Additionally we have teamed up with The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante and Yes, Your Grace to bring you The Fateful Hour Bundle. The bundle will be at its highest discount ever today during its first 24 hours and will be at -15% discount after that.
Finally, if you have missed our live Q&A earlier today, you can check out the recording here.
Citizens of Sordland! We are currently busy working on a few new things we'll announce soon, nevertheless May has brought some news we want to share with you.
First of all: Suzerain has reached 2000 reviews on Steam. Thanks to everyone who has made it possible!
This week we announced our nomination at the Games For Change awards, in the Most Innovative category, as well as the People Choice's Award. You can cast your vote for Suzerain here. It is a great honour to be considered for such an important award among great company. The awards ceremony will be held on the 12th of July.
And another milestone: Torpor Games has turned 2. We sadly couldn't celebrate in person but managed to find a picture of the three founders from when Torpor and Suzerain were just ideas. Thanks to everyone who has been part of this journey.
In other news, we have a new addition to the team: Irene Preuss has joined Torpor Games as Marketing Manager. Originally from Barcelona, she has been working in the games industry for the last 4 years in business development, event organisation and marketing roles. She's also Marketing Manager of the Berlin-based indie studio Happy Broccoli Games.
We are very glad to have her work with us. Our experience with Irene has been amazing even before this. She has opened many doors for our game and company in the past before the launch, with her wide network and experience in indie-games as well as the Berlin games ecosystem.
The Torpor Games team will be travelling to Sweden this month to spend 6 weeks at Spelkollektivet, a community for indie game developers in the middle of Sweden, where we are hoping to meet other fellow devs, exchange ideas and find inspiration for future plans.
Finally, a brief update on development from the team. We have been working hard on our yet to be announced Suzerain-related project. Our team has moved forward to finalizing the implementation with only a few design tasks left.
Current estimates expect this work to be completed by the end of June after final polish and bug-fixing concludes. So far, two rounds of testing have occurred with positive results. Our initial performance and optimization challenges have also been mostly solved. Here are a few teaser images:
We are very satisfied with the overall experience and hope to reveal it soon to the masses!
On the other hand we have just finalized the concept phase of our second unannounced project. Currently we are seeking new funding resources to be able to achieve a high standard of quality and to alleviate other pipelines in the company. In June we will be starting the actual design phase which will take many months to conclude. We will share more news and updates regarding this in the upcoming months.
Citizens of Sordland! Another month has passed and it’s been quite eventful for us. Here’s an overview of our activities during the month of April:
Suzerain won Best Expert Game at the German Game Awards 2021. This is the highest award recognition a video game developer can be honoured with in Germany and we’re extremely proud. Thanks to everyone for making this possible.
[previewyoutube="VUTL5JeVnj4;full"]
Suzerain is also nominated in 2 categories at the Unfold Awards: Best Narrative and Audience Award, for which we will need your vote: (Vote here) - winners will be announced on the 20th of May!
Last week we participated in LudoNarraCon, the festival organised by our publisher Fellow Traveller, with several activities, including a developer interview and Q&A, the Sordland Documentary by the Templin Institute, as well as the reveal of the fanart contest results:
@Dy with the drawing of the 4 Presidents
@IngsocDmnt with the Wikipedia page of Sordland
and @Pyrde with the website Sordish.org about the official language of Sordland
The winners have received the high recognition of Artist of Sordland in our Discord Server. Congratulations! Vectern Sis Da!
During the festival, Ata also led the panel ‘Good Stories Must Die’, with renowned speakers Annie VanderMeer (Guild Wars 2), George Ziets (Fallout: New Vegas, Wasteland 3) and Märten Rattasepp (Disco Elysium, Death & Taxes). You can watch it here if you missed it.
[previewyoutube="xqq8VZEui8s;full"] Last week, Ata also spoke about Suzerain, Torpor Games and indie game development during the Instagram Takeover of Factory, the co-working space and innovative community our team is part of.
On another hand, PC Gamer wrote a great article about Suzerain and the Novel Not New crew discussed Suzerain during an Abnormal Mapping podcast episode. More reviews also from Movies and Game Tech and the German online magazine Spielbar. It’s an honour to have Suzerain mentioned by so many media outlets, thank you!
Finally a reminder to fill out our merch survey - we’ve started the research for the feasibility of ordering merch so don’t miss your chance to share your thoughts with us!
We are looking forward to sharing more news with you soon! Hope you have a great May ahead. Stay safe and healthy. Vectern Sis Da!
Our publisher, Fellow Traveller is an indie games label publishing innovative story-driven games. Their newest game, The Invisible Hand is out today!
The Invisible Hand is a satirical take on stock market trading, where you’ll be empowered to pursue wealth and success… at the cost of everything else, in a story of finance and personal responsibility.
You begin the game on your very first day at the trading firm FERIOS, a brokerage where they turn a blind eye to breaking the rules as long as you deliver results. Profit is what matters and the rules don’t apply to winners. Plenty of others want your position, so it’s up to you to make money, at any cost.
[previewyoutube="OEExFFgiaFM;full"] Congrats on your new job, and welcome to FERIOS. It's time to make some money.
Buy the stocks going up, sell before they go down. Short the ones that are going to fall (or the ones you’re going to make fall). The more money you make, the bigger your commission. And you want that commission, don't you? Well don’t worry, the rewards are limitless, if you’re hungry enough.
We’re one big happy team here at Ferios and nothing brings the team together like competition.
So in the spirit of togetherness you better meet your daily profit targets and beat your coworkers’ results if you want to keep your job. We won’t hesitate to fire anyone who can’t or won’t do what it takes to succeed...
Patch 1.1.5 is released right before the kick-off of LudoNarraCon 2021 tomorrow. It contains some bug fixes and some polish to improve the overall writing quality! Thank you to our dedicated community members who are posting bug reports on our Discord server.
We will also reveal the art contest winners on tomorrow's Dev QA Livestream at 19:00 UTC on the Steam store page here. Make sure not to miss out on the Live Q&A with the developers Ilke and Ata from Torpor Games. Feel free to ask questions in the live chat or on the Discord server question and answer chat.
[CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT] [FOR YOUR EYES ONLY - CONTAINS SPOILERS]
Patch 1.1.5 (22/04/2021)
The patch applies on new games.
Balancing
Early crisis is harder to trigger under certain circumstances
Bug Fixes
Fixed a leaked scandals trigger that would result in a disappearing scene in turn 09
Fixed a missing company bribe variable regarding fulfilment of a promise
Fixed missing set Gender Equality variable in WLA bill
Fixed wrong conditions in the Final Supper scene regarding Deana's school experience
Changed wrong response description for lobbying decision
Improved some PresiPower tooltip text
Improved some MOD reports
Fixed wrong Franc university codex update
Fixed some typos in the summary screen
Fixed a few typos in codex articles
Fixed several wrong responses
Fixed several scene typos and bad wording
Fixed a dozen news and reports typos
If you liked Suzerain drop a positive review. Much love from from Torpor Games.
LudoNarraCon is taking place April 23 - 26, and Suzerain is exhibiting!
You can tune into the Suzerain Gameplay stream right here on the Steam page, at 11am PT Monday April 26 / 8pm BST Monday April 26
About the stream: The Templin Institute, a YouTuber investigating alternate worlds, streams his Suzerain playthrough! Will he turn Sordland into a communist utopia or a brutal dictatorship?
LudoNarraCon is taking place April 23 - 26, and Suzerain is exhibiting!
You can tune into the Suzerain documentary stream right here on the Steam page, at 12pm PT Sunday April 25 / 8pm BST Sunday April 25
About the stream: The Templin Institute, a YouTuber investigating alternate worlds dives into Suzerain, and the history of Sordland before Anton Rayne becomes president. Brush up on your Sordish history before you take the up the mantle of president. Sordland is depending on you. How will you lead?
Heartfelt greetings from the Torpor Games team to all of you! We are super excited to share that we are attending LudoNarraCon, the digital convention for all kinds of cool narrative games right here on Steam. Narrative games come from the heart and soul and it is such a great opportunity to be among these talented studios and games.
Not only that but we are also going to be streaming some interesting content like a live Q&A with the Devs next Friday the 23rd of April at 19:00 UTC / 12 AM PST. Followed by a different piece of content like Templin's Documentary, a Templin gameplay livestream, and the Adventure Games Podcast to keep our store page alive on different days!
Don’t miss it, Sordland is awaiting you.
This is an inclusive event that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. Fans of weird and interesting narrative games will be able to join together in a digital space to hear news about exciting upcoming games, play demos, and hear from talented creators on www.ludonarracon.com!
View the exhibitors with 20+ game demos!
Good Stories Must Die Panel & More at LNC
In this casual panel led by Ata from Torpor Games, we will explore games and developers who faced the difficult challenge of ending their games. The panel will go over the topics such as branching narratives and how multiple endings function, the impression that a game leaves at the end of the experience, and the challenges which were faced in bringing everything together in a conclusive and satisfying manner.
Join us next Saturday at April 24, 10am PT. Listen to the discussion of our amazing panelists like Annie (Astroneer, Guild Wars 2, Destiny), Märten (Disco Elysium, Death & Taxes), George (Fallout: New Vegas, Wasteland 3, Torment, Pillars of Eternity), Ata (Suzerain). Discover the challenges of endings and find out how and how not to do endings.
There are dozens of more interesting panels to discover at LNC! See here.
The LudoNarraCon Supporter Pack
The Supporter Pack includes Cyrano, a compilation album of music; and a treasure trove of wallpapers made up from the exhibitors of LudoNarraCon 2021. The LudoNarraCon Supporter Pack will be available on Steam for a limited time.
The Supporter Pack is an exciting new addition and will give fans an opportunity to show their love and appreciation for indie narrative games, and to help support the event.
