Cthulhu Saves the World has been out for a little over a week and the initial response has been very positive! We’ve sold over 4500 copies in the first 8 days, the average user rating in the US is 4.5/5 (same as Breath of Death VII), and we’ve gotten a number of great articles and reviews at very sites, like the following:
We also got a rather nice 2 page spread on Cthulhu Saves the World and the Indie Games Winter Uprising in the US February 2011 issue of Official XBox Magazine so be sure to check that out!
I’m very pleased with how the game is doing! Not only is it getting rave reviews, but it’s selling about as well as Breath of Death VII did at this stage of its life, despite being more expensive. From the look of things, the 1st quarter of 2011 will be our highest profit quarter to date – it’s quite possible that we’ll make enough money just from Cthulhu Saves the World in Q1 to support full time development in Q2.
In other news, the patch has been submitted but hasn’t passed peer review yet. I’m just about done transferring our game code to XNA 4.0 and about to start work on adding PC support. We have a big project that we’re going to be working on that should come out in the second half of the year and a smaller project that we’ll work on when we feel like a change of pace. 2011 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Zeboyd Games – stay tuned!
I missed the exact day in all the Cthulhu Saves the World development & various Christmas activities, but Breath of Death VII: The Beginning just recently broke 40k total sales. Yay!
Cthulhu Saves the World will not come out tomorrow.
However, I think Cthulhu Saves the World will be done tomorrow. At that point, I’ll put it up in playtesting for people to do a final going over to hopefully catch anything we missed before putting it into peer review shortly thereafter. I don’t predict any major issues – CSTW is built on the BoDVII engine which is solid, plus we’ve stuck the game into playtesting a few times before so I believe all of the major issues have been caught by now – but we want to do a final check before putting it into peer review.
If you are an XBLIG developer with a creator’s club membership, we would greatly appreciate it if you could take some time out of your schedule to play through the game when it goes into playtesting late tomorrow or early Friday. I understand that it’s the holiday season so many people have plans, but it would mean the world to us if we could get this game out before the end of the year. If we could get at least a couple people besides ourselves to play through the whole thing by the end of the week, then we could submit the game on the 25th and hopefully get at least half a week of sales before the pay period ends. Plus fans of RPGs who have the rest of the year off would get plenty of time to play it before having to go back to work/school.
Also, when the game does go out, we would appreciate any and all help in spreading the word. Tell your friends, posts on message boards, email websites, the works. As I mentioned in an earlier post, how much time we have free to work on game development in the first quarter of 2011 hinges on how many copies of Cthulhu Saves the World we manage to sell this month and since we don’t have much time left, those first few days will be crucial.
Something very good will happen if Cthulhu Saves the World comes out on Thursday or earlier, so I’m going to do everything in my power to make that happen. If that means a 48 hour period with no sleep and programming like an insane person, so be it.
I won’t be posting again on zeboyd.com until Cthulhu Saves the World is in peer review, so just an early heads up – Aphelion Episode 2 will probably go up on the marketplace later today so if you’re a fan of RPGs, you’ll definitely want to watch out for it.
Also, I’m about to post a debug version of the game to playtesting. Note, this is a debug version so the gameplay progression/story is all locked out. However, you can fly around to any location in the game, LV up to LV40 in a single battle, and other stuff. Obviously, major spoilers involved. Any developer who would like to help me out, I’d love if you could give the debug version a try and see what bugs you can find. Of course, later, I’ll post an actual playable game into playtesting.
EDIT: The debug version is up in playtesting. If you’re a Creator’s Club member, you can download it here.
A big hitter in the Indie Games Winter Uprising just came out – Chu’s Dynasty. Picture Smash Bros. with gorgeous 2D art, an Asian theme, and time manipulation all for only 240 MS points ($3 USD). You can download it here.
Longtime fans of the site will know that I am a huge Pac-Man: Championship Edition fan and have the highest recorded score in the game (well, before they wiped the leaderboards clean a few months back anyway) so it was with great anticipation that I took some time out from developing to play the sequel, Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX.
I can say without hyperbole, Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX is a worthy sequel to some of the best games ever created (the original Pac-Man and Pac-Man: Championship Edition) and is probably the best game that will come out this year. Given that this is a year that has included gems like Super Meat Boy & Civilization V, that’s saying a lot.
The style is a little different than the original due to a few new additions. Ghost trains – long processions of ghosts that follow your every move, just waiting to be devoured in a score boosting massacre of awesomeness - are great fun and bombs that can be used at any time to scare all ghosts back into the trap in the middle (albeit at a hit to your speed level) help to make the game more accessible to beginners. To go with the ghost trains, sleeping ghosts are scattered throughout the maps and by running past them, you can wake them up and add them to your ghost train. Oh and some sleeping ghosts have power pellets within them to add to the ghost clearing combo craziness. A bullet-time effect when you’re about to die, thus allowing you to avoid defeat helps to make the game more about strategy and planning rather than just quick reflexes. That’s not to say that quick reflexes aren’t necessary, just that it’s a bit more manageable. Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX is now more about good strategy and planning and less about having your perfect run ruined because the ghost with the random AI decided to step in front of you.
There’s a lot more game here this time. Whereas the first game only had 5 courses, this one has 9 – Championship Edition I & II, Highway, Junction, Spiral, Manhattan, Dungeon, Half, and Darkness. Each course has a number of modes as well – Score Attack in both 5 and 10 minute varieties, various Time Trials (stuff like eat 6 fruit as quickly as possible) and Ghost Combo mode. There’s a Free mode with unlimited lives and bombs where you can turn off random ghosts that is great for beginners or experts trying to perfect their technique. You can choose between 3 difficulties – make it easier for more lives & bombs or make it harder for a higher initial speed level (making it easier to get points). Oh and there are also 5 songs you can choose from (the original only had one song) and a number of graphic skins that you can use to customize your playing experience.
Even more than its predecessor, Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX is a game about high scores. Thanks to the close shave slowdown effect & your bombs, it’s much easier to stay alive than it was in the first game – in fact, one of the game’s achievements is to play a perfect game. However, mere survival isn’t the goal – the goal is to climb through the leaderboards with better and better scores. And what leaderboards! There are a ton of leaderboards to compete on (just about 1 for each course & mode combination) plus there are total score leaderboards for the truly dedicated. And as a nice touch, your current rank in each mode is shown when you select a course to play.
The User Interface has been upgraded to be more useful. A bar that shows how much power pill charge you have left is useful to both novices and experts alike, but expert players will especially appreciate having the current speed value displayed as well as a number total of how many fruits you’ve eaten for each side – very helpful if you want to plan out more complicated board clearing combinations than just keeping both sides equal.
There’s more content, more customization, improvements for both beginners and expert players alike, but most importantly, Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX is simply more fun than its predecessor. The gameplay style is a little different than the first Championship Edition due to the various additions they’ve made so you might want to keep the first game installed for nostalgia and the occasional change of pace, but all in all, I can say that the new additions and improvements to Championship Edition DX make for a much more enjoyable game that rewards skillful play with pure joy. If this game was a full retail release at $60, I would still recommend a purchase – at a mere 800 MS points ($10), your course is clear. Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX needs to be the next game you purchase.
The people over at IndieNerds.com have done a first look at the first location in Cthulhu Saves the World. You can check out their preview here.
Progress on the game is going well. By the end of the week, I’m hoping to have most of the game done, along with the trailer. As for the Indie Games Winter Uprising that I’ve been helping to organize, the early response has been very positive. We’ve already had articles at several big websites and I’ve received emails from writers from a number of popular websites hoping to interview, cover, or otherwise review the games in the promotion. Hopefully, this is just the boost in visibility that the service needs.
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