DeathSparks
Member
After Nuclear Thrones launch, we took a few months of time apart from each other to recover.
We have been struggling with Nuclear Thrones patch and some other backlog. The patch is an ongoing process (weve submitted for a new certification round this week), and has been rather embarrassing and frustrating for everybody on the team. Game Maker, our middleware, absolutely isnt built for PlayStation updates, and Nuclear Throne being the first test case of a Game Maker game natively on PlayStation means that every problem we run across needs to be found by SONY, addressed by YoYoGames, tested by us, and then submitted to certification again. Its been a slow, grueling, process. We take full responsibility for the delay, and were positive that were finally getting close.
Jan Willem went back to prototyping, and creating small side projects to sling his creativity back into shape. He recently released a small solo project in the form of DISC ROOM, which is a collaboration between Kitty Calis, Doseone (who we also worked with on GUN GODZ & Nuclear Throne), and himself. It was available as a Humble Original in the Humble Monthly of August 2016. You can, however, still grab the soundtrack over on Bandcamp.
Rami has been working on a lot of the Vlambeer-related stuff further up ahead, but he also spend some time making some solo stuff. One of his recent trips took him to a gamejam in a castle in Sweden, where he met a bunch of developers from all over the world. Together, they created a hotel maintenance simulation game in the shape of Breach & Clean, which is a freeware download.
Birthdays! Patches! Updates! Fixes!
In the meanwhile, weve been working on some other things in the background. At the start of September, Vlambeer turns six years old! Weve spent this first downtime in years fondly looking back at six years of ridiculousness and hard work with Vlambeer, but in looking back, we also found a young studio that made some mistakes along the way. Were committed to fixing those, and while were cleaning house, we might as well make some other improvements.
There will be updated freeware versions of Super Crate Box and GUN GODZ. Both will also release for Mac and Linux.
There is an upcoming PC update for Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, and Mac and Linux builds will be added there as well.
On mobile, well be releasing a patch for both Super Crate Box iOS and Ridiculous Fishing in the next few months, enabling support for new devices and aspect ratios. Were sad to announce that, as you probably expected by now, the Ridiculous Fishing content update will not occur. Weve thought long and carefully about this, but Ridiculous Fishing is really perfect as it is. We simply couldnt find a way to improve it in a meaningful way, and as such, wed rather leave it as is, instead of adding things for the sake of adding them.
We are happy to announce we will be working with Abstraction Games to try and bring a PS3 and PS Vita patch to LUFTRAUSERS. This patch will fix an old trophy problem some of our vocal fans have been asking about in more and less polite ways, and we didnt want to disappoint those of you who asked politely.
Nuclear Throne will get an update on PC, Mac and Linux in the course of this month. This will bring the game to update 99 on Steam, Humble and GoG, and will fix some of the remaining bugs. We are thankful to YellowAfterlife and Darwin from the community for their help in identifying and solving these, and to the entire Nuclear Throne community for their ongoing support. The PlayStation patches, when approved, will bring the game to update 99 on those platforms too, and fix some of the glaring problems of the console build.
All of this made us a bit nostalgic! Going over our old projects, back to little games such as Dinosaur Zookeeper and KARATE, and old hits like Super Crate Box and Radical Fishing it was quite a trip down memory lane. Vlambeer has been an amazing rollercoaster so far, and sometimes things moved so fast we can barely remember what happened.
Announcement!
We wanted to find a way to document our history, and we got in touch with the fine folks at Cook & Becker to help us out. They suggested the idea of a book. So, for the first time ever, Vlambeer is announcing a book.
Were really excited to announce 120 Years Of Vlambeer And Friends, an art & history book of everything weve ever made as Vlambeer. Were excited about the whole thing, and since weve never released a physical product of this scale before, this is all rather exciting to us.
Written by the writer of Killzone Visual Design, Arjan Terpstra, the book delves into our history, our designs, our process, and our projects. Arjan went and asked for full access to our archives, and he found design sketches, ideas and conversations we had all but forgotten about.
The 120 Years Of Vlambeer And Friends edition is available at $39 and features the 256x256mm artbook with a blue cover. It is over 150 pages, full of beautiful art, and features a 20.000 word history of Vlambeer, interviews with the two of us, our team members, and the people around us, and insights into our design, design sketches, history and our games.
Then there is the signed Limited Edition, which is being printed in a limited run. Now, the contents of the book itself are identical, besides the cover being in bright red instead of blue. The Limited Edition comes in what we think is a beautiful 307x307mm box.
In the box, youll find a numbered and limited art print, created according to Cook & Beckers stringent quality guidelines. Youll also find a custom Vlambeer notebook and marker to jot down your own game ideas or thoughts. Finally, youll find a collection of all of our games (& some additional prototypes). Each of the limited editions will be hand-signed by both of us. The Limited Edition sells at $93.50.
Pre-orders for both editions are available through Cook & Becker right now, with worldwide shipping.
Nice to see an update from them, the book looks interesting.
Pre-Order Link: https://www.candb.com/en/artwork/19...ng-back-arcade-games-since-1896-vlambeer.html
Source: http://www.vlambeer.com/2016/08/announcement/
