Cthulhu Saves the World was originally scheduled for an August release. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t ready in time for that. There are a few main reasons for this.

1 – We are not full time developers. Breath of Death VII has sold well and continues to sell well (we should surpass 30,000 total sales this month), but we’re still not making enough money to quit our day jobs and develop games full-time. Hopefully that will change in the near-future, but for now, working on Cthulhu Saves the World is a part time job for us. That means that the amount of time we have to dedicate to making games varies from day to day and week to week. Sometimes we have a lot of free time and we get a lot of progress done; other times, life intrudes and our time is limited.

2 – Cthulhu Saves the World is a big step up from our previous game. The world is bigger, there are more playable characters (8 total), there’s a lot more music, the graphics are noticeably better, the maps are more sophisticated, etc. Even though, we have been able to build upon our experience and engine from Breath of Death VII, we still underestimated the amount of time and effort it would take to make Cthulhu Saves the World.

3 – Because of the way the approval process is set up for XBox Live Indie Games (basically it can take anywhere from 2 days to weeks or even months if you find last minute bugs), it’s impossible to set a firm release date in advance. I anticipate that once the game is ready to submit that we’ll pass quickly, but you never know.

So when is  the release date for Cthulhu Saves the World? I can’t say for sure, but my personal guess based on what is finished and what still needs to be done is that the game will be playable by the end of September, but won’t actually be officially polished up and released until October 2010. We apologize to everyone who is looking forward to the game that it isn’t done yet, but we’d prefer to take the extra time to create something truly excellent rather than rush a mediocre product out just to meet a deadline.

We’re going to release the entire soundtrack around the time that Cthulhu Saves the World comes out (hopefully in just a few more weeks, guys!), but in the meantime, here are a few more songs from the game for your listening pleasure.

World Map Theme
Volcano Theme
Big City Theme

Oh and the actual soundtrack release will have more interesting names. How’s ‘Across the Crescent Moon, the Weeping Monster Sighs Once More (Victory Theme)’ sound? Pretentious enough?

The game took me about 90-120 minutes to complete its 30 levels. 3 difficulty levels, a New Game+ mode where you start out overpowered, and up to 4 player co-op all combine to give the game a decent amount of replayability.

At a mere 80 MS points, Radiangames Inferno is easily a must-buy.

Pros:
Helps developers who want to make RPGs but aren’t the best programmers.
We could see some cool games from other developers out of this.
Alternate source of income for us to help pay the bills between game releases.
XBLIG might become THE place for RPGs on home consoles.

Cons:
We could have an RPGMaker effect where lots of crummy RPGs get released.
RPGs on XBLIG might all start to feel the same if they’re based on the same engine.
Extra work – I’d have to go through and add documentation to explain how the engine works.
Some people might waste their money, not realizing how hard an RPG is to make, even with an engine in-place (there are no user friendly editors with our system- it’s all code editing).

If we did decide to do this, the code license would probably cost a few hundred dollars ($300 sounds about right to me), but again, nothing is set in stone and there’s a very good chance we won’t do this at all.

You can download it here.

And here’s a song – Zombie City.

The question then becomes why? Why has this game sold so extraordinarily well? I haven’t actually played the full version (they were out of review codes when I asked and our money’s too tight for me to purchase new games these days, although I hope royalties from Cthulhu will rectify that) so I can’t analyze the entire game, but just from the demo and the Internet, I’ve come up with a few possible explanations.

1 – Summer of XBox Live promotion. Any game that’s featured in Microsoft’s yearly Summer of Arcade promotion gets a huge boost in visibility. Yet this alone can not explain Limbo’s huge success – for comparison, last year’s Splosion Man (another high quality Summer of Arcade game) had 70,000 leaderboard entries after a week – a solid showing, but nowhere near as good as Limbo (and Limbo is $5 more expensive!).

2 – Media Coverage. Coverage by the media is huge for boosting sales, as my own experience has born out (Breath of Death’s sales usually spike whenever a website covers it). Limbo currently has 48 reviews on Gamerankings with an average of over 90%. Both the coverage and the high scores certainly can’t hurt.

3 – Accessibility. Limbo’s controls are very simple – move, jump, and interact. Although I’m sure the puzzles get more difficult as the game goes on, at least in the demo, there was nothing particularly mindbending (pull an object, push an object, jump). Certainly this isn’t Braid with its numerous complicated time manipulation mechanics.

Not only are the controls simple, but the game wastes no time in letting the player play it. No lengthy cutscenes, no big tutorial, just press Start and begin playing.

4 – Cliffhanger demo. The demo for Limbo isn’t long – it took me about 10-12 minutes amd that’s with getting a couple of hidden achievements -  but it ends with a bang and that counts for a lot. I daresay a lot of people who were on the edge ended up buying it just to see what happens next.

5 – Ignored niche. Horror games have become a scarce commodity of late. Resident Evil has abandoned its horror focus in favor of action, Alone in the Dark & Silent Hill haven’t had a great game in years (although Shattered Memories was a step in the right direction), Fatal Frame is Japanese only these days, and we haven’t seen anything new from the Siren team (my personal favorite horror series). Sure, we’ve gotten a couple of new series like Dead Space & Alan Wake, but for the most part, I daresay there is more demand for horror games than there is supply.

Limbo fills in this much desired void in the current gaming market, but not only that, it has some noticeable advantages over the limited competition. One, it’s rated T so children and teenagers who are in search of scares but have parents that frown upon M rated games can purchase it (as well as adults who chose not to play M games for whatever reasons). Two, it’s a 2D platformer so players who lack the skill or inclination to play 3D shooters (i.e. the standard format of horror games these days) can play it with ease.

Any other reasons I’m missing?