Greetings fellow players,
For quite some time, I've been pondering over a very large and somewhat risky change to our beloved game, renaming Retro-Pixel Castles to something that is more suitable to what the game represents.
The decision is not something I have taken lightly. Renaming a game that's over 2 years old in a lot of ways can be considered marketing suicide, as you will always lose a decent amount of name recognition all over the internet. Some people will have no idea what this "new" game is, and others will wonder what happened to the old one.
But as I'm sure a large majority of you agree, Retro-Pixel Castles is a downright silly name for a godlike village simulator.
The game hasn't been retro for over a year since the graphics overhaul, and while the game does indeed have castles now, castles aren't the focus of the game play mechanics. I suppose the game technically still has pixel art, but usually games tend to stray away from being called "pixel art" games once the artwork is rendered directly in 1:1 resolution, as much of RPC's is now.
I've also gotten several reports that its "silly name" was probably hurting it in the long run anyway, simply because it's not the kind of name gamers take very seriously, subconsciously putting in the same category as keyword-filled shovelware before even clicking on the game's store page.
So, I finally decided to take the risk about 2 weeks ago, and started thinking up a new name. I posted many polls on twitter, asking for people to pick names they liked, and after about 2 days of spamming back and forth, a good friend and fellow developer of mine suggested "Rise to Ruins", since the idea of the game is to survive as long as possible (Rise) to eventually end up dying as the world eventually overtakes you (Ruins) and you have to try again.
So I put it up for a vote, and it was the highest rated of all of my previous selections (Apparently I suck at naming things!).
The games new official name is now "Rise to Ruins", as soon as InDev 24 is completed, you will see the Steam official store page, the official website, and the game in your Steam library all start transitioning over. For a few patches, I will have the old name subtitled to lessen the confusion.
If you're a content creator out there reading this and you cover my game, please help me out and spread the word after InDev 24 is released! :)