Hey friends! I skipped out on last week’s newsletter due to being very busy trying to hit our planned Steam Next Fest deadline. We did! So now I’m writing again. We’ll be looking at the last update, some bands I’ve seen and a potential investment opportunity? (Spoilers: it’s a stupid joke, I’m not trying to scam you.)
How Am I Doing?
I’m doing pretty great. After a couple of weeks of rain, summer sneak attacked us, so I’m getting my daily allotment of sun in. We managed to hit our Bibidi Next Fest Demo deadline, so I’m a bit less stressed than the last few weeks. Also had a super fun week with a bunch of music, both making, listening and seeing. I went to 3 different gigs and saw a total of 6 bands play, so that was cool!
Shout out to the locals, who I had no expectations off but blew me away:
Jo Dahan & Le Gonzo Club as well as Carnage Piknik. Here are some photos for atmosphere! Though they went through multiple layers of compression, so there’s not much left. But then again, so do my ears when I’m there!
What Am I Doing?
We’re still waiting for Steam to review the build, so that hurdle has not been cleared quite yet. In the meantime, there’s many little (and not so little) issues and improvements we want to the patch with before Next Fest goes live for the public on June 15th.
If you want to try this update before it’s out for all to see, you can still hop on the playtest via the Steam page. We’re not sure what we’ll do with the playtest after the Demo is out, but I reckon we’ll keep it open one way or another. Most likely as a private beta, or something similar but hopefully with less friction.
The game is starting to feel representative of what it will be in the end. We added a bucket load of polish: sound effects, visual effects, music, the works. Feedback is welcome, as always, but we’d love for returning players to help us hunt down technical issues, bugs and potential weird user experience things that might make new players bounce off of the game. If you want to read the full list of changes, check out our patch notes.
Why Am I Doing? (this)
I also had a really stupid idea for a game that I got really excited about. I’m still working on the pitch, so bear with me.
I call it Insider Trading (with Friends). It’s a very simple autochess-esque game parodying the stock market. You join a lobby with friends and try to manipulate a virtual market to make your friends line drop while yours skyrockets! However, every backdoor deal you changes volatility, which makes it harder and harder to reliably read the market.
It’s a very dumb “number goes up”-type game that would invariably create some tension via friendly competition and the gambling aspects of it. Like watching marbles race. But you can sabotage other marbles by riding the coattails of parody celebrities whose inflammatory social media posts destabilize the world economy. Which would never happen in real life!
The big sell for me would be that it’s extremely light on assets: graphs, lines and text mostly. I know how to make those and make sure it has good game feel. The con would be multiplayer, which I’ve never properly done before. I think it has some financial potential, in more ways that one, pun intended.