The best of Unknown Pleasures 2019
It’s been a weird, weird year for games. My perspective has been particularly odd and hard to square, as I’ve now been full time staff here at RPS for nearly six months. Six months! That’s … oh my god, I still haven’t extended my rent. It’s quite strange suddenly being able to ta
It’s been a weird, weird year for games. My perspective has been particularly odd and hard to square, as I’ve now been full time staff here at RPS for nearly six months. Six months! That’s … oh my god, I still haven’t extended my rent.
It’s quite strange suddenly being able to talk about games in real life without having to apologise, but other than that it’s nice. In that time I’ve played somewhere around 1,200 to 1,300 games (an exact count is impossible for boring reasons), almost all of them little known.
There have been many, many excellent games. There’s a refrain you see around the internet sometimes that “this was a bad year for games”, and I’ve honestly never understood it. I lived through the 2000s, people, I remember that wasteland. But this year, even after a solid 2018, has been so replete with interesting things to play that I cannot fathom how to be disappointed with the games. Sure, the industry, the culture, these are often garbage things for garbage people. But the games, man. The gaaames. Don’t hold it against them.
So here it is then. It’s time for the very best of Unknown Pleasures 2019. The finest of all that we’ve got through since last year, in a mostly random order.
You thought the coolest part of Supraball was finding hidden coins in the Training Court? Say no more! SupraLAND releases today and is all about exploring the world of Supraball!
Beat up little monsters, solve puzzles and find lots of upgrades in this Metroidvania!
Get your copy today: https://store.steampowered.com/app/813630/Supraland
This is now the release of Supraball and not quite what anyone has expected.
We've been working on this for exactly 7 years now and we worked our way into a corner that we see no way out.
The UDK engine that we use limits us so much, that it's bordering impossible to debug a lot of problems and our motivation to go on like this is near zero.
We're maybe disapointing some players with this, but please read on! In the long run it will be better this way.
We now have a game that can be played very well and is a lot of fun if you take it seriously, but it is far from being a polished experience. Given all these circumstances Marenz and I (David) decided to release it as it is. We really want to start over, having learned hundreds of lessons, to make Supraball the game it deserves to be. Knowing how to do things right usually requires having done it wrong before. Trust us, we learned a lot from the many mistakes.
The complexity of our current system is way too high. It has way too many separate parts that are very hard to coordinate. The game is hard to update. We want to have the game in one piece, no separate launcher; have it all focussed way more on the core gameplay, not have so much clutter and menu options around it. What we cannot fix is, that in the past 5 years the gaming scene exploded with countless games being released every day, and even AAA games coming out for free all the time, all trying to get attention. All we can do about it is to not try to please everyone but go more for the hardcore niche player. I have no doubt the gameplay itself will stay unique; no other game can really compare to what Supraball is.
I personally couldn't help on the game production anymore in the last 12 months, and in that time I made an entire game (which will be finished within the next month). The production of SupraLAND, using Unreal Engine 4, was such a smooth experience and it turned out to be a polished game without real problems during development. All we really wanna do is make another SupraBALL in this new engine. Not only can this engine solve all the issues that we're having in the production of the past 7 years, I also learned to code in it.
A year ago it seemed impossible, but everything I needed to get coded for Supraland I could actually make on my own and I learned so much in the past 12 months. In SupraBALL I could always only do art stuff and for coding related things I always depended on others and was forced to wait and wait and wait. Now I can finally do all the gameplay and menus by myself. I'm really looking forward to do all that for SupraBALL, because I know it can be just as polished as SupraLAND.
We expect this release on steam now to automatically generate some buzz, so we'll keep a close eye on what's going on, and maybe we'll do some support updates if it's worth it.
Apart from that, we will inform you on our various social media channels the moment we have concrete future plans.
If you want to give us feedback please use this form: https://goo.gl/forms/e6i6D9IvO4xN8zI03