First of all: Kickstarter news! We are ready to launch our kickstarter campaign in February! Yep, were running a crowdfunder to speed up the development. Up to now, we've been working on PRG in our spare time, which is great because we really love working on the game - but seeing we want to finish the game (and many many more) in a reasonable time window, we want to secure some extra funding to be able to hire one or two freelancers, as well as make sure we can afford professional voice actors to make sure we can hold our current level of voice acting for the whole project.
You can sign up NOW for our kickstarter newsletter, so you don't miss out on any of the early bird specials. Find all the information HERE!
Now for some technical news: Godot engine After careful consideration and extensive testing during the unity shitstorm, we decided to finish programming the game in Godot Engine and ditch Unity! The godot engine switch has been a walk in the park so far. The engine works really great for us and it's safe to say now that we only lost about 3 months to make the transition from unity. We've completed all the code we need to be able to assemble the game exactly as we had envisioned it in unity. We've actually taken the opportunity to improve it!
Having coded the whole game by ourselves this time (we initially built it in adventure creator in unity) we now have a much slicker code and know our way around all the time as opposed to relying on a pre-written framework.
This decision has already paid off, as we reworked President Rocket Game’s UI completely, resulting in a better user experience. Our games uses context sensitive hotspots now, while keeping all the humorous interactions we had in the game in the 4 verb version we initially released as a demo. This is simply because we realized that it didn't benefit our storytelling and puzzle logic. Trust us this game is moon logic free and has some tasty puzzles and quests, even with the simpler UI!
November 23
Good morning from London where we are attending the adventure x convention this weekend. We'd like to start this post with a big thank you for playing our demo and wishlisting our game! It's been a special few weeks with the game in your hands, seeing some playthroughs on YouTube and reading feedback! We're more motivated than ever to get the rest of the game done.
Now to the juicy part: We're switching our game engine from Unity to Godot and while we're at it, we're going to change our interface from the 4 verb approach to an easier, more modern solution. "Why", you ask?
Well first there's the obvious trust issue with Unity. And even though they've taken a few steps back from their initial and controversial ideas, we had already looked at other solutions in the meantime.
We built PRG with an awesome and very powerful tool within Unity called adventure creator which we can warmly recommend for anyone who is thinking about making their own adventure game. It's awesome. The creator Chris is super helpful on the forums.
While fiddling around with Godot though, we realized our skillset had improved so much that it was the right time to write the whole code of the game ourselves, giving us more design freedom and more importantly a better understanding of the code of course. We realized that while we didn't run into many bugs after our release, there were a few that we couldn't locate as easily as we would have liked to, which is a combination of using a finished framework and us being relatively new to programming. So all in all it's a real win-win situation now.
Regarding the UI: We had thought about making a more modern UI many times during the design process and while we built a few levels of our game in Godot just went ahead and implemented it to see it work. The result is: we're going to run with it!
You can expect a new (but shorter) demo built within Godot real soon. And don't worry our process on everything has actually only been set back by about 2 months by all of this.
DEMO OUT NOW!
You can all give President Rocket Game a spin!
We've finally released our first chapter as a free demo today. Enjoy ex-president Lloyd Kinski stumble into an adventure he didn't see coming as you make your way to the city of Frankenstein in Germany where a conspiracy of global proportions is beginning to unfold.
Now that you have a part of our game in our hands and can get a glimpse at our work, we'll continue to grind away at the main game. We're planning a kickstarter campaign early next year to speed up the rest of our development.
If you do find a glitch or two in our game, please let us know via the contact form on our website.
We are also thoroughly testing a new game engine right now and things are looking good to make a switch away from unity. Now is the right time to consider this. (If you missed all the unity drama, you'll easily be able to google it)
Well, I guess the last thing to say now is: have fun with our demo!!
Cheers and all the best,
Tilly and Matze
July 23 Update
Howdy fellow adventurers! We did it! Chapter 1 is now fully playable and we are ready to release it real soon. We've completed closed playtest and are now in the middle of the last beta test before you can get your hands on it.
We spent alot of time working on our world and the story to make sure that even though we've chosen a satirical and adulty humorous approach for our first game, it's full of fun and surprising twists and it does have some rather serious moments. Yes, you might loose some of the friends you make along the way. At least in the full release.
Like we've stated bevore, we want to gain your trust with this first free chapter, and speed up our development with a kickstarter later this year. Apart from that we also had to prove to ourselves, that we are able to produce a game that meets our standards. And we're happy with what we've created as a team of two! You can watch our little gamplay teaser of chapter 1 here on our store page. As soon as the beta is over and we're bug free, we're gonna release it. We're only a handful of weeks away.
Cheers and thanks alot for your patience!
Tilly & Matze
February 23 Update
February 23
Greetings everyone! Wow. Happy new year! It’s 2023 we're still not quite ready to release our first chunk. We're about two months behind schedule - guess that makes us real game developers! No, all jokes aside: the gameplay of the first, free chunk of the game is finally complete! Getting all of this done while still having regular jobs is challenging, but we’re getting it done.
Now we're off to recording the voices of all of the characters and finishing off the cutscenes and main menu. So we're still very hopeful the first chapter will be released in Q1!
Chapter one will now feature three different endings and solutions. We also wanted to make sure that the players get a smooth introduction into the story and the world of our game.
Once we're done with the last few cutscenes and the voice acting, we'll ramp up our old and crappy website and get this thing out there, before we gear up for our Kickstarter campaign. Thanks alot for your patience, as this is our first release. We're giving it all we've got to make it worthwhile!
As our skillset grew we decided about half a year ago that it would be best to rebuild the game from scratch to include everything that we had learned over the years. When we first started working on President Rocket Game it was really only meant to be a small minigame and over the past few years we had so much fun working on the characters and the crazy little parallel universe that our game is set in, that the story and scope of the game has drastically increased. We’ve updated our games quick description accordingly:
Earth. Total climate breakdown is inevitable. Even though the United Nations have long realized that the situation is dire, the mighty alliance of the Autocratic Five is sabotaging every effort to save earth's climate. In a desperate PR stunt, a German tech company seeks to persuade them to join the cause while a conspiracy of global proportions is unfolding on the company's compound.
For many different reasons ex-president Lloyd The Prez Kinski - an arch conservative hypocrite and chauvinist, Liv Lundgren - a young militant climate activist and Leroy Jefferson - a successful beloved entrepreneur need to infiltrate the Brunner Tech compound. And YOU will need to make sure they work together without killing one another. What the hell could possibly go wrong?
Cheers, peace and freedom!
Matze and Tilly
Summer development update!
Adventure fans! Time to update you on our progress... We've been having quite a blast working on the completion of our first chapter.
Seeing this marks our very first game release, we don't only want to have a completed chapter (and the prologue) for free to prove to YOU that we're capable of of delivering a game that doesn't suck but also to prove it to ourselves of course! And right now as the first few hours of gameplay are coming together, we do feel a little proud.
We've been polishing animations and puzzles for the last few weeks and have been making sure to have different possibilities of solving some of the major quests in the game. Some may find sneakier ways while others might enjoy a little bit of brute force here and there. Now of course we won't have alternative solutions for each and every small puzzle. Seeing our game will also be quite dialog heavy we needed (and still need) to double and triple check that the script makes sense in all the different choices you make in the game.
The feature that you as the player will be able to talk to Lloyd, our main character, is not just meant to be a gimmick. The way you talk to him will have some consequences throughout the the story which can result in different dialog options or extra hints and possibilities to solve problems. We're currently fine tuning how much of that feature is good for the game without taking away the classic point and click experience.
Apart from all that, it's just down to bugfixing and working on the overall flow of the game so far. Where do we need an extra animation or dialog? Do the hints come about naturally?
At the moment we're trying to have the free prologue and chapter beta ready by October. No promises... But things look good! In the meantime go play some of the other awesome indiedev adventures out there! Cheers!
First playtests completed!
Good news! We've completed the first few external playtests to start to get rid of the remaining bugs and make sure our gameplay is fun and our storytelling is on point. Our game will be very story and dialog heavy as it's what the two of us have always felt like is our strength.
Seeing as we're both still new to the gamedev business, the last few weeks were also very important to get a feel for updating our content, working with the steam sdk and so on.
We've also blocked out the game into 5 chapters (maybe 6) and our plan right now is to release the prologue and the first chapter for free sometime in the next few months. But that doesn't mean we will be selling each chapter separately. We'll sell the whole game at once when the rest is done. Furthermore we finished scripting our intro and cutscenes needed in the demo and are ready to start work on that as soon as we're done polishing the gameplay of the freebie.
After releasing the freebie, we're considering a Kickstarter to speed up the process of the rest of the development. Up until the release of chapter one we will also make sure to get a new website up and running to give you all a better look at the game as the old one.. well it does kinda suck, right?
We're grinding away and can't wait to see what you think about our work!
Stay safe out there. Peace and freedom!
December development update
Well look here! We actually took almost half a year for the promised "regular updates".... Sorry for that, folks! The good news is: we've been super busy grinding away on the development of the game and stayed super focussed!
Our vision has gotten quite a bit bigger and seeing we want to keep this in a realistic scope as it's our first release, we took quite some time to write and refine our main plot. Even though PRG is going to be funny and weird, we want to send the players on a cool story, with multiple endings and branches and an adult plot. Who doesn’t love fearing for the life of your favorite characters, eh? Apart from the first few locations (classic) PRG won’t be on rails, and you’ll be able to figure out your own ways of completing the mission.
We also spent a lot of time working on lore for our world, which is just something we love to do and intend on being able to design future games based in it as well. It was also important to write something where our other two playable characters feel needed and not just like a feature that’s nice to have.
Most important to everybody waiting for the game: we’ve got a nice running prototype and have been busy fleshing out parts of the first few locations for our playable demo and you can expect a release date for it in the near future.
Our first development update!
First of all excuse our silence. Switching from the bone animations to true pixel art took us a while, as it was totally new to us and we needed to put some work in. But we’re very happy with the results now and are slowly back to business as usual.
After sorting this out, we have news on the state of our game. We’ve made great progress with the portion of the game that we will release as a demo later this summer (hopefully). That means we’ve almost completed all of the locations and npcs and are about to start intensifying tweaking and playtesting and will begin to record voice overs for the demo.
We’re also going to start recording a small developer blog, to keep you updated on what we’re up to and who the f**k we are anyway!
As a last little piece of information we’ve also finally updated our feature list. Did we mention that President Kinksi won’t be the only playable character in our game? So if you don’t feel like being restricted to playing a greasy ex politician - we’ve got you covered! And who knows.. maybe your actions will make him a better person.
