We wish you all a happy new year! First of thanks to everyone who submitted those amazing anthems for the contest. The team is very impressed by the selection. In other news we are releasing a minor patch with a few bug fixes and some extra polish to address all the bug reports since September.
[CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT] [FOR YOUR EYES ONLY - CONTAINS SPOILERS]
Patch 1.1.8 (30/12/2021)
The patch applies to new games.
Bug Fixes and Polishing
Fixed a case in Leaked Scandals where impeachment content wasn't delivered as intended
Fixed some news and codex updates that wouldn't happen in Leaked Scandals scene
Reduced debt tolerance beyond -7 to avoid narrative mismatch where player fully recovered too late
Fıxed wrong response referring to ATO instead of CSP at the Kyrute intervıew
Fixed missing response of Nia Resignation in the single resignations path
Adjusted Nia resignation conditions slightly for better tolerance
Adjusted some summary screen values and made some fixes
Petr no longer introduces you at the Anrica rally after being resigned or dead
Fixed two wrong conditions leading to double responses in the Franc University choice scene
Changed conditions regarding Curtan Leste appeareance in Anrica Rally scene to avoid a rare case
Fixed a wrong news article misquoting Rayne from the first interview
Fixed wrong conditions assuming Petr was gone in the Final Supper scene
Improved Lileas reaction to relevations during her dinner scene
Improved some lore inconsistencies related to Camp Strongarm and Holsord
Acasia is now Arcasia in two scenes
Condition fix for Kibener so he is not mentioned in recruitment article if dead
Slight edit to create distinction for Walker's comment on the secretary spy scandal
Added missing condition for Iosefs comment on bad military equipment during Parade scene
Narbel codex entry typo littleto no no resources was fixed and the entry was improved
Fixed wrong situation description mentioning ATO for Contanan Military Support
Fixed a other few typos in codex, reports and news
Fixed some more typos in scenes
Known issues
Lack of Assembly impeachment content
Country Reports have small typo in Ministry of of Foreign Affairs at the second smaller line below
Queen Beatrice can lose dialogue text colour randomly displaying <=color=>
Hyperlinks randomly break and highlight articles or change codex article text
We are super excited to share news with you in early February on what we have been working on. Take a look at our Discord or Twitter! If you liked Suzerain drop a positive review and spread the word.
Thank you for all your support. You made our 2021 and we are very hyped to share more about our work in the upcoming year!
Sign-up to our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain or Torpor Games directly in your inbox.
Winter Sale: Suzerain is -35% off!
Suzerain is participating in the Winter Sale, starting today until the 5th of January! Get it now with a -35% discount!
Starting tomorrow, the Torpor Games team are taking a short break and we'll be back in the new year with some news and updates. Urgent issues will be addressed, however the next broadcast will be delivered at the beginning of February.
Your President is addressing you today on this special date. It is an honour to celebrate with all of you the first anniversary of the release of Suzerain. Here is a list of highlights of the last 12 months:
December 2020 - Suzerain launches on Steam, GOG and Humble on Dec 4, 2020 and is immediately widely acclaimed by fans and press. - First reviews come in giving Suzerain a Metacritic score of 81 and is praised by prestigious press outlets such as Vice, Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer and Spiegel. - Received angel investment, as well government grant to port Suzerain.
January 2021 - End Game Summary screen and customisable Anton are added. - Publisher initial investment recouped.
February - Suzerain breaks its previous record and reaches 460+ concurrent players on Steam. - Largest patch 1.1 released.
March and April - Suzerain wins Best Expert Game at the German Game Awards. - Torpor Games runs it's first fanart contest, picking 3 winners: @Pyrde's Sordish language website sordish.org, @Dy's illustration of the 4 Presidents and @IngsocDmnt's Wikipedia page of Sordland. - Irene Preuss joins the Torpor Games team as Marketing Manager. - Suzerain participates in the most important festival for narrative games LudoNarraCon.
May - Suzerain reaches 2,000 reviews on Steam. - Suzerain launches on the Epic Store.
June - The Fateful Hour Bundle is launched on Steam, together with The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante and Yes, Your Grace. - Daniel Emig joins the Torpor Games team as Programmer.
July - Suzerain wins The People's Choice Award at the Games for Change Awards. - Juan Franco Lagar joins the Torpor Games team as Programming and QA Intern. - Held a successful Hearts of Iron IV Community event with the dev team.
August - Second largest patch to date 1.1.6 is released. Patch 1.1.7 launches shortly after. - The We Live in a Society Bundle launches on Steam, together with Death and Taxes, Orwell, Beholder, Do Not Feed the Monkeys, Not For Broadcast and Mind Scanners. - Torpor Games team gets a dedicated office.
September - Steam Rich Presence is enabled. - Suzerain launches on the Nintendo Switch and receives immediate praise from the press. - Tokyo Game Show selects Suzerain for their Indie Exhibit. - Kamila Shirinova joins the team as Art and Programming Intern.
October - Stijn Verstraete joins the Torpor Games team as 3D Artist. - Achievements added to GOG.
November - Suzerain is nominated in 3 categories in the German Developer Awards (Best Game, Best Design and Best Story), as well as in 2 categories in the GermanDevDays Indie Awards (Best Game and Best Story) - We reach 3,000 reviews on Steam.
We want to thank everyone who has purchased the game in any platform, left reviews, shared on social media, press and partners. A special shoutout to our mods Kay, Naro, Aysar Siddiqi and PAB, our amazing community, and as well as the whole team at Fellow Traveller. None of this would have been possible without you! Danki!
To celebrate the anniversary our office is holding a contest to look for the lyrics of the new anthem of the state of Sordland. We look forward to recieve your lyrics (in English or Sordish).
Submissions will open next week Friday Dec 10th, on our Discord. We will post rules and details during the upcoming week.
We ran another AMA last week, this time on the r/NintendoSwitch subreddit. You can check it out here.
Finally, we can officially confirm that we've started setting up our merch shop and we hope to have it up in the upcoming weeks. Here are some teasers of what we're working on.
Stay healthy! We'll have some important news to share with you at the beginning of next year.
October has been very fruitful with major developments in both our projects. We have neared the completion of our implementation phase and even begun deploying on all operating systems we are targeting to release on for Project #2. However, several larger issues remain. There have been some memory challenges in one of them which we are trying to overcome as we speak. Our focus will be to finish the implementation and starting the testing phase in November.
The unannounced secret project has made massive steps forward with our first environment nearing prototype level completion. We have began sketching the second environment we are going to create. There has been major feature development progress, so we are very positive about the current status of what we achieved. Yet there are some major design hurdles and creative questions that have come up. We are trying to refine the core of what we are trying to build, and it is proving challenging. But we all are excited by these learning challenges which push our studio to improve. We are hoping to be able to reveal more before the end of the year.
We are very satisfied with the Suzerain Switch reviews, as well as with the interest from the Reddit community.
The most recent review on StackUp scores Suzerain on Switch with a 9 out 10.
We ran an AMA on the r/Nintendo subreddit at the beginning of the month, which you can still check out here in case you missed it. We're also planning to run a second AMA on r/NintendoSwitch in the upcoming weeks. Keep an eye on our Discord, Reddit or Twitter to not miss the dates.
On other news, Torpor Games continues to grow with Stijn Verstraete joining as a 3D artist, welcome Stijn!
Originally from Belgium where he studied Digital Arts & Entertainment, and worked for the VR games studio Critical Charm for just over a year, Stijn has joined Torpor as a 3D artist, mostly focused on environment and technical art.
Stijn enjoys telling stories through art, evoking certain feelings and making people think about our world, while making things look pretty.
Join our Discord to read more about Stijn's role and interests!
On the 8th of October at 7pm CEST / 1pm EST, we will be holding an AMA on the official r/NintendoSwitch subreddit, come join us.
Suzerain is also part of Tokyo Game Show this weekend, with a -25% discount on Steam running until the 4th of October!
In other news, a new member has joined the Torpor Games team, welcome Kamila Shirinova!
Kamila is joining as Art and Programming Intern and is currently studying Information Engineering. Before that, she studied Computer Science for 2 years and has enjoyed drawing since an early age.
Join our Discord to read more about Kamila's motivations and interests!
Earlier this week, Ata spoke to Riad Djemili, CEO of Codecks, our favourite Project Management tool, about the development of Suzerain in the Game Production Podcast series. Listen to the interview here.
During the month of September, the studio has been very active, with our production capacity nearly doubling, due to Kamila joining the team and other members increasing their commitments. It was also the first time when most of the company was together in Berlin after 3 relocations were completed. It is usual to work with international colleagues online but having most of the team together in our new office is really something else.
This week we have also released our latest patch on GOG including the achievements feature.
After the release of Suzerain on Switch, we are now working on two main production pipelines.
The Suzerain-related second project is now speeding up in the implementation phase as we are increasingly adding more UI elements. Research also has begun on some OS specific subjects. We hope to share some teasers soon!
Meanwhile our second pipeline, the unannounced secret project, is ticking along very well with strong visual concepting and experimentations being concluded. We are also experimenting in a new visual environment, which is very exciting. Narrative design has received an overall push forward with the timeline being detailed and story subjects being documented at the high-level. Additionally we have begun the first UI mockups to begin designing the user experience from a visual and information standpoint.
To support some infrastructure and database questions of a completely new caliber than before, we have reached out to some developers from other games who have helped us raise the right questions and find the right answers. This was very helpful overall and shows the importance of the strong gamedev network as we also help out other developers with their questions.
All in all September has shown a great amount of progress. Looking forward to what October has in store.
