Cthulhu update

Hey, sorry for the lack of posts recently, but we’ve been focused on getting Cthulhu Saves the World done.

Since we are way past our scheduled release date, we’ve had to make some tough cuts. First, the game will no longer have a German translation. We had a good translator lined up, the response in Germany to Breath of Death VII was better than any other country that wasn’t predominently English speaking, and we wanted to do it, but in the end, the time that would be required to set up the game to support multiple languages (and probably change the User Interface since a lot of German words are much longer than their English equivilent) meant that it just wasn’t practical with our current setup. We made the decision to add German support before we were planning on doing a PC version and well, in the end, we feel that the PC version has to take priority, both from a financial perspective (which is important since it’ll help fund future games) and from a fan perspective (we’ll probably reach more people with a PC version than we will with a German version). I’m truly sorry for the disappointment. Maybe we’ll add languages in the future.

 Second, we were planning on having a post-game remix mode in Cthulhu Saves the World called Cthulhu’s Angels. In this mode, much of the dialogue would be different, there would be an additional playable character (a certain werezompire from one of my previous works), and a few other extras and changes as well. Adding this content would probably tack on 1-4 weeks of development time depending on how many changes and additions we made from the regular game. In the end, we decided it’s not worth delaying the launch. Now, we would still like to do this bonus mode, but we’ve decided that if we do it, we’ll do it as a free upgrade after release (probably as a break between our 3rd and 4th games). This way, we’ll have plenty of time to do it right. Plus, to be honest, how many people are going to want to replay the game immediately after launch, even with a cool new bonus mode? However 6-12 months down the road, that seems like the perfect time to come back and play a new mode.

Now enough with the bad news. Time for the good news. We’ve made a lot of progress on the game in the past couple weeks and we’re getting really close to being able to launch. We’re pretty much in the polishing/finetuning/content-plugging stage. I think we’ll have the game ready for initial playtesting tomorrow (with the first hour or so playable) and have the game ready for final playtesting (the entire game) sometime next week. We’re in crunch mode and we’re going to get this game out ASAP even if it drives us insane (which would be quite appropriate actually).

So in practical terms, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that you can expect to see Cthulhu Saves the World on the XBox Marketplace sometime between November 10th and November 25th (i.e. Thanksgiving/my birthday). Of course, this is coming from someone who thought we’d be done a few months ago so take that with a grain of salt, but I think that’s a good estimate.