Thursday, March 28, 2019

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #50

Hey all! Welcome to the 50th development log for the studio. It's been almost three months since the last one. But first, I want to start off by saying that this will be the final development log we'll be doing in this format on my personal blog -- We've grown quite a bit since the first development log back when we started this in 2012, and future development logs will have more than just me posting about progress in the studio and will be posted on a new section on our whimindie website.

• Our studio is now on Discord!





We've made the leap onto Discord, where we will be posting all kinds of new information about our games. We will be also communicating the progress of the Selatria beta testing.

If you have a discord, please join our channel! We will be doing giveaways over the next few months, as well as other exciting things.


• We are in the process of expanding whimindie into being an independent publisher and developer.

Last year, we completed work on our second mobile game: "The Dastardly Dairy Debacle" which was seen as a test for what we could do with a project pitched to us from outside the company and see it to completion. We learned a lot about this project and made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of lessons along the way.

Over the past few months, Paul, Matt, and I met with several developers in Southern California and Southern Nevada to pitch their games to us for potential future studio projects. This last weekend we had our last pitch reviews. While I can't go into too much detail about what these games are just yet, this is going to be an exciting next step for the studio. Some of the games are really awesome and are genres we've never worked on before. And we hope to bring these games to PC as well as Mac and consoles!

• We are now self-publishing Selatria on our distribution platforms going forward!

We want to especially thank Aldorlea Games for working with us and being our publisher for the past few years. They've been wonderful in working with us to bring Selatria to Steam as our publisher at a time when publishing on Steam was very difficult and we are grateful to have worked with them for the past two years.

What does this change mean? For the first time, we will be able to better support the players on our Steam platform, and make the update timings more consistent with our other release avenues. For players who purchase Selatria through itch.io, we will be able to provide a steam key with your purchase. In the coming days, we'll be moderating the Steam discussion boards with our usernames with developer tags to better assist and patch problems.

You can buy a copy of Selatria on Steam here.

We're also looking into people who have purchased a copy of our game in the past and providing steam keys retroactively. Although I can't promise we will be able to do this, we're going to look into it. We will also for the first time be able to sell Steam codes for Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire at conventions. We're working very hard to have this ready for LVLUPEXPO. Speaking of which...

• We will be making an appearance at LVLUPEXPO 2019!


We will be making an appearance at this year's LVLUPEXPO at the Las Vegas convention center at the end of April. Players will be able to see a lot of improvements we made to our game, buy steam codes, charms and buttons we'll also be hosting a raffle for a Nintendo Switch gaming attire, and other prizes.

Here's a preview of what the charms and buttons will look like! Photos by EISS Photography.

You can purchase tickets to LVLUPEXPO here.


Selatria

On Saturday, April 13 we plan on putting a new update to Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire across all of our platforms. There will be new features, such as unique victory poses for characters, the ability to skip to the title by pressing a button, and Quick Save functionality! Among various other minor bug fixes and tweaks.

Here are some screenshots to show off some of the new content and quality of life improvements.





As for what's coming in the pipeline, I want to show some of our progress in Chapter 4. As of this post, we finished cutscene production, and are currently in the polish and adjustment phase. Here's some footage of what's to come in Chapter 4. And do note that what you see is in development is not final and is still subject to change.








Players who own a copy of Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire will be invited via email to beta testing for Chapter 4 of Selatria to try the game! We're aiming for some time after LVLUPEXPO. We're also looking for beta testers as well, and we will be providing more information about beta testing Chapter 4 on our Discord server!

That's all for this development log. Thanks for reading, and see you at LVLUPEXPO or on Discord!

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