Gregzilla Games

last two weeks have been quite busy for us with a couple of events and the Steam launch, now we have a bit of time to tell you about what we have been up to this later exciting times!

The first stop of our trip is Brazil and its SBGames 2013, one of the most important events focused on game development in Latin America. It took place from 16 to 18 October in São Paulo, and there was our community and PR guy, Jesús Fabre, that met some of the most interesting brazilian devs and gathered some feedback on Nihilumbra. Glauber Kotaki, pixel artist on the indie hit Rogue Legacy, praised the art quite a bit, and Saulo Camarotti and Beto Souza, from Behold Studios (creators of the amazing Knights of Pen and Paper and the upcoming Chroma Squad) loved the game mechanics and atmosphere. It was a great experience for us to be witnessing this "indie rennaissance" that is going on in Brazil right now, with games like Ninjin, Toren, Mr. Bree+ or Qasir Al-Wasat (the last two are struggling in Steam Greenlight,so if you like them, upvote!).

Our second stop is goes several thousands kilometers away from Brazil. No further than Kyiv (Ukraine), where Casual Connect was being celebrated.

And there flew our colleagues Marcos Sueiro, one of our programmers, and Kevin Cerdà, our Creative Director and Nihilumbra's designer. Kevin did a speech about riding on sharks and living the indie adventure. He focused on how hard has been the labour of creating a and marketing Nihilumbra for iOS and the exhausting feat of getting out of Steam Greenlight.

Kevin and Marco's time at Casual Connect was fun as always but it was also really rewarding. They had the chance to meet with some great independent developers such as the guys from Studio Fizbin, who are the creators of The Inner World, Fishing Cactus with Algo-bot, Staal Media that brought a great flash game called A Knight to Remember, and a lot of other developers of awesome independent titles.

Both had the chance to have some serious conversations about videogame development while partying hard and wearing silly hats, as you can see in the pics. Bussiness is hard.

Yes! Steam! we are there, finally! hard to believe but in the end all the work we started doing a year ago, today has come to fruition! So here is what you, dear long-time supporter, and you, welcomed newcomer to our site  (maybe thanks to the divine power of Steam), can find when entering the Nihilumbra Universe!

Nihilumbra is a dark tale that takes shape as a solid puzzle platformer where you play as Born, a weird but also charming being that one day separated and grew up from The Void. The Void seems to hate your hunger for independence, so he goes after you, vanishing everything he finds on its way only to try to absorb you back. Your only weapon to make your way through the end of the adventure are the colors you find along the stages of the game, each one has a power to modify the scenario. The use of colors, along with the melancholic loneliness of the game game, sets the perfect mood to present some really challenging situations to the players. Also, is impossible to forget to mention the hand-drawn graphics and the moody and melodic music composed by the brilliant Álvaro Lafuente.

Access here to Nihilumbra presskit: https://sites.google.com/site/nihilumbrapresskit/

As it happens in the first stage of the game itself, Nihilumbra for its own was a leap of faith, in a gaming universe oversaturated with words like "social", "casual", "free to play" or "in-app purchase", a few students wanted to make a game in the old fashion, something that you pay for once and enjoy for your whole existence. That's Nihilumbra, a game about existentialism, full of challenges and meaning. Released for iOS platforms in early 2012, the initial goal was to raise the quality bar to try to stand out from the average mobile titles in the always overcrowded AppStore. A year and a half after, we can say we achieved it, the great critic reception (remarking iTunes’ Best of 2012: Hidden Gem award) fueled us to port our game to other platforms, like PC, Linux and Mac, and in the future to platforms like Wii U and Android.

And this is a golden chance to re-introduce you our dear Nihilumbra's trailer: 

You can also get Nihilumbra on the Humble Store: http://www.nihilumbra.com/

New game features for this version:

Who are Beautifun Games? 

We started out in March 2011 as a team of a few young graduate students from Barcelona who wanted to create something of their own, at the beginning there was no money there, only a passionated group of around 15 students who met once a week to try to shape their dreams into something truly enjoyable. As anyone may expect, in a few months that group of people became smaller and smaller, only the ones who really wanted (and could afford) to be part of that labour of passion remained. Then what it was going to be an amateur project turned into a professional work when Aniol, one of the four remaining members, purposed to invest his own savings in funding a real game company. Then BeautiFun Games was born and a year later Nihilumbra became its first child. Now you can understand why today is a great day for us, we see how our efforts are starting to pay off, and this way are opening the door to new projects, new leaps of faith.

Jesús Fabre. PR and Community Manager at BeautiFun Games.

Hi Beautifans!

we have important news this week! ... because they are really big for us! after suffering and trying everything we could during this past year, we are now approved on Steam Greenlight! it has been really hard for us to raise the votes, but finally we raised no less than 20.900 upvotes and that put us in Greenlight's Top 10!!

To reach this point, we had to wait more than 13 months, 399 days to be exact! we tried many alternatives, we sent many many press releases asking for some coverage, we thought we could look for a publisher who already were approved by Valve to try to reach Steam through them, we did even a massive one-week Nihilumbra iOS giveaway, but nothing was really effective, but month after month we were gaining some votes. It wasn't until Steam decided to approve a round of 100 games in the end of August when we started to see the light and climb a bunch of positions and finally passed the filter.

Now we are working non-stop with the Steamworks integration tools to adapt our game to Steam as soon as possible and make it available there. We hope to have it ready for next week or maybe sooner!

Also this week has been quite busy with the launch of the PC version of  Nihilumbra, getting feedback and we also tried our best to spread the word and it went pretty well. The game got covered in many Youtube videos, streamings and press sites, here are some of the more remarkable appearances:

IGN Spain (3/10/2013)

Gikz.pl (Poland - 2/10/2013)

Indiependencia (Spain - 1/10/2013)

Rubber Chicken (Portugal - 1/10/2013)

Indie Mag (France - 30/09/2013)

Games Master (Croatia - 27/09/2013)

Rock Paper Shotgun (26/09/2013)

Capsule Computers (25/09/2013)

Hookedgamers (17/09/2013)

Nihilumbra Walkthrough - Turbine Gaming

As you can see, the game is getting pretty nice comments out there, but we expect the Steam version to be even more complete, not only because of the new Steam achievements system. We are going to launch a small game update with this version, and then we hope to polish the Nihilumbra experience even more.

But in the middle of all this work, we are still celebrating it!

Will keep you updated! stay tuned!