comments and that the PC Gamer review touched on somewhat: This game was designed to be platform agnostic: Meaning it plays equally well on PC and Mobile. This put us in the precarious position of possibly being unclaimed by EITHER platform, since gamers on each occasionally have hard biases against another platform. Initially, this took the form of us stepping into threads to clear up the dual points of the game either being "A shitty mobile game trying to get on PC" or "a PC game trying to get a shitty port onto mobile." Now that the quality of the game has been established this is less of an issue, but for those here who are concerned that Crashlands' presence on mobile SOMEHOW means it is an inferior game on Steam, it doesn't; what it means you can play it wherever you want however you want and it remains a great, cohesive experience. Further, nearly all of our Beta testers (whom we used for the final tuning of the game's balance and design improvements) primarily played on PC - that's what the game is actually most optimized for, from a feedback standpoint! A note about the controls: The game is designed to work extremely well with a mouse, which makes it work perfectly on a touch device. However, this control scheme choice is viewed by some on PC as a holdover that's sprung from the game's presence on mobile, which is an understandable assumption but a bit odd if you extend it to other PC games that rely on the same scheme. For example, Diablo uses extensive mouse control - but its lack of presence on mobile means its controls are considered only with regard to how well they work, not as though they're a necessity for touch screens. (For those of you who simply prefer controllers/WASD movement, that's a different thing entirely!) All of this leads to the final question of different pricepoints on Steam ($15) vs Mobile ($5), for which the answer is 2-fold: 1) We believe Crashlands is easily a $20 value. But we want people to play on everything they have (crossplatforminess!), so we split the price for a buyer between the two. 2) The mobile market has massively suppressed pricing - putting a game on that market for $15 from a generally unknown studio would be a complete financial disaster. Trust us - we did it with our first game (for $2.99) and it fell on its face so hard it burst through the crust of the earth and nearly destroyed our fledgling studio with the resulting magmic eruption. Hope that answers a few of the most frequently asked / assumed things! Thanks for helping make this launch RIDICULOUS. (Seriously, we made high-pitched yet-still-extremely-manly noises when we saw the Totalbiscuit tweet). Feel free to drop your thoughts below, but remember to not be a jerk. We're all humans here, playing games because we love them or making games because we love to. Stay frosty, samuel 1/3rd of our 3 brother studio

[ 2016-01-23 20:13:42 CET ] [ Original post ]