We have been working on porting Macrotis to macOS so that our Mac using friends could enjoy the game too and finally, it is here!
But wait, there’s more! In honor of this update, we are going into a week-long deal too!
We hope that you’ll lose yourself in the magical world of Macrotis: A Mother’s Journey!
Here are the patch notes
v1.1.0
Macrotis is now available for macOS.
Fixed an issue where entering the magical form on moving objects caused magical form to appear in a wrong location.
Quality of life improvements to some puzzles.
Improved resolution options in the options menu.
Fixed a camera issue in the last puzzle of Chapter 2.
Fixed an issue where some of the texts while playing with French translation were appearing in English.
Changed starting option to "Continue" instead of "New Game" on the main menu.
Version 1.0.3 is available now!
Here are the patch notes:
Fixed an issue where switching between applications during credits freezes the game.
Fixed a rare issue where you can place more than 3 barricades.
After your feedback we changed some of the dialogues to not trigger after restarting from a checkpoint. We will keep monitoring your feedback for these changes.
Fixed some visual glitches.
Version 1.0.2 is available now!
Here are the patch notes:
Fixed a rare issue where you could control the physical body while in magical form.
Fixed an issue where after closing the magical form you couldn't interact with objects.
Fixed an issue where the animation for magical form's closing didn't work when you killed your physical form while in the magical form.
Now when you accidentally press the magical form button more than once, it doesn't close immediately.
Version 1.0.1 is available now!
Here are the patch notes:
Fixed an issue where you can't get the achievement "Think before you act" if you completed the chapter using your magical form.
Fixed an issue where you can get out of the playzone through some of the walls.
Music playlist improvements. Also, fixed an issue where the music for the end of Chapter 4 doesn't loop.
Fixed an issue where the credits end sooner than expected.
Fixed a camera issue in the last puzzle of chapter 2 where you can get out of camera's viewport.
We are live!
Today, February 8 of 2019, we release our first game ever!
After working on it for two and a half years, we proudly present to you Macrotis: A Mother’s Journey, a thrilling adventure filled with challenging puzzles and a heart gripping story.
We hope you love our debut title as much as we do.
Release Date Announcement!
Macrotis: A Mother's Journey will be officially released on February 8!
Thank you all for joining our journey and for your patience. We are almost there!
Postponing the Release of Macrotis
We decided to postpone the release of Macrotis: A Mother's Journey because we want to give you the best game that we possibly can.
We are fixing bugs, working on sounds, making transitional videos between chapters, and polishing the environment to make it look even more beautiful at the moment. The end product will look, sound, and feel amazing!
Your support means a lot to us and we hope that you will continue to show us your love while we put the finishing touches on Macrotis.
Hopefully, you will be playing our game in early 2019!
Macrotis will be at Gamescom 2018!
We are proud to announce that Macrotis: A Mother's Journey will be attending Gamescom 2018, probably the biggest gaming convention in the world!
You can find us in the Indie Arena Booth area and play a demo to experience our game first hand!
Devlog #4 Trying to Create the Perfect Gameplay Trailer for an Indie Game
Heya!
I am a recent addition to the team and I am in charge of marketing. I was already friends with most of the team for more than ten years but I could only watch the amazing stuff they did from the sidelines as I was busy with different work. I took the first chance that I could and joined in on the fun when I was finally available.
After examining what we had in our hands, my initial concerns were focused on our previous trailer and our lack of online presence. I learned that previous trailer was done in an afternoon because there was a gaming expo the next day and the team needed something to play in loop on the background while people visited our booth. You can understand why I wanted to make something better.
Probably because indie game studios lack professional marketing support, when I started researching about how to make a successful gameplay trailer on internet, the initial results were all aimed at them. The first issue was concerned about how there was a difference between making trailers for indie studios and established studios. It was said that if you are not Blizzard, Bethesda, Ubisoft or something similar, starting the trailer with your company logo was a big no-no because your indie logo doesn’t convey any value to the viewer… which was exactly what our previous trailer did. The general wisdom was to make a good-looking end card with a big logo of your game with some announcement below it and only use a small sized studio logo on the side.
People who start watching a trailer make a decision between watching the whole thing and just skipping to the next video during the first 15 seconds. So, the advice was putting the most exciting parts of the trailer near the beginning. If you have something unique, something that other similar games doesn’t have, or some shots full of action and explosions, put them in the beginning! Make people want to see more! Even recent movie trailers started to put best few shots before the beginning of the trailer. After capturing people’s attention in the first shots of the trailer, you can move on to the main body where you can give whatever message you want to give to the viewer.
The next advice was about a necessary assumption concerning the viewers. More specifically, how you should assume your audience is completely ignorant about everything. Assume that they don’t know anything about what they see on the screen even if things are pretty obvious, the genre even if it clearly has platformer elements, or the game mechanics even if what you show is something basic like pulling and pushing some rocks. When you start thinking along these lines, it becomes obvious that you need some descriptive texts on the screen explaining what people see. For example, when you show the character pushing, digging, and gnawing you also need to include a text saying “interact with the environment” to solidify the information that you are trying to pass on to the viewer.
While getting a message across is important, the crucial information that indie studios forget is that people’s attention span is very limited. That’s why, rather than trying to include every bit of information in a trailer that lasts around one and a half minutes, the advice was, just focusing on some main aspects and showcasing them. In short, rather than trying to show both the game mechanics and the story elements, just choose one and make a trailer around it. Making a trailer that’s longer than one and a half minutes is not a good practice either because people just get bored easily and may decide to switch to another video. Because YouTube makes its decision about the appeal of a video (and stops recommending it to other people if it decides to be an unappealing one) based on how long people stay and watch, it is very important to keep people’s interest and never bore them. If a video is too long, people may watch only half of it and YouTube stops recommending. So, to not lose people to other videos, a trailer should be short and to the point and does not try to fill it with everything that is relevant to the game.
At the end, we tried to be loyal to the wisdom we received as much as we could while creating our new gameplay trailer. We don’t show our studio logo at the beginning, have a cool looking end card, start the video with the most unique mechanics we have, have descriptive texts that match the shots, and got a duration easily under one and a half minutes without the end card. I can honestly say that I like the new trailer not only as the person who was behind it but also as a random gamer as well and I hope you will like it too. This was the first time I did anything remotely similar to this but I am proud of the result.
By the way, I realize that we made a pure gameplay trailer to showcase our mechanics and environment because we didn’t want to overcrowd the trailer and did not include any story elements. Sooo… a story trailer is in the works!
You can watch our new gameplay trailer right here:
Devlog #3 How We Ended Up Making a Puzzle-Platformer
To explain how we ended up making a puzzle-platformer, I must start from the beginning. The universe was in a hot, dense state. No, wait… Jokes aside, when we first came together as a team, we were only five people consisting of a coder, a sound engineer, two game designers, and an art designer. Our initial goal when forming Proud Dinosaurs was to make an isometric RPG game. It would be in a custom universe that was created by Özgür, one of our game designers, for a tabletop RPG world that we still play regularly.
Later on, we wrote the general story, how everything begins for the player, how tutorials would work and scenes would play. Since Özgür has been moderating games in this universe for over ten years, we already had classes, skills, NPCs, cities etc. While we were speculating about other features we would add, we were also looking for more members for our team, since making an RPG game required a more complex team.
Our numbers grew while we worked on conceptualization, however, some of us (including me) insisted that we should start with something smaller and maybe easier to make. Of course, later in the production, we realized that Macrotis was not actually small nor was it easy, but we lacked the foresight and experience for this intuition at the time. Eventually, our persistence paid off and the team conceded that making a small game to see how we work as a team was a good idea. So, we started to generate some ideas that would not be in the isometric RPG genre.
The most prominent idea came from Özgür, who first suggested the concept even before we decided to make a small game. The idea was simple, the player controls a character that runs from water. But, instead of going for the high ground, as common sense suggests in the case of a flood, our player must go deep underground.
With that idea in mind, we started to make progress. At first, we planned to do a 2D sandbox game, where you dig for a procedurally generated deep underground environment. The first absurd idea was that, at the end of the game the character will awaken a Bullrogue (not a Balrog, mind you, but a shady looking, black hooded demon that looks like a bull with a flame whip in its hand). Later, we expanded the idea and decided to add more demon enemies that would drop their weapons and gear for the player to use. And for a brief but glorious moment, our game became an action/survival game.
We decided that our main character would be a crazy and delusional person that would craft equally crazy weapons from collected and looted materials. We would make the character suffer gruesome deaths throughout the game adding in to the craziness. Our inspiration was a cartoon named “Happy Three Friends”, where seemingly cute, cartoony characters repeatedly died horrible deaths. What our idea at that time was a game similar to the game “Terraria” but with more gore, however, the idea took a different turn after some consideration.
The changes started early on during the pre-production stage. We realized that implementing both crafting and inventory systems would increase our production speed tremendously since all those items and materials would have their own costs of production. So, we decided to focus more on our main features. However, after discarding inventory and crafting systems, the game started to look empty. We only had enemies to fight and water to escape. To us, this did not feel like a full-fledged game that we ourselves would want to play. Thus, we were up against another design choice, we could add the inventory system again, or add more features to the combat system with more enemy types and different skill-sets to use. We chose neither and decided to focus more on the story instead. Since we discarded inventory, item sets, crafting, and combat, using a deranged, crazy character became illogical as the character did not fit into this new environment. Since, our new goal was to focus more on the story and to make our players more engaged with the character, we wanted a more relatable and down to earth protagonist.
After almost two weeks of research about rodents and various underground dwelling creatures, we found the main character of our game: “Bilby” (you can read why we picked bilby in the previous entry of our Developer’s Blog). Within that two-week period, we have also re-written our main story and plot countless times until finally the ultimate version was embraced by the whole team. However, we still lacked features to complement the story. The only definitive idea was that our character had to run from water towards underground. With a little bit of brainstorming, we created our first draft with shiny new features. Equipped with solid features and a complete story, our game started to look like a puzzle-platformer instead of a 2D action game. Even then, some of the new features gave us hell at the development stage, so we had to change some of them either because of technical issues or game-feel reasons. However, we always had one ideal in mind: The game had to feel whole. No matter what we removed from our game, we always struggled so that the game would feel as intended for our players and make them live through the intended experience.
As you can see, the story, features, and the game as a whole evolved in a completely different direction from our initial ideas. While some of these changes were done consciously, some of them occurred naturally without us even realizing how we drifted off from our starting point. Now, all our team members are happy with these changes even though half of them do not actively seek and play puzzle-platformers. It is still a mystery to us that how our whole team, which includes various tastes when it comes to video gaming, came to a point where all of us are proud of the game we are creating even though it’s a puzzle-platformer.
