Hello MOTHERGUNSHIP Fans!

So, we made it! I am so happy to finally say: MOTHERGUNSHIP is now available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One! Man...we’ve been working on this game a looonnnnng time. I thought now might be a good time to take a trip down memory lane and show you what the road has been like.

The Kickoff!

In September of 2015 the two co-founders of Grip Digital and I started talking about making a sequel for my 2014 game, Tower of Guns. For Tower of Guns I had one ambition: make a game and hope some people like it. That was it, really. I didn’t expect it to do well. I didn’t expect it to gather fans. I just wanted to finish it. And I hoped some people liked it.

Some did. And Grip then got interested in porting and publishing the game for consoles. Afterwards, we looked to continue the relationship, working together on a new follow up for the game. A month later, I flew to Prague for a brainstorming session, where I sat down with Grip’s founders (J & J) and really got to know one of Grip’s senior engineers, Radek Pibil, and the kickoff for Tower of Guns 2 development began!

Tower of Guns 2, as many of you know, eventually morphed into Mothergunship. We had realized the project was, even by early 2015, outgrowing the Tower of Guns franchise name, and so Mothergunship was born. Radek and I would continue to work together on the project, initially just the two of us full time, and then eventually with some part time help from others within Grip (hi Vasek! hi Cisi!) and some old former-coworker friends of mine. We shared our first playable demo behind closed doors at GDC 2016, along with a pitch deck and around this point Humble Bundle began taking interest. They’d eventually hop on as a major partner for the game, which is great because Humble is pretty much awesome.

Beginning the Ramp up

By June 2016 we began to “formalize” our process into Sprints and Milestones.I put formalize in quotes because it turns out that developing a game virtually across multiple continents is quite hard, and we constantly adapted and shift our methodology throughout development.

In September of 2016 we finally began nailing our art style as we narrowed in on an art set we simply called “acute”. This art set would be eventually expanded to inform the full art of the game, resulting in this “Bible” of artwork.

Throughout the summer and fall of 2016 we gradually added more folks to the team, oscillating between a core team of four or five of us plodding along and sometimes growing to fifteen to twenty! We’d be more than that before launch.

Mothergunship is Born (and Announced!)

It took longer than we would like to admit to come up with the name Mothergunship: a little over a year after knowing it was not going to be "Tower of Guns 2". At times everything from “Death by a Thousand Bullets”, to “Ubergun” to “Gunzillion” to “Monstrosity of Guns” were all on the table. I’m glad we did not go with Gunzillion.

Finally, in February 2017 we got to announce the game to the public! From there on, the real heavy work happened: showing the game with the indieMEGABOOTH at PaxEast 2017, then again at GDC 2017, then again at PaxWest 2017, then again at Gamescom 2017, then again at PSX 2017, then again at PaxEast 2018 then again at GDC 2018..all while growing the team more and building up the game. It’s a constant roll when you are public with the game, and the task of verifying our work against public reception was never ending. We received a huge boost in validation from Epic Games, who awarded Mothergunship a Dev Grant award later that year...a grant we put right back into further refining our work.

Some time during 2017, George from Marketing appeared. No one knows from where he came. Some say he appears wherever he is needed, as if carried in on the wind, only to be whisked away again when he feels his work is done, like the Mary Poppins of Marketing. There’s no way he’ll let me leave this sentence in here. We’ll see how closely this Mary Poppins From Marketing proofreads.

The Push

Sometime in the last 12 months, 2018 happened. I’m not sure when, because I was too busy working on Mothergunship. The entirety of the last year is a blur. We released trailers. We released demos. We released special streamer-only preview builds. We gathered partners (Hi, Skewsound! Hi, Evolve! Hi, Sculpin and Origin and Pixio!). We built up our community and tried to cherish them. The team went through low points and high points--moments where we felt completely and utterly crushed...and moments where we suddenly saw rays of hope. People seemed to like what they played. People seemed to want to play more and this team worked like Hell to try and deliver on that. So here we are, launching Mothergunship.

We made a game. We hope some people like it.

So, like usual for these blogs, here’s your To Do list, dear reader!

1: Buy MOTHERGUNSHIP on: