Hello peoples,
It's been a long time since we shared a development update in this community, and today being a properly foggy and moody morning, I thought I'd just write a short note; send a signal into space, so to speak (talking about signals, I've been watching Apollo 11 this weekend; in all the scenes, someone is smoking in the room – this is how you truly know it's the footage form the '60s...).
Anyways, what would I like to know, ifI were a player of Gremlins, Inc.?
- Is the development team alive?
- Do you plan to add any new cards or features?
- What's up with Gremlins, Inc. 2 ("Gremlins Unlimited")?
- Tell me something funny/interesting related to the game.
Let's start:
Is the development team still alive?
Yes! Unbelievably, huh? We are now seven people plus some extras freelancing for us, and from the folks who worked on the original Gremlins, Inc., we have 3 people still on the team (including myself).
Geographically, we have 1 person working from Spain, 1 from Japan, 2 from Russia and the rest – from Lithuania. Which makes for some interesting time zone coordination when we need to talk to each other.
100% of our focus – aside from supporting the community of Gremlins, Inc. (thanks, Standard of Ur!) – is currently on our new game, which we develop for about a year / a year and a half now.
ːsummer_magicː History time:
In 2013-2018 we focused on Gremlins, Inc.
In 2018-2019 we focused on releasing Spire of Sorcery into Early Access
In 2020-2021 we focused on fixing the damn thing (changing genres, all the works)
In 2022-2023 we focus on a new game (unannounced, I just created a Steam page today...)
Good news: for the new game, we collaborate with a bright game designer who shipped one, two, three, four games, that sold several million copies (he's both smart and rich), with two more in production at his studio at the moment. And this new game of ours has a mechanics that revolve around evolving tokens, combos, bi-directional battle matrix, and many other things that make us happy...
So there's a pretty high chance that if you enjoy Gremlins, Inc., then you will dig the new project as well. When we are ready some time in 2024, we will start by releasing the playable demo, so that you can see for yourself, if it's up your alley (it also has a story that is somewhat relevant to real life: corruption, discrimination, racism, we have it all; including a female protagonist).
Do you plan to add any new cards or features?
Surprisingly, yes, we do.
I mean, it's a game from 2015, so maybe it's already good enough, right? ːtelegramː
What we have is a new card (or two), and a few balancing tweaks, that have been on the back burner for months and months.
We now have agreed that once we're done with the demo of our new project, we'll take a week or two to spend on finalising that content, and releasing it here. Probably, that's Q1 2024. Don't hate us for slow-walking the thing, we are currently like a team of deep divers, submerged down below for almost two years, with Standard of Ur calling us from the surface with the updates on how things are going in the real world).
What's up with Gremlins, Inc. 2 ("Gremlins Unlimited")?
We saw strong interest from players (you guys rock!), but we couldn't raise the development budget from publishers or investors because the game was "too big and too small at the same time".
We may get around to taking the series further once we ship the new game – and if it's successful enough, to provide the extra money that we can throw on this concept.
Nobody wants to do a version 2.0 that will have only marginal improvements. We discussed some out of the box ideas that can take the game to the next level (with cards that you can construct, etc.), and if we will do G2, then we will do it like that. But for the moment, it's not happening, not in 2024 for sure.
Some trivia
Good news: A.Fruit, the composer who wrote all the music for Gremlins, Inc., continues to collaborate with us, and already wrote over 12 tracks for our new game. From that side alone, it's a feast for ears! The music changes as you progress through the game... different adventures have their own themes... and we even got around to creating "the theme of the lead character", "the theme of her best friend", etc., which is the level that we haven't tried before.
Lessons learned: the biggest lesson that we took home following our "death march" of 2020-2021, is that we have to stop trying to be "the indie team that works like a big corporation". All of our developer friends are pretty crappy at posting updates, or responding to bug reports on the forums. It is a given, when you're small, that you simply don't have the time to act like a SEGA subsidiary.
The sabbatical from the social media that I took in 2022 taught me that most of the time spent on posting regular news in 6 languages and responding to comments on Discord, was mostly time spent inefficiently. Because, ultimately, if the game is doing well, then you can post just in English, whenever you have news, and it's good enough. Whereas if the game's in trouble, no amount of localisation will save your ass.
Finally: Gremlins, Inc. is still performing well enough to pay for its servers in Asia and in Europe, and to support the community and live ops. For which I'm very thankful. It's lovely to see that we have new players coming in every month, and having a good experience with the project. No game is ideal, and very few games can afford to keep re-inventing themselves (ours definitely wasn't built for that, we were like the blind people painting a picture in a dark room, in terms of architecture). But to see that we still have thousand+ sessions a day in Gremlins, Inc. in 2023, is a big motivation for our team to try our bestest to deliver a new game for you all, which would surprise you, and make you happy with its multiple challenges along the dramatic story.
I cannot wait to share more on that project – at some point between now and the release of the demo, we'll start posting dev diaries, and so on.
As for now, I'm wishing you all a nice day, and here's a high five to everyone who sent a kind word or two my way over the last year. We're not yet back to regular communication, but we're getting ready to share more. See you around!
/sergei
(yes, this is form our new game =)