Happy Holiday Season Jungle Nation

From expanding the team to launching the closed beta, we've had a super busy year and we couldn't be more proud of how far the game has come this year alone. With 2022 drawing to a close we thought we'd take a moment to reflect upon the past year of development, highlighting some of the key moments, and taking a look at what it took to get to where we are today. So without further ado, this was 2022...

The Team Grew

At the start of the year, we expanded Team Gerdoo, adding Jarvis as our Marketing and Community Director. She brought with her experience of managing the communities of several indie games, as well as of a huge YouTube channel in the UK, PlayStation Access. For a community-based game like ours, this was an important role to fill and according to you guys, we definitely made the right choice in bringing Jarvs on board. She has been a key member of the team this year and we're glad you seem to love her as much as we do.

The Big Update

For most of the year, the team was hard at work updating the game prior to the launch of our closed beta. We wanted to overhaul pretty much everything bar the core gameplay loop itself, which was no small undertaking, to say the least. A great deal of coding needed to be rewritten, and whilst we won't bore you with the details, trust us it was a long but fun process.
Our artist Naeim did an incredible job redesigning the characters, developing a completely new art style for the game in the process.
The feedback from the community on the new art style has been wonderful, and we cannot wait to show you all what he's been working on in recent months as well. At the same time as the characters were being given new life, our UI/UX Designer Erfan was busy overhauling the UI to change the way the game feels to play, making it more accessible for players and easier to follow from a viewer's standpoint.
The little flourishes he added, such as the candid scandal photos in the secret files or the species info of each character, continue to be fan favourites and we are so grateful for his incredible work this year. We honestly can't believe just how different the game looks now from the start of 2022.
We also knew that, with the big update underway, we needed new marketing materials to reflect the changes to the game's look. Work began on several iterations of possible new logos and whilst it took us a while to settle on the final designs, we absolutely fell in love with the new key art Naeim produced. It gave us confidence going into our first big in-person event of the year, that the look of the game was strong enough to attract new players who previously knew nothing about it.

EGX London

With Jarvs being based in Europe we were able to attend EGX London this year, without the need for trans-Atlantic travel, making it the first time RoJ would be shown at a big in-person event outside of the US. A lot of preparation went into our presence at the show as we knew this would be our biggest opportunity to get more people to sign-up to play the closed beta. We hired an intern, Jerreau, just for EGX, who helped Jarvs and her partner to run our booth on the show floor.
We had everything from merch to giveaway, to a TikTok treasure hunt, to beta sign-up forms and the game on display for people to see, at the booth and we were inundated with people wanting to know more. We had some great conversations with eventgoers and even managed to make some new friends, whilst telling people about the game. But the booth wasn't our only focus for the event as Jarvs also managed to wrangle two stage appearances across the weekend. The first being a talk on careers in the games industry, titled Finding What You CAN Do , on the Barclay's Rezzed stage, on the Saturday. It was well attended and we are honoured that she spoke about how much working on RoJ has meant to her as a disabled dev. We always try to be inclusive in all that we do here at Gerdoo Games, so to hear a member of the team speak about what that has meant to them really made us smile.
The second stage appearance was to show off the new beta, in all its upgraded glory, to the audience of the EGX Main Stage. Jarv was joined on stage by Twitch Partners Captain Badgertail and Nikoheart, as well as Psy White, Scott Tailford and Jules Gill from YouTube's WhatCutlure Gaming, for a few rounds of RoJ. Chaos ensued, as we're sure you can imagine, and the audience laughed all throughout the show. Almost every single person watching that day signed-up for the closed beta and we were blown away by the love and support given to the game across the entire event.

Launching the Closed Beta

That brings us to the launch of the closed beta this November. The culmination of all the team's hard work since the start of 2022. Everyone who signed up during EGX or had previously backed our Kickstarter campaign received an email inviting them to take part in the new phase of beta testing, and we sat back, nervously awaiting their first impressions. The feedback soon came rolling in and we were delighted to hear that you loved the new look of RoJ as much as we did. You let us know what you liked, where the bugs were and gave important opinions of the subtle changes to the gameplay.
Each week Jarvs ran an RoJ game night in our Discord server, which quickly became a regular hangout for our core community. There she was able to get valuable feedback on the beta, which she then relayed to the rest of the team, in order for us to iterate on and improve your experience when playing the game. We encourage more of you to join the game nights too, because not a single one has ended without at least one person crying with laughter, and we challenge you to name a better way to end your week than laughing with friends over a good game. Plus, the more feedback we get whilst in beta, the better the final product will be.
One of the things that we mentioned earlier which was continually commented on during the early beta game nights, was the inclusion of the characters' species in the UI. Out of this, the community suggested it would be nice for us to do a fundraiser for an animal preservation charity, if possible, and we took this to heart. So, we got in touch with The Humane Society of America. They loved the fact that our game has no violence towards animals and we loved the work they do on their Black Beauty Ranch in Texas, rescuing animals of all kinds, from tigers to kangaroos, to the tiniest of kittens. So, together we planned a stream as part of their December Dash in order to help raise money for the ranch to continue to support the animals in their care. We smashed our original goal of $100 making three times that in the end, and had the best time working with them. We look forward to working together on future fundraisers in 2023.

Thank You

A huge thank you to every single person who has shown an interest in RoJ this year. Your support inspires us to do what we do, and we can't wait to share more with you in the new year. Don't forget that it's not too late to get access to the beta for yourself. All you need to do is head to the Republic of Jungle website and sign-up to get a place on the waitlist and we will email you as soon as more slots become available.
We hope you have a wonderful holiday season whatever you get up to. See you all in the new year, when we'll have even more updates to share with you. But for now... ...Thank you Jungle Nation and here's to a great 2023! Team Gerdoo Games.