Nihilumbra's PC launch post-mortem
Hi Beautifans!
It's been a couple of weeks since we don't come up with some news! I guess that regularity is not something usual on indie dev teams. But don't worry, we haven't been precisely idle!
We are working on Megamagic, our new project, and at the same time we keep polishing and getting ready all Nihilumbra versions. Like the PC one that, a few days ago, got an update to version 1.2, containing the following improvements:
- New languages (KOR, JAP, CN, PL).
- Enhanced tutorial.
- Bug Fixes.
- Check your achievements in-game.
Also, last week, Kevin and Pol went to the Madrid Games Week, a huge event where the biggest companies presented their new consoles and games. But there was place for some indies as well! Our colleagues were showcasing Nihilumbra (amongst some other incredible games such as Kromaia, Gods Will be Watching, Candle or Extintion) to a lot of visitors who were curious and eager to play!
But today we want to share with you this article we published on Gamasutra. After reading Nihilumbra reviews and watching gameplays, we discovered that something was not right. We had a great reception with the iOS version, and a lot of people seemed to be enjoying the enhanced PC version as well, but we've started to see a considerable amount of critics that didn't like Nihilumbra at all. Why is this starting to happen now, one year after the game was released? What has changed? Is it the game, the audience or maybe the press?
Kevin wrote his thoughts about what could be the causes of all this. In this peculiar post-mortem Kevin explains some of the most relevant design choices he made, why the game is how it is and how this influenced on the community and press feedbacks that we've been receiving; remarking the differences from the iOS and the recent PC version. We hope the article can help some other developers who are in the same situation as we were, and also could be useful for anyone who plays the game and wants to understand some of its particularities (for example, why the first few hours of the game are quite easy or why the difficulty of the Void mode is too damn high).
We would love to read your opinions, so don't hesitate in commenting here or in the article itself!
Cheers!
BeautiFun Games
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A busy, but pleasant ride: Stops in Brazil, Ukraine and Steam!
Hey BeautiFans!
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!
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| SBGames 2013 (Fuente: Arena IG) |
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!).
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| Some awesome devs discovering Nihilumbra: Glauber Kotaki (left) and Saulo Camarotti and Beto Souza (right). |
Our second stop is goes several thousands kilometers away from Brazil. No further than Kyiv (Ukraine), where Casual Connect was being celebrated.
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| Nihilumbra was showcased beside two great titles: The Inner World and a Knight to Remember. |
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.
And finally, we cannot forget to mention how intense everything has been for us to launch our game on Steam. We are really thankful for all the attention we got from the press, from sites, youtubers and people supporting us on Twitter, Facebook, even in our new Nihilumbra page on Google Plus. We are learning a lot from everyone's feedback on Nihilumbra. That's why, in the future, we want to share our impressions and write up an article about all that we learned from the feedback on this conversion and the differences from mobile to PC/Linux/Mac audience, hope you like it!
Cheers!
BeautiFun Games.
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Nihilumbra HD is now finally available on Steam!
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/
The human story behind.
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:
- Voice acting.
- Levels adapted to widescreen.
- New HD textures.
- Improved and remastered soundtrack.
- Art gallery.
- Re-imagined and intuitive controls.
- Improved atmospheric and weather FX
- Steam Cards.
- Achievements system.
- Steam Cloud support.
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.
