I know, you're only here to hear about the hot future Supraland stuff. You want the release dates! I know, but for a moment I'll bore you with what happened in 2020, before we get to the upcoming games!
Crash
In July 2020 we released the "Crash" DLC. It was supposed to be a little thing, but turned out to be another 10 hour adventure, because we fail at keeping things small and keep adding more and more ideas. The concept for Crash was very experimental and you and I pretty much agreed on what's problematic about it. If you missed it, my postmortem of Crash is here https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/813630/view/2596838746238082040
It's selling okay-ish but I'll get to that in a bit.
Crew
Also in July 2020 hardcore Supraland-Fan Stuart Baron joined our team. Instead of putting tons of effort into elaborate speedruns, he's now putting lots of effort and enthusiasm into future Supraland content. It's great to have him there. Great work and everyone loves him!
We're now 5-7 people working fulltime on Supra stuff.
We're still looking for someone who can model stylized 3d characters for Supraland 2. If that's you, let us know!
Consoles
In October 2020 the console versions of Supraland got released. It took Humble Games and the team of Garage 227 about one year to port the game. I think the most work went into performance because especially the Switch is really weak compared to all other systems.
We don't really know yet how well the game is doing on the consoles as it takes long for the numbers to come in, unlike on Steam where you see everything immediately. But we know hundreds of thousands of people enjoyed Supraland on Gamepass, so that's great! The first sale on consoles only started now, and as we all know people are not buying anything if there is no sweet %-sign at the price.
To answer a frequently asked question: the first DLC will probably not make it onto consoles. The effort would be ridiculous, because PC and console are both on completely different versions of the game. The DLC is just not compatible. The console versions are based on a Supraland version from late 2019. The Steam version received many improvements and some more content in the meantime.
But the bigger problem is that DLCs are a terrible business model if you actually put effort into the content, like we do. Roughly 10% of players (who bought the maingame) buy DLCs, so they are only worth it, if they are done in a very half-assed fashion. I guess this explains the many AAA DLCs you're thinking about right now.
In our case 7.5% of Supraland buyers also bought the first DLC. Yeah, that's not great.
Supraland 1.5
Therefore I made a significant change in the plan for DLC2. This little 3 month game jam by our then new recruits is now in the making for the 15th month. There is significantly more effort in it than in the main game and it would be a financial loss if we released it as a DLC. In general people are not very interested in DLCs, especially if they come out long after they finished the maingame. Understandable. Therefore it will come out as a Standalone game. It will simply be "Supraland Six Inches Under". You can consider it to be something like Supraland 1.5.
We also thought about going standalone with DLC1, but it was from the ground up designed for people who finished the main game. The puzzles were a lot harder and abilities were not explained. It came down to the question if we do "the right thing" or if we wanna squeeze out some more money but damage our reputation. So it was no viable option to go standalone with DLC1. DLC2 however should work very well standalone, also for beginners. We have to add some tutorialisation here and there but that's no big deal.
We're currently closing in on having a version that can be played from start to finish. At first only for developers, and then we'll bring in the early access testers. Since we're going standalone, we also have the option to release this as an early access game on steam, so everyone else can buy their way into the testing phase too. Is this something you would be interested in or would you rather play the polished and (mostly) bugfree version when it's done?
I know, all you wanna know is the release date. But I dunno. I can only guess. Since we expanded the scope of the game, we will spend much more time balancing, polishing and bugfixing. I only know what's left to be done, not how long it takes to get it done. I'm not setting deadlines for the team and don't want anyone to crunch. But my guesses are: Early Access in Q1 2021 and Release in Q2 2021
What's going on in Red Town??
Supraland 2
The development of the actual 2nd Supraland game will start when Six Inches Under is out of the door.
I'm in preproduction right now. I put together a completely new set of skills and I'm trying to figure out how we could combine the different skills in surprising ways. The abilities were the backbone of Supraland 1, and they will be for Supraland 2 of course.
The challenge is,
a) to have abilities that feel unique (not the usual ones that are in literally every metroidvania out there),
b) to have many different uses for every ability (instead of just one use case that you keep repeating; which turns abilities into nothing more but a fancy key; like a red shot that destroys red blocks... meh)
c) and to have lots of interactions between the different systems (I loved how you could for example attach the beam to your cube, shoot with the blaster through the beam to change the color of your projectile and use that to turn your translocator from green to purple).
d) When you get a new ability the world should be recontextualized. Like when you got the floating buckle in the first game, and now everywhere you see metal things that you didn't see before. I don't like it too much, when you see lots of things that you will be able to use later and you even have a precise guess, how you will be able to use it. Then it's just annoying to not be able to do it right now.
In general I try to get away from abilities that just add verticality to your movement in different ways. It's a bit boring to constantly just get to a higher place or to open doors. There are so many more interesting ways for the player to accomplish certain goals. Like when I let you make a guy appear holy by faking a halo and holding it over his head. You know, there are lots of ways to get you to think in more creative ways and I think that's what makes Supraland fun (and of course finding chests out of bounds). Meanwhile the puzzle genre mostly seemed to just settled for putting some sort of cube onto a button to open a door. We should have been done with that by now. But please let me know in the comments what you think makes Supraland fun. My perspective might be totally skewed by being way too close to it.
And this time I plan to have even more abilities and half of them will be completely optional. It's cool finding hidden chests, but if the content is too common, you're losing the fun finding them. I want your mind to be blown when you find secrets. Not everytime, but now and then!
And we'll put more work into actually planning out legit sequence breaking. In the first game everything was in essence totally linear, there was only an illusion of freedom. SL2 should deliver more.
I dunno if you knew it, but the idea of Supraland being a miniature world was not planned from the start. When the game was half done I decided to make it stand more out by putting it into a giant sandbox. You can partly see, that things don't look exactly miniature quite often and besides the visuals it made no real difference for the gameplay. In Supraland 2 it will be way more meaningful and the interactions between the tiny toys and the giant people will be significant for the gameplay.
- David
PS: to speed up development you need to press the like button