Some of you already know this, but just to make it official – the PC version of Cthulhu Saves the World will actually be a combo pack that also includes Breath of Death VII: The Beginning. Oh and there will be a few minor improvements to Breath of Death VII since we’re using the Cthulhu Saves the World engine for it (stuff like being able to save anywhere). All this for $3. Yes, we’re insane to offer so much RPG goodness for such a low price, but I think Cthulhu would have wanted it this way..

Porting BoDVII to the PC has been much easier and faster than I expected so it’ll probably be done this week. If you’ve already signed up for the CSTW beta testing, I’ll probably send you an email offering access to the BoDVII PC beta testing as well. The actual CSTW PC beta testing will probably begin next week. Oh and I’m sorry, but we don’t need any more beta testers – we’ve already got plenty.

I’ve added two new documents to the Free Stuff section of the website, along with a link on the right to make the Free Stuff section easier to find. The first of these is the original design document for Cthulhu Saves the World with notes talking about how the design changed from its origin to the finished game. Since there are a lot of spoilers in there, I highly recommend not reading it until you’ve finished the game. The second document is the text file that I used to keep track of enemy stats & abilities in Breath of Death VII. Hopefully, you find these two documents interesting.

The stuff in our free stuff section is, well, free, but if you’ve especially enjoyed any of the things there, please consider making a donation to Zeboyd Games via the nifty Paypal donate button that we’ve just installed on the right side of the blog.

Just got an email from Valve. Looks like we’ve been approved for release on Steam.

Haven’t worked out the details yet, but we’re planning on selling it for $3. Hoping to get it released by the end of the month.

Hi, guys. This is just a reminder to be sure to check out our official Facebook page. Since it went up about a month ago, we’ve added a number of things including some cool images from the upcoming new version of Cthulhu Saves the World like an October bromide, shots of the new bonus dungeon, and one of the new bosses. Be sure to check them out!

Hi guys! The PC port/enhanced edition of Cthulhu Saves the World is coming along. Bill started working on game development full time a few days ago so we’re making faster progress than ever before.

Things that are done:

Game works on the PC.
Options for visuals, audio, and control customization have been added.
Bestiary mode added (lets you look at all enemies in the game with the descriptions, plus lets you switch between their sane & insane visuals).
Construction of the 2 new dungeons.
Some of the content for the Cthulhu’s Angels mode.

Things that still need to be done:

Draw bromide art & insert in game.
Insert the 2 new dungeons in game.
Finish up the Cthulhu’s Angels mode.

Doesn’t look like the beta will be ready this week, but we’re getting awfully close!

Zeboyd Games (Breath of Death VII: The Beginning, Cthulhu Saves the World) is proud to announce their upcoming RPG, the Final Fantasy XIII remake for the XBox Live Indie Games platform.

“Although Final Fantasy XIII was one of the most highly respected games a year or two before its release, even the most diehard Final Fantasy fans today agree that it hasn’t aged well,” said Zeboyd Games founder, Robert Boyd. “We at Zeboyd Games are excited to be a part of the effort to bring this game up to modern standards of pacing, gameplay, story, and general non-suckiness.”

“Sure, it will be difficult to get all the content in under 50MB limit, but thanks to our experience with the Crystal Stick Figure engine that Zeboyd Games pioneered in Molly the Were-Zompire, we feel up to the task.”

“As the artist and level designer on the team,” says Bill Stiernberg (the artist and level designer on the team), “I can assure you that the graphics under the Stick Figure Engine will produce high quality, high def Stick Figure iterations of your favorite FFXIII characters. The game maps have been successfully ported as well, as there was very little lost in the translation to the straight and narrow aspects of the Stick Figure engine.”

The Final Fantasy XIII remake will be released approximately 6 months after Zeboyd Games says it will. Suggested price is 80 MS points or $1 USD.

We are pleased to announce that Alex Mauer will be writing the music for our next RPG. We were very impressed with his previous work with various chiptunes and we believe his style of music will be a great fit for our upcoming third game. You can check out some of his songs here.

And what is our third game? Ah, for that bit of information, you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

Since posting the article about ratings manipulation on XBLIG, things haven’t gotten any better. Cthulhu Saves the World has dropped an additional NINE ranks in about a week. It’s currently #20 in the US Top Rated. Considering it had been hovering around the #6 spot for a month or two prior to this whole mess, it’s very obvious that it’s a targetted attack. Plus, you can just do the math – given the number of ratings that we had before (around 1400 I believe) and the number of ratings we have now (1700+), pretty much the only way that we could be dropping so quickly is if the vast majority of new ratings are 1-star.

It’s highly annoying, but to be honest, we’re still in good shape. The PC port of Cthulhu Saves the World is almost done. Even if the PC version only sold a fraction of the XBLIG version, we’d have plenty of money for the rest of the year. And there’s a good chance that the PC version will sell drastically better than the XBLIG version since the PC is a much bigger marketplace and $3 is not the kiss of death that it is on XBLIG. And beyond that, I have very high expectations for our third game (for reasons that will become obvious once it’s officially announced) – I wouldn’t be surprised if our third game ended up covering expenses for a year or two of future development after it’s released.

If you enjoyed our games and haven’t voted on them, feel free to do so, but please don’t create fake accounts to upvote our games. The last thing I want is for good meaning people to get in trouble with Microsoft or to start a ratings war. We’ll manage with or without user ratings.

On a more positive note, there’s a new dashboard promotion on the UK dashboard with a video that reviews some XBLIGs including Cthulhu Saves the World. Should be fun to see if there’s an increase in UK sales over the next few days. Oh and Trails in the Sky comes out on the PSP today – that’s another thing to be grateful for.

Just thought I’d let you all know that we started up an official Zeboyd Games page on Facebook a few days ago, perfect for keeping track of the latest news, viewing images, asking questions, and recommending our games to your friends. You can find it here.

The page is pretty barebones at the moment, but we’ll be adding more stuff to it over the coming weeks so stay tuned!

Zeboyd Games is proud to announce the upcoming arrival of Cthulhu Saves the World: Super Hyper Enhanced Championship Edition Alpha Diamond DX Plus Alpha FES HD – Premium Enhanced Game of the Year Collector’s Edition (without Avatars!)

In 2010, Cthulhu stole our hearts and our sanity with the release of the retro parody RPG, Cthulhu Saves the World on the XBox Live Indie Games service. Now, in 2011, The Super Hyper Enhanced Championship Edition Alpha Diamond DX Plus Alpha FES HD – Premium Enhanced Game of the Year Collector’s Edition (without Avatars!) version of Cthulhu Saves the World – or CSTW:SHECEADDPAFH – PEGYCE (WA!) for short – will offer a number of exciting improvements over the original version including:

Cthulhu’s Angels game mode – Cthulhu is too lazy to save the world so he talks a bunch of beautiful women into saving it for him! Features new dialogue, new playable characters (Molly the Were-Zompire! Elonalina the generic healer! Dark Knight Umi! Low level October!), new music, new abilities, and much, much more!

Director’s Commentary mode – Specially marked commentary icons scattered throughout the game tell the inside story on how one of pop culture’s most popular cosmic monstrosities became an RPG hero for great justice!

Rebalanced Gameplay – Many abilities and monsters have been rebalanced for even silkier smooth RPG gameplay! Plus a new Insanity difficulty mode and new super-hard bonus dungeon have been added to challenge even the best players ability to grind out higher LVs (because they’re really not as skilled as they like to brag)!

Unlockable Character Bromides – Due to the frothing demand for sexy Cthulhu art!

More jokes – F’tghan!

An obscure hint to our next game – Hey, why aren’t we working on that now instead?

More options – Toggle the running button, then untoggle it! Endless fun!

Great value – All previously released paid DLC bundled for free (note, previously released paid DLC does not exist)

Longer credits – To thank all the froody guys and gals at Kickstarter who helped make this project a reality!

Celebrity cameos – Cthulhu, the dog of e from Xbox Live! Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade (the benefits of being a fundraising benefactor)!

Plus all of the great features already included in the original version of Cthulhu Saves the World!

Take a look at what the press are saying about Cthulhu Saves the World:

Eurogamer (8/10) – “At this price, you’d be a gibbering madman not to give it a go.”
Joystiq (Indie Gem) – “It’s rare to find a game that is both entertaining and genuinely funny, and so far Cthulhu Saves the World is both.”
RPGamer (4/5)  – “Zeboyd has a knack for crafting fantastic, witty lines for all the game’s characters…”
RPGFan (87%) – “…most important of all, it’s a fun game to play.”
HonestGamers (8/10) – “Loyal Lovecraftians will enjoy things like battling Dagon in the eerie town of Innsmouth, while everyone else will appreciate fighting giant zombie whales in hidden caves. Mostly, though, you’ll just enjoy a clever, witty game.”
Gamesradar (9/10) – “Honestly? This is too good to be stuck in the 360 indie game store.”
IGN (Never reviewed the game) – “. . .”

CSTW:SHECEADDPAFH – PEGYCE (WA!) ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn is currently scheduled for release in Spring of 2011 for the PC and 360.

The original version of Cthulhu Saves the World is available now for 240 Microsoft Points ($3 USD) in all countries where XBox Live Indie Games are supported. Owners of the 360 version will be automatically upgraded for free to the enhanced version when released. The PC release ($3 USD) will include the enhancements by default when the PC version is released this Spring.

For press inquiries about Cthulhu Saves the World or Zeboyd Games, contact Robert Boyd at rdespair@gmail.com or visit our website at http://zeboyd.com

The final day! The whole reason I’m here awaits – the XBLIG Success Stories panel that I’m speaking at. However, that’s not until 2:00 so there’s a bit to go through before that.

My day started out with a meeting with someone at THQ (name withheld to protect the innocent) about the possibility of collaborating on a game in the future. The meeting place was a Starbucks near the conference center. The old joke about every other building being a Starbucks came and bit us because it turns out that there were multiple Starbucks on this particular street near the conference center. Luckily, I was able to call him up and get things straightened out.

The actual meeting went well – we talked about GDC, about indie games, about Titan Quest (one of my favorite games of all time and published by THQ), about I Don’t Know Jack, about the THQ publicity stunts here (he’s not sure who was responsible for the whole balloons in the bay mess), and more. We didn’t make any definite plans for the future (we couldn’t even if I wanted – most of the rest of my development year is already set), but he said to keep in touch. Very nice guy and it was fun chatting with him.

After the meeting, I had enough time to catch part of the 15 Games in 15 Years panel. This panel had quite the interesting concept – a designer was going to talk about the different card/board/other games that he had made for his children over the years and the different lessons he had learned from each one. The panel was one of the most entertaining I had been to all week. The only downside was that since these were custom made games, I couldn’t go on to Amazon the next day and order them – I really wanted to play several of the games he talked about.

After that panel, I had a dilemma – Cave Story or Maniac Mansion? Truly one of the hardest decisions I had to make this conference. In the end, I decided to go with Maniac Mansion simply because nothing would be lost via translation (the Cave Story creator is Japanese). Although I hear the Cave Story panel was great, I don’t regret my decision as the Maniac Mansion post-mortem was both interesting (I love how he worked at LucasArts and didn’t have the rights to make a Star Wars game) and educational. I’ve been doing the vast majority of my work directly in code so I daresay I could save a lot of time by implementing a scripting system ala SCUMM in my next game.

After that, it was time for lunch and then time to prepare for my panel. I got to the room about an hour early and talked some GDC volunteers into letting me in. Once I got onto the stand, I was surprised at just how bright the lights blazing down on the speakers are. Quite annoying, although understandable (gotta have the speakers easy to see for the audience and the camera). Some of the technical support staff came by and asked me about our panel and someone brought us a bunch of water. While I was waiting for the panel to begin, I went over the questions that Brandon Sheffield had sent us, browsed the Internet, and did some IM (with someone I’m working with on our secret next project – woo!) and twitter.

Ian (Soulcaster I & II) showed up next about half an hour before game time. James (Z0MB1ES, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai) came next, followed by Nathan (Explosionade, Shoot 1Up). Brandon, our moderator, came last, just a few minutes before we were supposed to start, but still on time since we didn’t need to set up any audio visual equipment.

The room was of moderate size for the convention center and could probably fit four or five hundred people. To my great surprise, the room was mostly full by the time we started. Were these people mistaken as to who was speaking? Didn’t they realize that David Crane was speaking elsewhere? I briefly considered going to David Crane’s Pitfall! post-mortem myself, but since I’d like to get invited back next year, I decided against it.

I’m probably not the best person to ask about what exactly happened during the panel since I was busy trying to give good responses to the questions and trying to not make a fool of myself and had no time for note taking. Here are a couple of articles you can check out for more details about what we actually said. I did think we did a pretty good job of making sure that all four of us got about the same amount of screen time and no single individual dominated the conversation. Ian probably had the funniest bit in the whole panel with his Mega Man for game developers metaphor. I made a joke about XBLIG being plagued with too many mediocre dual-stick shmups and I half expected to read a headline the next day “Robert Boyd hates shmups and freedom! News at 11!” but I guess my comment wasn’t as interesting as Nintendo and duct-tape and generally not worth the effort to take out of context.

After the panel finished, I was swamped by several people who wanted to ask questions and compliment us on our panel, including someone at Joystiq who thanked me for the shout-out (Joystiq started doing a feature focusing on XBLIG gems in response to our Indie Games Winter Uprising promotion). When we finally got off of the podium, I hung around for a few minutes and talked to some of the other panelists before deciding to head back to my motel. Sure, there were a couple cool panels left in the day, but it would have felt anti-climactic to have gone to another panel right after finishing our own. Besides, after a whole week of GDC and countless panels, talks, and meetings, I was done. In my motel room, I helped my wife get her phone working and then relaxed with some more Xenogears. The next day, I drove back to my home in southern California.

And that’s it for GDC. Time for some recap!

I don’t think I attended a single bad panel. Even my least liked panel (the depression one) had a few good points. Everything ranged from pretty good to downright amazing.

Although it looks like it’s going to be at least 6-12 months before there are any games that I’d be willing to spend $40 on, the 3DS hardware is very cool and if I thought I could convince my wife, I’d buy one at launch. If the 3D can work even on my strange eyes, I daresay it can work on pretty much anybody’s. And unlike all other forms of 3D that I’ve experience so far, the 3DS’s graphics are sharp and clear, even in movement.

Most famous developers are surprising humble.

It’s a big investment in time and money to speak at GDC. If you don’t get a chance at the panel itself, make sure to take some time to thank your favorite panelists via email, twitter, facebook, etc.

Making good tools beforehand can make game development and polishing drastically easier.

There are a lot of very intelligent and talented individuals working in this business.

With nearly 20,000 people attending this year’s conference, you can’t really rely on chance meetings. Setting up meetings before the conference begins is best.

I never want to live in San Francisco. The traffic was nightmarish.

And there you have it! I hope you have enjoyed this little excursion into the world of GDC!