UPDATES:

There is now a demo that takes about 15~20 minutes. This is what we show to business contacts and showcase at events, but maybe we can put it online at a fitting time…

Popostad – Central upgrade. Added more maps and more things to do. Polished a lot of stuff as well.

Bliekenstad completed (apart from some minor polishing).

Trainstations

Music

New weapons

NEW FEATURES:

Happiness

Warping

Boss icons

Controller support

TO BE MADE:

Final boss fase 2.

Wumhouse side(/happiness) quests.

Blusser Islands & Splenkhakker funfair.

Popostad – Old Town upgrade.

Overall polishing.

Hello! It’s been a while since the last development blog. I realized that Wuppo was still going to be worked on for a very long time before anything would be released, so I thought it’d be a bit annoying if I’d continuously talk about updates when nobody could actually see what was changing. But we didn’t want to go completely silent, so instead we launched a Wuppo reddit page . We use it for occasional small updates, so people can still see we’re still busy. And also provide FTL answers to any questions! And now, after a year of no development blogs, I think it’s the right time to give some more insight into the development again. So here’s another development blog! Past year we said that “we think we can finish the game in 2015“. I think we might have been able to finish Wuppo this year, but we changed our plan a little bit. We were working on Wuppo for so long and still having such a long time of hard work ahead, we thought it would be a MUCH better idea to try get a little ‘safety net’. We wanted to know that what we’re working on isn’t going to be for nothing. The first thing we did, is look if we could get funded somewhere. Upgrade our gear to improve our workflow, but also get a budget for the game. For example, if we want to hire a space to properly playtest the game, or fly to Tokyo to showcase our game, there would be a budget for that. So we applied for the “Creative Industries Fund NL“. And to our surprise, they approved! Simultaneously, we were looking for a publisher. As most of you probably know by now, we were very happy to join Soedesco. They seem to have a great idea of what the game is and how to sell it. Working with them allows us to focus on the game, and worry less about the marketing side. But of course, to know if what we’re doing is going to work out, we had to find out if people (and potential business partners) are actually interested in the game. By now we thought we had a good idea of what the game is, so we decided to create a demo that summarizes the gameplay in less than 20 minutes. This was quite the task, but we’re happy with what we ended up with. Soedesco has been showing this demo to people and received a lot of positive feedback. We also got to show the demo ourselves on the Tokyo Game Show this year. With a fantastic response! Until then we’ve always thought we were working on something interesting, but never really knew if other people would ‘get’ it. It gave us a massive boost to see how Wuppo managed to get some people intrigued and inspire them to explain us so enthusiastically what they loved about it. After playing it for the first time! The only bad(?) side to it all is, well, we felt very inspired as well. Inspired enough to take a bit more time to create the best game we possibly can (within the time we give ourselves). So we didn’t finish the game in 2015. Content wise, we’ve surpassed the 80% mark. But there is still some stuff to polish. We want to give every part of the game enough attention, to make sure it feels like how we imagine ‘Wuppo’. Since there was so much content to create, we’ve never actually played the whole game in full ourselves. So at the moment, what we want to improve exactly, remains a bit of a surprise for us as well. I don’t know how long it will take exactly, but we are very far in the development and we are veryveryveyryeveryagsdasd eager to get it out there as soon as we can in 2016!There is way too much to put here, and I never know how much of these make sense if you haven’t really experienced the world yet. So here’s my best attempt to try and list a few interesting updates:This is the final world. We’re especially excited about this world, because we’ve kept so much of it secret. But this is also where everything in the story comes together. And it… goes completely out of hand. I honestly can’t wait to see how players are going to react to some of the things that happen in Bliekenstad.At one part in the game, you take the train to Popostad. But the train makes 2 stops. It’s not completely done, but most of the 2 stations are done. This is also the part of the game where we’re thinking of having some updates after the release. We’d like to let the train stop at random stations each time.Obviously Thomas created many many more compositions the past year. With his graduation behind, he’s able to spend a lot more time on them. He prepared a new small compilation of some Wuppo of the Wuppo BGM!You collect many items in Wuppo. And some of them are usable as a weapon. And since none of them are as iconic as your ‘gumgumgun’ (the paintball gun), you can upgrade in 3 different types.Wuppo features many story- and character related things to do. The only collectable items we had until now were the filmstrips, which you can watch at a projector. But we wanted to create a collectable that rewards you on a gameplay level as well. So we came up with “Happiness”. Happiness basically expands your maximum HP. So players that are interested in the world and mess around a bit, and therefore “live a happier life” in Wuppo, get rewarded with more HP. There is a very slight visual difference in your HP too when you get more max HP.We’re really fond of traveling in games (hence the train, tram, lift, and the amounts of walking in Wuppo). So this is a feature that appears at the end of the game. But the idea of this is (apart from that it fits in the story) that you can still play the game after beating the final boss, and collect some stuff you’ve missed.I don’t know why I ever went with a skull for this one, but now bosses have their own individual icons next to their HP. I started on this recently, but I’m incredibly excited for it. It’s really fun to come up with these new controls, and the whole game feels new when I’m playing it now. You use your left stick to move/duck and your right stick to use the item you’re carrying. You can use bumpers for jumping. There’s one button for talking to NPC’s and throwing items. In controller mode you get indicators around NPC’s or ”item holders”. You can swap between targets with the shoulder buttons. Pretty much all the other buttons are available to create shortcuts to your items.And that concludes this update! Me and Thomas both want to say thanks to everyone who has been supporting us since so far back and still continues to do so. It feels great to see so many people still being interested in a game that takes way too long to complete if you’ve been following it since the beginning. But as always, we’re confident it will be worth it! We hope everyone has a nice X-mas and new years eve! To be continued in 2016! – Lars & Thomas