Hey everyone!
It's been a number of months since we've updated and I wanted to let you guys in on what's been going on, who is working on the game, and what we have planned for the future!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. We moved the studio to Washington.
There were a number of reasons for this both financial and personal but things should be settling down now as the move is mostly complete and we just have a few more things to do. The new digs will be focused entirely on developing games and running the streams. Right now we're in a temporary shared space but by next week -hopefully- we should be in a permanent new space that isn't shared.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. We have daily dev streams!
If you didn't know we stream development of Heartbound live on Twitch every day from 12pm-10pm PST. The first 5 hours is art and the second five hours is programming. Heartbound is the main priority right now and we're working through Animus live so come check it out.
We also work on our back-burner game Kill The Moon from time to time or play games and give feedback on them. Recently we ran a game jam and helped a ton of new designers on their path to making cool stuff.
You can watch the streams here:
https://www.gopiratesoftware.com/twitch/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Animus is in -unstable testing- phase right now and we update this build every Sunday.
You can access the unstable version of the game using the code "CheeseAndWhiskers" without the quotes and following the image below for instructions. This build has tons of changes, new stuff, testing stuff, all kinds of things. Animus is a massive undertaking and we are spending time on testing things for feel on top of just making it work.
There is no unstable build for Mac or Linux currently. The unstable builds are also only in English. This speeds up development time and reduces issues while we're testing all of this stuff. Once these builds pass and feel good we translate them and move them to the other platforms.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. Heartbound is being created by only three people.
Shaye - Art/Animation
Stijn - Music/Sound Effects
Thor - Programming/Writing/Game Design
This is a ton of work for three people but we won't be expanding the team. I'm happy with how development has gone so far and I'm proud of what we've accomplished together and what we have planned for the future. Good games take time and I do not intend to rush this. If you're ever wondering who responded to your YouTube video, Tweet, or email all of that was Thor. Small teams do a lot of stuff outside of making games so be kind to your devs!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I know a lot of you just want updates now.
I would rather update the game when it's fun and ready.
Let me know if you ever want to chat or have any feedback.
Thanks,
-Thor
Discord - https://discord.gg/PirateSoftware
Twitter - https://twitter.com/PirateSoftware
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/PirateSoftware
Stream - https://www.gopiratesoftware.com/twitch/