A big thanks to everyone who has bought a copy of Captain Contraption's Chocolate Factory making this one of our biggest launches ever! I thought it was a good time to introduce ourselves to Pill Bug newcomers and give you some rough details of our future plans with Captain Contraption.
Nice to Meet You
We are Pill Bug Interactive, which is made up of myself (Sean) my friend Dave and unofficially Jordan who is the super talented composer behind our games' soundtracks. Both Dave and I are actually full time university lecturers in Wales working on this games thing in our evenings and weekends - I teach game development at Swansea University and Dave teaches creative writing at Cardiff University.
Captain Contraption's is our fourth game on Steam and (seeing how we are indie developers with bad business sense) all our games are different genres - but long time fans can spot some tell tale things which make a game a Pill Bug game (even if I'm unsure what those things are).
Here is a picture of us at the BAFTA awards where we were nominated for best game made in Wales for our second game Cycle 28 - which is one of my proudest Pill Bug achievements.
We try to be as open as possible about development so please ask any questions and join our discord to chat with us. Which brings me on to the real reason you're reading this...
Future Update Plans for Captain Contraption's Chocolate Factory
Fixes and Improvements
Bugs
Part of our update strategy is going to be making changes based on your feedback. Partly that will be bug fixing and partly that will be things like quality of life improvements. My priority over the past few weeks has been fixing bugs which had the potential to be game breaking. I'm happy to report there were only a small handful I failed to spot before release which have all been fixed. My next bug fix sweep will be issues that have been reported which are not game breaking. For example, there seems to be a few cases where objective indicators don't update correctly and the leader boards sometimes update in the wrong order after you submit a score. If you do find any bugs please report them on the forums or discord.
UI and Quality of Life
The influx of new players from the launch has been valuable in getting a wider range of feedback from people on the UI. I will be carefully watching lets plays and reading your feedback to decide what needs changing and what can be improved.
Localisation
Our in-game localisation kind of sucks right now and I am sorry for that. Our lack of budget forced us to use machine translations which is not ideal - but I felt that it was more accessible to include a half good translation rather than no translation. I'm hoping that if the first month goes well enough in terms of sales we can explore improving things with human translation. We will also look into community driven translations if there is any interest.
New Content
Our plan with new content is to add some new "bonus" areas to the game, each around a theme. I already have an idea for the first bonus area which I will be working on throughout the summer. To help us with that I would love to know which of the levels in the game you have enjoyed the most - this will help get my game design brain working.
Also, I would love to add some player created levels as a bonus area - so keep adding your own designs to the workshop and I will contact authors of some of the best levels about adding them to the game.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions please let us know - we would love to hear what you think!
Finally here is another Let's Play for you to enjoy!