Wishes Ultd.

Beastieball Update: Rank Defense!

Unknown — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We just launched a new big update to Beastieball!

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The most exciting new feature is Rank Defense, a new challenge mode in which your Ranked Beastieball team accepts challenges from other players’ teams from around the world! Set up your perfect team, watch their results come in as they challenge other players, and defend your rank!

We’ve been diligently updating the game and adding stuff continuously since our Early Access release last year, including lots of new animation for Beasties. To celebrate the new update the game is on sale this week, so consider checking it out on Steam!

Beastieball on Steam</a>

Chicory 4-year anniversary + Tote Bag!

Unknown — Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been almost 4 years since Chicory first launched on Steam and Playstation… At the time I recall there was a powerful anticipation for the game within our niche little community. But we couldn’t have foreseen just how large its impact was going to be and the kind of response it was going to get from players during a difficult pandemic year in 2021. 
It’s still pretty mind-blowing to look back at the accolades it received. Destructoid</a> and Giant Bomb</a> both named Chicory as their #1 Game of the Year in 2021. Looking at other games that have received the same selection, you see stuff like Zelda, The Last of Us, Elden Ring, Grand Theft Auto… far as I can tell Chicory is the only GOTY on either list that wasn’t a million+ dollar budget mainstream success. Somehow our weird little indie game made by a few friends off a modest Kickstarter campaign was able to reach many people and stand out as a game worth remembering. There were like a hundred other accolades worth celebrating at the time (getting shortlisted for the Indie Games Festival grand prize was a pretty special bucket list item to check off) but those GOTY noms have particularly stuck with me because of how weird they are.
ANYWAYS, in celebration of our strange and beautiful little painting dog game turning 4, we’ve got a new tote bag to share with you!
</figure>Shop Chicory merch here!</a>
You may recognize the design as the album art for the game soundtrack. The original art was hand-painted by Alexis, the game’s character artist and animator (who then went on to direct all the creature design and animation in our follow-up, Beastieball). For the tote bag we processed her vivid and complex art town to just 4 colors, which was not trivial to do, but after seeing the results printed in person I was pretty blown away. I’m not really a guy who gets excited about tote bags but this one looks REALLY good. The print is very vivid and the limited palette evokes the look of the actual game in a funnily authentic way.
Thanks to everybody for supporting our weird little team making our weird little games. It’s a very rare and fortunate thing to get to make our dream projects and pursue our craft to make the best things we can imagine without compromise for market viability or demographic appeal or whatever. This game is really special to us, and even if we tried I don’t think we could ever make something quite like it again.
Thanks forever,
Greg & The Chicory Team

The All-Important Third Thing (designing Albrax and Yueffowl)

Unknown — Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we got late into production, our priorities in concept designs shifted. We asked concept artists who had stuck with us for a long time to pitch their own ideas to us; what’s an animal or concept that they had dreamed of, but never got to do?
That’s when Harlow dropped Albrax on us, basically fully formed from the first concept sketch.
December 2023: An invader from another world appears!</figcaption></figure>
Harlow has long been a fan of cryptids and urban legends, with a particular soft spot for Braxie, the Flatwoods monster.</a> This Beastie clearly had been waiting, dormant, inside Harlow. 
In Harlow’s words: “There are few cryptids as visually iconic as the Flatwoods Monster. It's a small wonder that it regularly appears in video games with its design largely unchanged. I've done a few Braxie influenced pieces before (and will certainly do so again) but a simple iteration would not do for a beastie concept. I wanted to take what I love about the Braxie sighting and evoke it rather than simply reference it.”
And from her blog</a>: “The barn owl portion stems from the general suspicion that the Flatwoods Monster sighting was a misunderstood scuffle with a barn owl (along with various other things). The idea of the line was to try and illustrate the way one thing can seem like another - and also to make a badass cool alienbird.”
“To round out its visual design I used a lot of geometric angles to distance it from more naturalistic bird designs, and themed it vaguely around avocados - it kind of emerged looking like an avocado and it was a fun "third thing" to crowbar the design into its own identity.”
I want to highlight Harlow’s mention of a “third thing” here, because it’s a guideline we independently stumbled on when coming up with our pillars for a good Beastie name</a>, and I believe it’s a rule with wide application. Mashing any two things together is a surefire way to make something new, but often the components are obvious and the result is ungraceful. Adding a “third thing” is what can take a concept to the next level, and when it works, it imbues everything with a deeper and richer meaning. Ideally the third thing should be something that resonates with the other 2, but as we see with Albrax, even when it’s something fairly random—like an avocado—it still gives the design a strong leg to stand on.
With so few slots remaining for new designs, we never intended to move forward on the “baby” idea Harlow had sketched beside Albrax. But when we got to pondering what the last 3 or 4 designs in the game would be, Alexis did a month-long reassessment of every Beastie we had, trying to identify all the gaps that could still be filled. And one thing she uncovered was that there weren’t any unique birds in the early areas of Mythwood. Another thing she uncovered was that we had an overabundance of “round” Beastie designs, and not enough pointy/spiky ones.
Alexis particularly wanted to emphasize the strange shape of owl's legs to make something that felt a bit alien and bizarre.</figcaption></figure>
With this data in hand, we came to Harlow with a request for an immature form of Albrax that had gangly long legs and a non-round design. We were so excited to realize the idea, we had the name Yueffowl ready to go before the first sketch was even started (first draft names: Leggstraterrestrial, Hooteffo).
April 2024: Lightning strikes again</figcaption></figure>Again, Harlow nailed it on the first try. In her words: “While Yueffowl definitely still has the iconic barn owl face, lophorinas</a> obviously inspired its posture and wing shape. It’s too perfect not to do!”
I think it helped that, at this point, we had been working together and on this game for more than 2 years. After many trials and tribulations, impossible design challenges, crushing failures and difficult victories - we’d perhaps hit our stride designing Beasties, just in time to be finished with the whole ordeal.
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Harlow also took charge of designing the poses for these two Beasties, both of which were obviously quite precious to her. Something new she started doing around this time was roughly modelling her Beasties in 3D, as a way to create a quick reference for different poses and view angles. 
And - that’s how Albrax and Yueffowl were designed! It was refreshing to have a couple that came together this easily. 
If you’re curious to learn about any other particular Beastie designs - let me know! See you next time!


Creating with Hearts and Brains (designing Cherrily and Merrifly)

Unknown — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

cheerleader bug fairy - colorful, small, has pom-pom like shapes on its hands! frail bug with very powerful support abilities</blockquote>
This was the concept prompt we sent to Ivan Freire for what would become Cherrily! Ivan is a really fun and interesting fellow - he initially reached out to us asking if he could do concept work with us, and as fans of Dodgeball Academia</a> of course we had to say yes!
March 2022: Ivan had so many ideas. So many!!!</figcaption></figure>
It’s fascinating to see how differently every artist worked. Ivan hit us with sketch after sketch, all with their own merit and appeal. There was so much to appreciate, but it was also daunting to sift through, compare and discuss them all.
As we advanced through sketch phases, something we wanted to emphasize were more elements inspired by specific insects, trying to create something that felt more naturalistic and less caricatured/cartoony, the way Ivan’s style bent. Ivan’s jolly character designs all had the right energy, but Alexis soon realized we needed some way to filter down all of the ideas into something cohesive. She wanted to find some single specific bug species that we could center the design on, using elements from Ivan’s sketches to inform the character. In our search for possible pom-pom wielding inspirations, we considered pseudoscorpions</a> and even pom-pom crabs</a>.
April 2022: Alexis has an amazing ability to step away, deeply internalize a complex conceptual problem, and then tie it all down… she never ceases to amaze me!</figcaption></figure>
This was what Alexis came back with after a period of contemplation, and right away we could all feel that it had been “solved.” She chose to focus on woolly aphids,</a> very small bugs who suck sap from flowers and spin it into a cotton-like cloak. The idea to reframe this as a cheerleader pom was pretty galaxy brain, not to mention the way she navigated Ivan’s ocean of ideas to bring together many of the most appealing individual details — the OwO face from one drawing, the head/body ratio of another, the use of long, gangly arms and dangly shapes from yet another. Where the rest of us had been stuck deciding which design to explore more deeply into, Alexis found a way to pack all of Ivan’s iterations into one!
April 2022: Ivan claps back</figcaption></figure>
With the design honed in a lot more, Ivan really showed his chops, taking Alexis’ concept and turning the personality up to 11. It took Alexis’ smarts to tie all the pieces together thoughtfully, but Ivan’s distinct linework and over-the-top character performance was what made Cherrily come to life. I love how, even though we’d given artists a pretty specific selection of poses we needed for each Beastie, Ivan always drew tons of extras. You could feel his intense desire to explore the Beastie’s personality through expressions and poses, way above and beyond what the game required.
Cherrily as they appear in-game! They were one of the very first Beasties we brought to animation, as we felt they perfectly expressed the game’s unique mix of “sports” and “creature.”</figcaption></figure>
We knew from early on that we’d want to make an immature form for Cherrily as well, since it seemed so straightforward to take the design and make a cute baby version of it, possibly even drawing from Ivan’s existing body of sketches. Eventually, Irischroma decided to pick up the torch and take some passes on the idea.
March 2023: Irischroma tries some fairy ideas</figcaption></figure>
Boom! Done! Easy! Or so I thought, anyway. It seemed like there were a few pretty obvious ways to turn Cherrily into a baby and I felt Iris had nailed it here. And I think on many other productions, this is where it would have ended. But Alexis was dissatisfied with these concepts for reasons she had trouble articulating, sitting on these for an extended period while she brainstormed what she wanted to do.
2023??: I found this in a folder somewhere; I don’t think Alexis ever sent it to anybody, but it shows where her head was at.</figcaption></figure>
Alexis wasn’t content to go down the “obvious” route—partially because, with the design so simplified, it made Merrifly into a generic looking fairy without any clear insect inspiration. Alexis wanted to keep the design grounded with specific real-world animal characteristics and references. Her thought was to keep the woolly aphid wool as a key design element, turning the creature into a sort of jolly dustmite. But it still felt too nonspecific, and she couldn’t resolve it.
November 2023: Dandelion seeds!</figcaption></figure>
Eventually Alexis and Irischroma sat down together for a big brainstorming session, and this art was the result of it—Iris took in Alexis’ ideas and spruced it up with their own amazing sense of personality and flow. The key idea that cracked it was to take inspiration from dandelion seeds, which aren’t technically related to woolly aphids at all… but they provided the perfect theme to tie down all the ideas we’d had. After experimenting with different ear, arm and wing shapes we all agreed that the simple top-right sketch design was the one.
Going against convention, we skipped doing pose sketches, and Alexis simply drew clean final poses in her first pass. This design wound up being very special to her.</figcaption></figure>
As someone who tends to design characters in a very fast-and-loose way, it always amazes me to reflect on all the tiny invisible decisions that get made in the design process, and to see all the iterations that you can do on something that seems so simple. I really want to give Alexis kudos here on her skill as a creature designer; I’m still learning from her every day on this project.



A Hairy Problem (Designing Broslidon and Leobro)

Unknown — Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This Beastie family was requested by a couple readers, partly because many picked up on the fact that this one has a storied history. It’s one of a few that was started early on in the concept development process and then never could quite get figured out until nearly two years of iterations later. Why was it so hard, and why did it take so long? I’ll try to show you that process and some of the tough lessons we learned along the way.
February 2022: Irischroma’s first explorations for a seal concept</figcaption></figure>
The seal was one of our earliest design prompts I came up with. All I really wanted to go on was a seal’s famous ball-handling ability</a>; I thought they’d make for a great passing/setter-type character. With that prompt, Iris put forward a broad range of possible personas, all of which were appealing right away. But after taking some time to stew on it, we decided to go forward on the beach volleyball-bro character, because they felt like something quintessentially Beastieball which you wouldn’t ever see explored in other creature games (another important direction we were still trying to establish with our early designs).
April 2022: It's done! ...Right?</figcaption></figure>
This is probably a great time to mention that Irischroma loves pompadours. I don’t know why, I don’t think there may even be a particular reason. But left to their own devices, Irischroma would often introduce a pompadour somewhere in designs they played with, sometimes even accidentally. And that is what came through here in their development of the beach bro seal, including a first sketch idea for an immature form based on them. Looking at the adult’s sheet, I couldn’t find anything wrong with the designs, and in fact I was really excited by the strong personality already coming across, so I felt that it was basically finished and ready for animation. These are the sketches we used in beta builds for years. But while Alexis loved the personality and poses, she had doubts about the design, so we paused further work on its concept. After a while, feeling like we needed to make some progress on it somehow, we decided to explore more ideas for the immature stage.
March 2023: Playing with different levels of cute vs. cool-looking</figcaption></figure>
There were lots of great sketches here, but there wasn’t any consensus among us which were the strongest ideas. While we struggled to figure out what we were missing, it was Alexis (as usual) who pointed out the lack of any clear theme to all the sketches done so far.
This is a type of issue that often comes up in these articles, but frequently readers respond with mild confusion, saying something along the lines “I liked the earlier design better, I wish you stuck with that one.” So I might take this as a moment to talk about why it’s always so important to establish a clear design theme, and why we often iterate past the point where a design is basically working, from the perspective of somebody who only learned its value in the process of making this game.
Firstly, sketch drawings have a rawness which conveys strong personality/gesture at the expense of clarity, cleanliness and specificity. It’s easy (and common among artists) to get attached to a compelling sketch drawing, only to feel the final cleaned-up result is disappointing. A compelling character design can’t work only as a sketch; it has to be strong enough that it has appeal and personality even when drawn in different poses, different angles, and by different artists. Put another way, if the concept’s appeal relies on the personality of the sketches, then that magic would be easily lost as soon as we cleaned it up and had a different artist animate it. Having a clear theme grounding the design’s details ensures that its essential meaning and character carries through to future stages of production.
Secondly, greater specificity always makes designs better. You might say, “but I liked it better in the earlier stage, so how can you say it’s better?”… well, because part of our goal is to make designs that most people don’t like. That might sound completely insane, but stick with me here. When designs are more generic, they have fewer potential “turn-off” elements, and tend to be more liked by more people. But if the entire game was filled with medium-temperature designs with minimal specific details, basically just animals with personalities, then the end result would be a game that nobody could really get excited about. Designs always need to have a weird element, something that drives some people away and attracts others. With 100+ Beasties in the game, we can afford to have 95 that you don’t even like, if it means that there’s 5 that feel specifically made for you. That’s the goal. And a well-established theme gives artists a blueprint they can follow to inject more details and visual ideas into a design to add that needed personality and weirdness.
March 2023: Adding a lifeguard theme</figcaption></figure>
Newly enlightened with this incredible wisdom, we asked Iris to do another pass but highlighting a “lifeguard” theme, to tie in the beach-bro persona they’d developed. The resulting sketches… felt like a step backwards. It felt like we’d glued some non-sequitur floatie shapes on the design; there wasn’t any clear harmony to it. We started spitballing other theme ideas. Maybe the big one is a surfboard, and the immature form is a boogie board?… But we had no idea how to convey that visually. We were very stuck.
End of March 2023: A rare occasion where I contributed a sketch</figcaption></figure>
This was where I had an idea that, at the time, seemed fairly ridiculous. The chest hair and pompadour were the key elements of Iris’ initial seal sketches, but they had nothing to do with the “Beach bro” theme, and it made any attempt to make them more “beach bro” just feel tacked-on and stupid. So why not make the hair the theme? Maybe the adult seal was very careful about their hair care, and their flippers produced hair wax to keep it smooth and shapely, while also making a smooth surfboard-like surface to glide along the beach. Riffing on that, the immature form can’t produce its own wax, so it would be an untamed hairball monster. Alexis was lukewarm on the idea, but Iris was all-in and went ahead exploring new ideas for the immature form.
June - December 2023, exploring hairy seal pups</figcaption></figure>
These drawings were all incredibly cute, although none quite felt hairy and untamed enough. They were effective fusions of the untamed idea with a general shape of a seal, but Alexis was itching to explore what it would be like to make a design whose entire shape was untamed.
December 2023: Leobro emerges</figcaption></figure>
Alexis watched a LOT of videos of baby sea lions, and grew particularly attached to their huge floppy feet, awkward locomotion and hilarious vocalizations. She wanted to capture their particular weirdness while wrapping them up in a thick mass of hair, and the result was what was finally recognizable as Leobro.
January 2024: Alexis putting some hair on Broslidon's chest</figcaption></figure>
It was finally time to solve the mystery of Broslidon, the hairwax seal. Alexis tried honing the design in to focus on the hair, looking for ways to make all of the key features happen in the hair without drawing attention away from it. Irischroma had the idea that the wax produced in their hand might vary in color from seal to seal, tinting the color of their hair; this was an exciting idea which helped Alexis to land on “G” which finally felt like we were in the ballpark of a finished concept.
February 2024: Irischroma iterates on the idea</figcaption></figure>
Iris ran with this, playing with more hair shapes and color ideas, iterating on what Alexis had started. This was where we nailed down specific details like the size and shape of the hands, the patterning in the hair, the design of the tail, etc. We worked out that using the wax color as a hair highlight/streak felt strongest way to showcase that detail. The largest struggle remaining was trying to nail the texture of the hair, which had to look like hair, but also unnaturally smooth and shiny, all without compromising the level of detail established by our art direction.
The final in-game designs!</figcaption></figure>
In some ways, it’s embarrassing to have spent such a long time on these designs only to end up with something that feels so close to where we started. But it’s all the details that really matter, and sometimes they take a long time to nail down. Most people who play the game will never really be able to know or recognize the amount of thought and effort that goes into each of our Beastie concepts, especially for how many there are in the game. But I do believe the effort pays off. 

April Bash Results! Top Coaches & Stats!

Unknown — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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This past weekend we hosted another BIGMOON BASH in Beastieball, where coaches could challenge one another in fierce contests of sport! 
For this Bash, we BANNED the top 5 most-used Beasties from the previous Bash, which meant there was no Bandicraft, no Illugus, no Noizard, Surgus or Hopra! Here are the coaches who came out on top in the unconventional meta that remained.
Zonk (The Violet Enigmas) | Bash Score: 3108</li>
Kim (The Happy Hearts) | Bash Score: 2980</li>
Arc Tech (The Arcane Machines) | Bash Score: 2916</li>
Satoros (The Diamond Ducks) | Bash Score: 2892</li>
Rosery (The Roaring Knights) | Bash Score: 2860</li>
Ket (The Lonesome Lovers) | Bash Score: 2848</li>
Kyyg (The Wacky Worms) | Bash Score: 2828</li>
AshleyETA (The Musical Girls) | Bash Score: 2816</li>
Figgy (The Spicy Spies) | Bash Score: 2804
Knight (The Newborn Lights) | Bash Score: 2804</li></ol>
Congratulations to these coaches! Many of these players are active in our community Discord</a>, often swapping strategies and team ideas. In fact, kim of the Happy Hearts (this Bash’s #2 player!) recently took it upon herself to start interviewing active community members to learn more about their angle on the game and teambuilding. Here’s a little bit of insight from some of the above coaches…
</figure>You can see more player interviews in kim’s spreadheet here!</a>
Usage Statistics!</h2>
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With the top-used Beasties all missing, we saw quite a different palette of teams emerge this time around! We’ve got all the stats here for PvP Sickos to peruse through.
Check out ALL THE STATS!</a>
I want to give a shout-out to some of our more active community members, who keenly noticed that their specific team compositions were missing from previous Bash stats. Thanks to them, we uncovered underlying issues with how our data was collected—it turns out, we were missing data from about half our players! As such these stats are much more representative than we’ve ever had before… a huge gift for us on the balancing team (phew!) and for our community who love to look at all the juicy numbers. We’re still working on recovering data from previous events; when we do, we’d love to share updated historic data on those with you!
In the meantime, a few insights from me looking at the usage stats in this event:
Captains still reign supreme! With Bandicraft absent, other Captain Beasties (Tortanchor and Beetlback) took their place in top usage. Captain is just THAT handy to build around! </li>
Many more Beasties got to thrive this time! The top-used adult Beastie (Tortanchor) was used only ~7x more often than the least-used one (Grazada). We may never see such an even distribution between every specie in a future event again! Players really showed off their creativity this time around and discovered tons of new combos and ideas, which is exciting to see (and a bit daunting as we play whack-a-mole with balancing it all… ha ha…)</li>
The most underrated Beasties included Grazada, Pladion, Magpike… and Collarva?! I don’t know who brought Collarva to those high-ranking games, but kudos to you, whoever you are! You’ll probably never attain that player’s godlike skill level, but you may get closer if you try using some of those other Beasties that high-skill players gravitate to.</li></ol>
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That’s all for now! We’re getting our calculators and nerf-hammers ready as we prep the next balance patch with all this data in hand.
Thank you to our players and community for your devotion to this game. It’s really an honor to get to make something that so many people put so much of themselves into. See you in the next Bash!


Expand and Contract (designing Sprecko + forms)

Unknown — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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Before I start this newsletter, an exciting announcement! Sprecko plushies will be available for sale one week from today at the Yetee!</a> This is a limited stock of extras we had after our Kickstarter campaign, so we wanted to make sure everyone who wanted one had a chance to plan in advance. You can enter your email on the store page to be notified as soon as it goes live.</a> It should be in one week, at 8AM Pacific Time on Friday, April 18.
In honor of Sprecko, here’s a dive into the process we went through in designing them as well as their various forms!
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When ideating the Beasties players would start with, we developed a pretty lengthy wishlist for the Beastie that would become Sprecko.
It had to be broadly appealing; every single player got to choose one Beastie they started with, but they would always get this Beastie as their 2nd, so it needed to be easy to like.</li>
It needed to have the potential to become many different forms based on the players’ decision later, to make up for the fact that they had no say on it initially.</li>
Fitting with the game’s overall themes, we wanted a creature that was nature-inspired, perhaps a nature spirit or a caretaker of some kind.</li></ol>
This was a huge ask; before this design was even started, there was pressure on it to carry the game’s themes while also appealing to every single player. I figured we would probably need to adjust our plans later or compromise on some things in the process. Despite the daunting ask, concept artist ToriDomi jumped right in and started exploring all the directions they could think of.
March 2022: Tori’s first exploration</figcaption></figure>
There were a lot of intriguing ideas right out the gate; nothing really rang like “this is it!,” but almost everyone agreed that there was something striking about the mushroom-inspired visual design Tori had tried in a couple designs. We started sharing pictures of different strange mushrooms and started theorizing on how designs could be inspired by them. Tori went off and aimed to dig deeper on a couple ideas that stood out more than others.
March 2022: Tori’s second pass</figcaption></figure>
Even amidst all the ideas on this page, this was when a lot of the team came together and agreed that “C2” had something special going on. The only thing nobody could decide on for themselves was whether they liked the hat full of holes; it looked complex, and a bit scary. But its contrast with the chibi monster was also what made it appealing. We didn’t know what to do with it, but we told Tori to go and make more of it.
April 2022: It’s Sprecko!</figcaption></figure>
And that’s when all the ideas that would be combined into Sprecko finally emerged. On first impression, almost everybody liked the leaf-hat idea, but as we sat with it for longer, we decided the “sprout” head fit best. It was the perfect mix of conveying immaturity, while being a bit weird, but still very simple. By adding berries to the tail, we could create a complex and colorful focal point to add just a bit of flavor to an otherwise plain design. Alexis took the reins from here, making some tweaks to the proportions and bringing Sprecko to life.
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Now Tori just had to come up with 3 different forms, inspired by 3 different field effect game mechanics we’d already implemented. My message to Tori at the time:
good luck lol</div>
May 2022: Tori threw all these ideas out at once</figcaption></figure>
Discussing 3 Beastie designs at the same time was exhausting, but it did help us to clarify what made each of them distinct, and helped us to push each one in a unique direction. From early on I appreciate how willing Tori was to be playful with the silhouette and body shape, offering designs that were all over the place in personality. I think the seeds of each design were firmly planted from these first sketches, although they each still had a ways to go.
June 2022: Tumbling down the rabbithole</figcaption></figure>
Rather than honing in on what was working, Tori went even more broad! Chatter was flying about all the parts we liked of different designs, trying to piece together what we wanted to carry forward. The designs were so all over the place they didn’t feel strictly related. What we needed was a way to tie them all together. 
We did eventually figure it all out… but that story will have to be for another newsletter! I’ll see you next time in part 2.


Constructing a Theme (designing Demolipede & Millimine)

Unknown — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I think it’s no secret that I’m a pretty big fan of the volleyball anime, Haikyu. Several of our early concept prompts were ideas inspired by characters in the show, particularly in the ways they tied playstyles to personas. And one that we really wanted to explore was a tall blocker inspired by Tsukishima.</a>
April 2022: Karen’s first exploration of ideas</figcaption></figure>
Now, Karen Centella hadn’t actually seen Haikyu, but they studiously watched some YouTube videos and sketched some starting ideas. For some reason nobody really could put into words, we all gravitated to design #7. It had nothing to do with the inspiration… it just had its own natural charisma to it and we all wanted to see more. The main issue I was having with it was its awkward shape; for something meant to be a blocker, its arms couldn’t actually reach up high, and its spherical upper body “beads” (we didn’t even know what they were) would deflect balls in unpredictable angles. We encouraged Karen to explore that design more, but thinking more about its practicality.
May-June 2022: Experimenting with an immature form, armor, anetenna, arms, and other ideas</figcaption></figure>
Karen tried a lot of ideas, pulling from any inspiration they could find. We honed in on some species of pillbugs as potential real-world inspirations. But nothing was quite working. We really, really liked the original silhouette from “design 7” (Alexis particularly). But we couldn’t come up with any explanation for it to have those strange, distinct spherical shapes on it. And every alternative idea and shape that Karen explored to help it feel more grounded seemed to compromise the original drawing’s appeal. We couldn’t find a way to resolve it.
July 2022: We settle on a strange balloon-bead idea</figcaption></figure>
After all our exploration, we still most liked the original “design #7”, so we decided to just go with it as the final and make only minor modifications. In our struggle to explain why it looked like that, Karen pitched quite an elaborate game mechanic idea where their beads could inflate and deflate. The game mechanic wasn’t very usable, though. In fact, the entire original idea that had prompted this design didn’t really fit what we wound up with at all, as we’d never been able to make them look like an effective blocker. We couldn’t really explain what inspired this shape, or why they were like that… but Alexis liked it a lot and fought to keep it in the game at all costs. 
This was where I charted out a new game design for them, with a trait called “Watchtower” that emphasized their appealing eyes and tall form. We figured it might have some sort of Mind or Spirit-type flavor, and with its strong facial expression, that would hopefully be enough to make it work as a Beastie. 
Later, as we were deciding where in the world different Beasties would appear, we clocked this one as having strong potential as a cave-bug. This introduced a challenging new wrinkle, as caves appeared pretty early on, and as such anything that appeared in caves would probably need more than one form to mature through. Already our lack of a strong design direction was coming back to haunt us. So, faced with the challenge of designing a second form without any clear theme or inspiration to work from, we decided to pull in our resident insect expert.
January 2023: Harlow offers ideas for an immature form, and shares sketches of a similar idea she'd worked on years prior</figcaption></figure>Enter Harlow Diggs, whose past experience with entomology had proven a strength on our team time and again. She identified pauropodas</a> as a potential insect to draw inspiration from and offered a few ideas, and shared some very old sketches she’s done trying to adapt the same insects before. There were tons of ideas here with great appeal. But without any theme tying the ideas together, nothing really felt like it had any connection to the tall millipede they were based on. 
This was where I took a step back, assessed everything we had, and made a fairly radical proposal to try to resolve all our different explorations.
With the adult’s sphere-inspired geometry being such a huge component, we needed to exaggerate the shapes on the immature form a lot more as well. I wanted to find a clear progression from the immature form’s base shapes to become spheres in the adult. After all, we’d seen before that geometry itself could be a solid starting point for design themes.</a></li>
Harlow’s new ideas included some mining and construction inspired ideas. What if we rolled with that, and rebranded the sphere-focused adult as a “wrecking ball”?</li></ol>
February 2023: Harlow rethinking the immature and mature form together</figcaption></figure>
We all loved Karen’s design, but with their blessing, Harlow opened it back up and started messing with it to see how they could pair it up with a new immature form. She honed in on a “rough stone” to “polished stone” concept to rationalize why the adult was made of spheres. Developing the ideas side by side like this really helped us work out theming at this stage. This was where I pulled up Harlow’s oldest pauropoda sketches and highlighted a particularly cube-shaped one, asking if we could use that idea for the immature form here, since “cubes to spheres” would be a really satisfying geometric character/visual arc.
February 2023: Harlow figured out the shapes and leans into \"construction\" inspired colors</figcaption></figure>
I don’t know if the idea clicked for the rest of the team, at least at first, but all the pieces snapped into place once we saw the designs side by side. Harlow pushed into yellow-and-black for the color palette, emphasizing the “construction” theme and codifying this Beastie’s in-game role as a Body type. Somehow, we’d found a way to explain the bizarre shapes of Karen’s original concept, injecting a theme into it without disrupting what had made it so appealing in the first place. It was a huge win. This was where Alexis suggested that we augment the immature form’s antenna to take inspiration from dirt pushers, to solidify their role as an earth-mover that teamed up with the wrecking ball adults.
June-July 2023: Harlow finalizes the designs and works out pose charts</figcaption></figure>
Final in-game designs by Alexis</figcaption></figure>
I think something we firmly established from this experience was how important it is to have a theme for every Beastie. Beastieball’s “types” are a lot more broad than in other creature games, and that gives us a lot less slack when it comes to conveying ideas through our designs. For example, you might be able to combine a specific lizard species with “fire,” and develop a fairly specific-feeling creature from the combination of those ideas. But taking any animal and combining it with a “mind” theme rarely turns into anything inspiring. It puts the onus on our creature designers to always go a layer deeper and make the designs really resonate with strong visual theming that stands on its own merit, rather than relying on our types to convey everything for us.
Coming up with new themes is really hard sometimes. It can even feel pointless or painful when we have a design we love but that falls apart when we try to attach a theme to it. But we’ve found the result is always worth it. And I think that even in creature games that have a stronger “type” system to lean on, the designs are only truly great when they go beyond the obvious and develop their own strong internal logic. The lack of easy solutions for us only helped us to learn that lesson faster.
Let me know if you’re curious to learn more about a particular Beastie! 


A Beastieball update & an apology

Unknown — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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We owe our players an apology. We released Beastieball with a critical issue. In the version we launched with, Beasties played sports and humans coached them. But everyone knows animals can’t play sports… humans do! We’re very sorry for leaving this issue unaddressed for so long. Thankfully, it’s finally fixed.
We’d strongly encourage you to take the time to check out the game</a> or the free demo</a> today and enjoy Beastieball as it always should have been.
Happy April Fool’s Day!


March Open Bash - ALL THE STATS

Unknown — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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This weekend we hosted yet another BIGMOON BASH in Beastieball, a timed PvP event! This particular Bash was special for a couple reasons. One, we just released a pretty big balance patch</a> adjusting a lot of Beasties’ statistics, traits and playbooks. Two, this Bash had no teambuilding theme - players were allowed to use any combination of unique Beasties they wanted! We collected a ton of data from this Bash, and we’re going to share more here than we ever have before!
But first—let’s honor the coaches whose Bash Scores shined brightest.
Congrats to the Top-Ranked Coaches!</h1>Ket (Bash Score: 3835)</li>
Dino (Bash Score: 3681)</li>
Figgy (Bash Score: 3365)</li>
Zonk (Bash Score: 3276)</li>
Satoros (Bash Score: 3273)</li>
Arc Tech (Bash Score: 3198)</li>
Pyopyo (Bash Score: 3149)</li>
Wallmonger (Bash Score: 3123)</li>
Litt (Bash Score: 3017)</li>
Venn (Bash Score: 2979)</li></ol>
It’s exciting to see some old and new names in this list! I played in this Bash too, but I could barely crack a score of 2300… Looks like I have a lot to learn from our players.
STATS</h1>
What is this… a chart for ANTS?</figcaption></figure>
I know that some players really, really, really like to look at stats after every Bash. So do we! And rather than just report on the top or bottom few Beasties, I figured I may as well just let you all pick through all of it. (Note: Stats are not collected from players who have analytics disabled.)
Click here for ALL THE STATS!</a>
There’s a few things I want to highlight, reflecting on how this compares to previous Bashes and reflects our recent changes.
Spirit offense is on the rise! We saw a surge in usage for Beasties like Skulkapi, Opposur and Cherrily this time around. With lots of new spirit offense added to the game, it makes sense that players were excited to try out the shiny new toys. But it’s always exciting to see past-neglected Beasties suddenly getting more attention and play.</li>
Team diversity is higher than ever. If you compare the top usage stats to our first Bash just 2 months ago</a>, you’ll notice that usage is less centralized around the top most popular ones. Of course some Beasties like Bandicraft, Illugus and Noizard are here to stay, but it’s nice to see a closer race between the most popular species.</li>
Trat, Blitzwift, Musselbound and Grazada are being neglected. At this point we shouldn’t be surprised to see Blitzwift and Grazada here, but seeing Trat at the bottom of usage was quite surprising. Perhaps all the Trat fans were on vacation this time. Also, interesting to see Hydrolm drop from top 10 in the first Bash to the bottom 5. But 2.74% isn’t dire usage by any means—in Hydrolm’s case, it may just be a sign of how much usage has spread out among many other species.</li></ol>
In the next Bash…</h1>
We’re going to try something a little bit different. There won’t be any Guilds, but the top 5 most-used Beasties from this Bash are going to be banned! That means these 5 species:
Bandicraft, Noizard, Surgus, Illugus, Hopra</div>
The date for the next Bash will most likely be April 18-19, in 3 weeks. But I will delay officially announcing the date for a little while, in case anything comes up we need to address on the development/update side. I’m giving you all an early heads up so that you’ll have time to rethink your teams, since this theme is going to impact a large portion of our players. It may be challenging, but I hope it inspires even more creativity :) 
Happy Bigmoon!


Balancing Beastieball

Unknown — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Without a doubt, the most fun I have working on Beastieball these days is getting to work on the game balance. It sounds like thankless, grindy math… and sometimes it is! But it’s also an area of the game that’s still living, breathing, and changing every day… where math intersects with emotional experience, the very essence of game design. And seeing as we just released a large new balance patch</a>, it seems like a good time to talk about what guides our process, and how we got to where we are.
What We’re Dealing With</h2>
Beastieball is a turn-based strategy game with no randomization whatsoever. It also has very little hidden information</a>; players can see every option their opponent has access to, and exactly how much damage it will do. That means the game has to be pretty mathematically tight, because the numbers have an outsized role in the outcome of every game. 
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But the game also has a huge creative element in its teambuilding. Every player has their own favorite Beasties to use, and that influences their team composition. Beastie matchups are generally very fluid, without strict strengths or weaknesses—they’re more like “colors” in Magic the Gathering than “types” in Pokemon. In many ways, game designing an individual Beastie feels more akin to designing a fighting game character, with unique tools and a unique playstyle that caters to a certain kind of player. And our ultimate goal in balancing the game is to let players feel that they can be successful using ther favorite Beasties, no matter who they may be. 
Laid out like this, it sounds pretty daunting to make math that feels tight enough to feel balanced, but loose enough to fit 100+ different character playstyles in it. Maybe even impossible! But somehow it’s been going well for us so far.
Measuring Success</h2>
We make use of analytics to track what happens in competitive PvP games. For every match where players have analytics enabled, we track what teams were brought to the game and which one won. And over thousands and thousands of matches, we can observe what trends emerge. Here is a chart!!!
This plots how popular a Beastie is (what % of teams it appears on) VS how successful it is (what % of its games does it win) </figcaption></figure>
Each dot here represents a Beastie with a certain trait; so Daredillo with the “Self-assured” trait is a separate dot from Daredillo with the “Acrobat” trait, acknowledging their different playstyles are effectively different characters. Higher dots are used more often, and dots further to the right win more often. If we narrowed our data to only include top-level players, especially as the game is out for longer and the meta advances significantly, you’d expect this chart to show more of an upward slope where the Beasties that win more often also are used more often. But what we see isn’t like that, because players generally choose their Beasties by personal preference, and there aren’t any that are predominantly known to be better than others.
How we interpret this data</figcaption></figure>
What we’re seeing is a “normal distribution.” Beasties that are used more often will trend towards a 50% win rating, partly because they’re statistically playing on both teams of more encounters, but also because they represent the aggregate skill of more players. Whereas Beasties used less often may have data from as few as 1-5 players, and so their statistics are basically just showing us the skill level of their inidivudal coach rather than the Beastie’s inherent strengths.
But those dots we’ve circled in orange are performing outside the curve—across many players and games, they’re clearly losing more than they win. And it’s similar with the dots circled in green: those ones are clearly and consistently winning more often. So this data gives us a strong starting point to figure out what Beasties we want to target with changes, either to buff or nerf. It isn’t strictly binary… dots close to the edge on either side likely need attention, and any change we make try to should account for precisely how far off expectations that Beastie is.
While hard data is comforting and helpful, we can’t rely on it to get the full picture. We’re always keeping tabs on player discussion and feedback as well. Sometimes, a particular strategy may just be unfun to use or play against, even if it isn’t statistically successful or dominant, and we’ll have to consider what we can do to adjust that area of the meta. There are other times where player speculation about a particular Beastie will gain traction even when it’s statistically flat wrong, though. At the end of the day, complaints about game balance are as inevitable as it is for every match to have a loser. So having data helps us keep feelings in check.
Making the Right Adjustments</h2>
Once we know what the problem is, the fix is easy. We just double the numbers that are too low and halve the ones that are too big. 
Just kidding! This is the hardest part! Partly because there are a lot of constraints that we try to follow with every change we make. Knowing when to follow, push back or compromise on these isn’t a science—it’s an art.
Maintain unique strength</h4>
Masahiro Sakurai has a concise video on this topic</a>—but to sum it up for our case, every Beastie and play and trait has some essential unique strength to it and we always try to respect that with changes. So when something is overly strong, we may try to shift its balance by exacerbating its weaknesses. And when something is underpowered, we try to strengthen its most unique elements, rather than giving it additional strengths that outshine its original intent. The goal is to maintain peaks and valleys across the game and make sure every element maintains its unique character, rather than all melting into flat blandness.
(But not too spiky)</h4>
Our predisosition to exacerbate strengths and weaknesses means we sometimes accidentally push elements too far, and they can dominate the game. Beastieball is also a game full of unique interactions, and for any drawback we add to any play, players always find some way to mitigate it. So anything that’s “very strong, but with a strong drawback” always winds up needing special attention from us. It can take a couple iterations to find the right maximum power level.
Maintain flavor</h4>
Game elements aren’t just code and numbers! We always want to make changes that are consistent with the characters and fiction we’ve established. For example, it may feel balanced to make a powerful support action give the user the “Angry” status, preventing them from using further support actions. But we’ll always resist doing this if it doesn’t make sense for that action to make the user feel angry. Finding adjustments that do make sense within the fiction can be challenging, but often results in more creative and evocative solutions.
Consider accessibility</h4>
When a Beastie is underperforming, we’ll look at their statistics with high skill vs low skill players. Sometimes a Beastie is perfectly strong, or even overperforming at high skill levels, but underperforming in general, which indicates that their best tools may be hard to access or that they are more challenging to pilot. We have to treat these cases with a delicate touch. As often as possible, we’ll try and create easier paths for low-skill players follow without actually strengthening them.
Consider the context</h4>
We can only measure Beasties’ effectiveness by their relationships to each other. Sometimes a Beastie is over or under performing not because they themselves are strong or weak. For example, one Beastie that overperforms will also raise the win statistics of the Beasties that they are commonly paired with. And the more often a particular Beastie is used, the better the win rates will be for Beasties that play well against them. So sometimes the perfect adjustment for a game element is actually to change something else entirely.
Consider the vibes</h4>
Even with all the data at our disposal, sometimes we’ll make a change just because it feels right to us. I have to wonder how often then happens in larger budget projects with more collaborators… but as an early access title that patches frequently, it’s freeing to be able to “try” things and see what happens, with the freedom to take it back if it makes the game less fun.
Putting it together…</h2>
One balance change I was quite pleased about was to a move called Set, an iconic passing move which made the ally feel Jazzed, buffing their next attack. It turned out that feeling Jazzed was a REALLY strong status effect, particularly because it could be combined with other strong things, and this play quickly took over the meta. Players wanted us to make Jazzed less effective, or add a debilitating cost to Set so that it was punishing to use. 
While this conundrum was on my mind, I went out to play volleyball at a local casual league. I used to play with a group of friends who are, like me, all quite novice and unathletic. But on that week one of our members was out sick, so one of the coaches who runs the league offered to fill the spot on our team. And as an skills exercise, he encouraged us to all play different roles than we were used to, and so made me the setter on the team. I was pretty reluctant about it because I’m just not good at passing, and I was worried about holding the team back, but we went ahead with it. The game starts, and I’m waiting at the net and terrified about the pass I’m surely about to fumble. The first serve goes to the coach, he gets it perfectly and puts up a beautiful pass to me. And with such a perfect pass, better than any I was used to getting, it was like I became a different player. I had the extra time I needed to get to the right place, stop, square up, and put up a set with perfect form. 
Now, I know I’m still pretty bad at passing. A great setter is great because they make great plays even under bad conditions. But this experience showed me how much easier it is to do a good job when you’re set up to do it. And when I got home that night I implemented my idea for an adjustment to the play called Set, which required that the ball be hittable for the play to be used, mirroring the way a setter in volleyball is always meant to get the 2nd touch on a ball, not the 1st. It wound up being just the right adjustment, keeping the play just as strong, but requiring players to support their setters a little bit to get the most out of them.
</div>
Balance adjustments are fun to do, but daunting, because the work never truly ends. With a meta that’s constantly shifting, and player creativity always discovering unexplored corners of the systems, the game can never be truly balanced forever. But it’s also the area of the game where the conversation between designer and players is most alive, and that’s what makes it so rewarding to come back to every day.

Follow the Shapes (designing Skibble, Skorock & Boldlur)

Unknown — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Aside from sketched Beastie stats and playstyles, from early on we had a plan of different environments we needed to fill with Beasties based on where and when players would encounter them. So we knew we’d need a multi-form cave Beastie that players could find early on and grow into something later, possibly inspired by some sort of lizard. That was the prompt Karolina ‘Twarda’ Twardosz ran with when she came to us with these ideas.
July 2022: Various ideas inspired by shingleback lizards</figcaption></figure>
Twarda’s a big fan of lizards and dinosaurs, and had trouble deciding which features of a shingleback to focus on for her designs. On one hand was the distinctive bright blue tongue; an other was the pinecone scale pattern; yet another was the adorable and distinctive sausage-like shape. After putting our heads together, we decided to focus on the decoy face-tail as a central element since it would also be the most obvious implement for playing sports, so there’d be good synergy there. To better emphasize the tail as a decoy, we asked Twarda to try making the head and tail more similar in shape. 
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And right away we could feel it was working! We started intensely brainstorming what we could do with the poses, switching it up between body and tail and showing off the cute decoy face. We also started considering how we could develop a second form based on this.
Alexis lays out the options before us</figcaption></figure>
Alexis identified two possible directions, with a very geometric theme centered on the count of “ball” shapes; either 1 to 2, or 2 to 3. Laid out like this, we could see that the “3 ball” sketch had a clear theme/pattern to follow, whereas the “1 ball” design was kind of a themeless nothingburger, so we decided to pursue a “3 ball” idea as the additional form for this Beastie.
July 2022: Twarda went off exploring on her own, but Skibble came and found her</figcaption></figure>
Twarda built up a robust pose library for the Beastie that would become Skorock, and during the same period started exploring more shapes for the "adult” skink. Something overtook her, though, because at the same time she posted these poses, she also shared this sketch of an immature form, apologizing that she’d brought this unexpected design home with her, but admitting that she’d already fallen in love with it. And after we saw it, we couldn’t help but fall in love as well.
In general we always put a lot of thought and effort into developing meaningful themes for every single creature; we didn’t want to add designs just to fill up slots in the game, and we didn’t want to add immature/adult forms of existing Beasties that were simply the same idea but smaller, or the same idea but bigger. But every once in a while, that directive was challenged by a cutie like Skibble. Nobody could say no to them, so we decided to adapt it into a 3-stage Beastie.
Skibble!</figcaption></figure>
Skibble came together near instantly, and then Twarda went off to finish developing the final form. But we didn’t anticipate how much it was going to challenge us.
August 2022: It needed something for the body mechanics to make sense...</figcaption></figure>
From Alexis’ sketch, it seemed pretty straightforward to just stack 3 balls on each other and call it a Beastie. The problem was that its body mechanics made no sense. If the tail was meant to be swung or used as a bludgeon, then it needed a joint and some length/leverage it could use to swing; it couldn’t just be a ball stuck to a ball. Twarda came forward with some decent solutions, proposing that we add a medium-length “stem” between the body and tail. But it felt a bit ungraceful and disrupted the geometric harmony established in Alexis’ sketch. Things fell into chaos from here.
August 2022: Madness! Anarchy!</figcaption></figure>
Twarda started exploring what we could do with a limited range of motion, or how we could adapt the size of the body vs. the joint vs. the tail to find a decent middle ground of appeal and practicality. Nothing looked particularly bad, but nothing felt like it was hitting as well as it had in the sketch, and we started to worry the design was simply broken on a fundamental level.
November 2022: Alexis to the rescue!</figcaption></figure>
This was when Alexis came back with a few proposals which satisfied everybody; reduced the number of scales to simplify animation, and a few adjustments to the tail size, joint side, and joint position so that it would be usable but mostly out of the way/hidden by posing. I think this stands as a prime example of the advantages we get from animating our designs in 2D rather than 3D, allowing us to cheat our angles and composition to express exactly the geometry we want players to see, without concerns of a spinning camera.
A big happy skink family</figcaption></figure>
There are a few interesting things about how this design process translated into the game. For one thing, the initial idea which sparked this concept ended up occupying the middle of 3 forms, making it a transition stage which players will usually have the least exposure to. Often with multi-form designs, it’s easy to fall into a trap where the “middle” form is just a boring average between the extreme ends, so I’m glad that we dodged that here. 
Despite being the least high concept of the 3 designs, and indeed the least interesting on a thematic level, Skibble wound up being one of the first Beasties players were exposed to by early marketing materials, with the other forms being a surprise revealed much later. We’ll never be able to experience these designs the way that players did, but it’s always interesting for us to hear from players how the more mature forms surprised, delighted or disappointed them when coming from the early stage. From our perspective, the designs were always going to be like this!
We almost always try to ground our designs in resonant, personality-defining themes. But it was a fun experience to build something from a very geometric concept instead and then fill in the personality in based on that. As the project went on, when certain designs or design features challenged us, this was a technique we sometimes came back to.
Is there a Beastie you’re especially curious to hear about? I’d love to hear from you! Next time we’ll be discussing one that a reader requested :)

Challenging the Rule of Cool (designing Daredillo and Radillo)

Unknown — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Before we brought external concept artists onto the team, I’d spent a fair bit of time developing different Beasties purely in code and design - using just stats, traits and playbooks to come up with broad sketches of different playstyles, to help inform the range of concept designs we’d need. 
So when Tia Rohrer (AKA Irischroma) joined the team, one of the first prompts we sent them was a ‘spirited’ Beastie, who focused on spirit power and powering themselves up, including the ability to summon an audience via a play called Rally. Iris always had an explosion of ideas for every prompt, and this “fiery” armadillo was just one of many that they tried for this concept which we decided to pursue further because it was so darn cool.
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As would become a recurring theme with many designs - often it was easy to come up with something that looked cool, but what was often harder was coming up with a good answer to “why.” Why put a pattern on the shoulders, or not? Why have a big abdomen, or a small one? A skilled artist like Iris could make anything look cool - but when every option looked so cool, we had to start finding some criteria to help filter the options down.
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One of our core guiding principles on this project was to keep our animal inspirations forward, to make designs that felt naturalistic rather than overly anthropomorphized or fantastical. So following the initial exploration, Iris tried to hone in on a more “armadillo”-like silhouette, to good success! We were starting to see the design shift from something that was generically cool-looking into something that felt more like a Beastie.
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This was where Alexis stepped in, trying to take what was working with Iris’ design and focus it into a theme. We decided to re-assign the concept; rather than targeting the ‘spirited’ one, we went to ‘daredevil,’ a spirit/body-attacking Beastie who got a power up every time they moved on the field, encouraging their coach to make the Beastie shift positions often. We hadn’t had any idea how to execute on that prompt, but Alexis identified that we could point Iris’ ongoing design towards something inspired by Motocross or F1. That in turn gave us clearer answers on how to focus the small details.
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That push was enough to set Iris on the path straight to Daredillo, just as they appear in the final game! Something really fascinating to observe here is how the design actually got a lot less cool from where it had started. The new rounded shapes add a slight dorkiness… but that only increases its overall appeal. It’s a great example of something we pursued from the start; Beasties can’t only be “cool” or “cute.” You always need at least a slight mix of both, to make the cool parts cooler and the cute parts cuter. Especially because the details here all work together to express a cohesive theme, I think the design feels more powerful and clearly expressed.
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Although we knew we could also do an amazing immature form for Daredillo, we didn’t start exploring it until nearly a year later - there were just too many other Beasties to figure out in the meantime. But eventually, Iris did these explorations all testing different shapes and stances. They all looked cute, but like before, they were all so cute, they left us stuck on which direction to pursue. 
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After nearly 8 months of gridlock, Alexis and Iris got together and brainstormed a solution; again, honing in deeper on a central design theme to tie everything together. If Daredillo was an F1-inspired Beastie, then Radillo was going to be a baby in a car-seat. Iris managed to tie together a car-seat, a rolling wheel, and an embryo-like baby all into one silhouette. This introduced an alien strangeness to the design, but like before, making them “less” cute actually made them feel cuter, and the design grew stronger and clearer.
Goof drawn by Mike Horowitz while working on the in-game animation + poses</figcaption></figure>
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I get to watch artists craft these designs, and I get to shape the process here and there. But I’m not actually the one who does any of the work. So I think it’s OK for me to say this:
One of the hallmarks of a great design is how “obvious” it can appear to be. Beasties that have strong clear themes and such cool shapes might seem so elementary that you can’t imagine them any other way, and you might naturally assume that it was a straightforward process to arrive at the design. To the contrary, the process that made these designs had to involve exploring—and discarding—many, many cool alternatives. I think all those discarded ideas add a weight that can be subconsciously felt. The way they feel at once new and strange, and yet instantly familiar, closes a mental gap—like the set up and punchline of a joke delivered to you all at the same time. I think that mental leap is ultimately what makes a great character design so instantly satisfying to take in. 
It’s not an effect that any artist can manufacture intentionally; but when you see it, you know it.
Radillo and Daredillo as they appear in-game</figcaption></figure>
Let me know if you have a favorite Beastie you’d like to hear about in the next newsletter! We have so many to discuss, I’ve been feeling daunted deciding which to do next.


Spreckomorph PvP Bash Results!

Unknown — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sprecko, Bongus, Surgus and Illugus clashed in this weekend’s BIGMOON BASH!</figcaption></figure>
This weekend we held another BIGMOON BASH, an in-game event where players could challenge each other for 24 hours. This Bigmoon was a themed one, challenging players to use a form of Sprecko, thereby contributing towards their favorite’s global score. Here are the final results after a nail-bitingly close contest!
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This Bash’s Champion is BONGUS!</div>
*Note on Bash Scoring: Scoring is adjusted each Bash depending on the number of guilds so that the average Bash Score is always 2000. This did not impact the results of this Bash.
Top Players</h1>
Let’s take a moment to honor the coaches who earned the most victories for their favorite guild!
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Sprecko Guild</h2>
Dino (61 wins)</li>
Pryn (49 wins)</li>
Renee (39 wins) (tie!)</li>
Robin (39 wins) (tie!)</li>
Nalathni (31 wins)</li></ol>
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Bongus Guild</h2>
Patatin (93 wins)</li>
Pyopyo (65 wins)</li>
Pix (54 wins)</li>
Cam (51 wins)</li>
Mal (37 wins)</li></ol>

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Surgus Guild</h2>
Figgy (90 wins)</li>
René (78 wins)</li>
Ket (76 wins)</li>
Mintonette (46 wins)</li>
Luiz (45 wins)</li></ol>
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Illugus Guild</h2>
Wad (73 wins)</li>
Astra (59 wins)</li>
Knight (50 wins)</li>
Rosery (49 wins)</li>
Dorothée (46 wins)</li></ol>
Usage Statistics!</h1>
These Beasties were the top most used by players in this Bash! (Excluding theme Beasties). There are plenty of familiar faces, but some surprising new ones as well!
Noizard</a> (24.1% of teams)</li>
Bandicraft</a> (19.3% of teams)</li>
Hopra</a> (17.2% of teams)</li>
Deluja</a> (15.1% of teams)
Many players opted to bring Deluja to this Bash, likely anticipating that with the theme, there’d be a lot of field effects to contend with! Deluja’s In the Clouds trait gives them immunity to field effects, allowing you to maintain your strategy no matter what weird stuff the opponent is up to.</li>
Heliath</a> (15.1% of teams)
Heliath is an extremely solid choice for Rally teams, as one of the few Beasties able to set up Rally and also take advanage of it with high-damage offense! They’re often paired with Surgus, so it makes sense to see them pop off in this bash.</li>
Lunaptra</a> (13.6% of teams)
Lunaptra was the #1 most-paired Beastie with Illugus (they appeared on teams together 31.3% of the time!) I’m honestly not sure why that is, but it could have to do with disruption strategies combining Illugus’ ability to set Traps with Lunaptra’s propensity for Dreadful Mist, a deteriorating field effect that chips away at Beasties while preventing any good feelings.</li>
Tortanchor</a> (13.4% of teams)
Tortanchor’s solid defenses, offensive support via the Captain trait and defensive support with setting Rhythm made them a consistent, steady pick on many different teams in this Bash!</li>
Kaleidarn</a> (13.3% of teams)</li>
Crabaret</a> (13.2% of teams)</li>
Boldlur</a> (11.7% of teams)</li></ol>
Those are the popular ones… but who’s been going neglected? We’ve collected data across both of the most recent Bashes and proudly present to you the top 5 least-used Beasties across the last 2 events. (*This is a good time to note that we collect this data using in-game analytics, which players have the option to disable. For Beasties with very low usage, their stats can be very sensitive to the fact that they may have a handful of fans who simply don’t have analytics enabled.)
Riplash</a> (2% of teams)
Riplash hits like a TRUCK, especially with its Launcher trait that boosts the power of attacks in exchange for having them always target straight ahead. Players may be finding them difficult to utilize right now, although with a bit of support the reward can be great.</li></ol>
Diabloceras</a> (1.8% of teams)
Diabloceras has the Overwrite trait, deleting the trait of other Beasties when they attack and slowly spreading their corruption across both teams. Beasties who lose their trait will often struggle to make use of their equipped plays, making this Beastie’s disruption particularly nefarious. It’s a double-edged blade that often forces its allies to lose their traits as well, but like Riplash, it can be very rewarding if you build around it.</li></ol>
Crawlurk</a> (1.7% of teams)
Crawlurk has many ways to hit hard, with its twin Ambush and Hunter traits boosting its damage on serve or when hitting an opponent that’s just tagged in, respectively. When it’s put into an advantageous position, Crawlurk is one of the scariest attackers you can face. They can consistently wipe out many Beasties just with their serve attack, including popular picks like Surgus. But getting it into that position isn’t always easy.</li></ol>
Blitzwift</a> (1.6% of teams)
Hey, not again! After we pointed out how overlooked Blitzwift was in the first Bash</a>, they saw a renaissance of players enabling ridiculous new strategies and tech with this Beastie. Through some experimental balance patch phases, they rose to prominence among PvP Sickos. Ah, but how fickle gamers can be… Perhaps their era is already over. In terms of success rates, they are still a strong Beastie that rewards any coach that’s willing to step into its wacky world of infinite movement actions.</li></ol>
Magpike</a> (0.7% of teams)
What is it with coaches overlooking birds capable of incredibly deadly offense? Magpikes may be a sweethearts to their friends, but to opponents, this goth bird is as dangerous as they come, wielding some of the quickest-scaling offensive pessure in the game thanks to their Trusting trait giving them extra BOOSTs from allies. I know I’ve said it before, but everybody is wrong about this one.</li></ol>
Thank you!</h1>
I was chuffed to see so many players come back to play in this Bash. Overall, I was really impressed and delighted with the diversity of team building and strategies. It still feels like there’s a lot of room to explore in this game’s meta.
We’re already underway on the next balance patch, which will take into account the results and data from this Bash as well as player feedback. After that patch is ready, we’ll put it to the test with an open-format Bash that invites all Beasties to participate!


Starter Bigmoon Contest Results!

Unknown — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

</figure>
This weekend we held the second Bigmoon Bash, an in-game event where players could match up into each other for limited time! This one lasted for 24 hours, and saw 376 players play 4,019 matches (!!!).
For the first time, the bash also had a theme; it was a contest between Kichik, Axolati, and Bildit, and 3 Beasties players can choose as their starter. Every player had to use EXACTLY one Beastie related to one of these 3, with their results contributing to that Beastie’s global score. Here are the final results!
</figure>
Kichik is the Bigmoon Champion, with a final Bash Score of 2008! 
Top Players</h1>
Let’s take a moment to honor the coaches who earned the most victories for their favorite starter!
</figure>
Team Kichik</h3>
Dino - 102 wins</li>
CORELAR - 43 wins</li>
Rosery - 42 wins</li>
P3Rcarus - 41 wins</li>
Clifford - 37 wins
</figure>
Team Axolati</h3></li></ol>
Patatin - 86 wins</li>
Fujoball - 56 wins</li>
Pix - 45 wins</li>
Red murderer - 44 wins</li>
Cam - 40 wins
</figure>
Team Bildit</h3></li></ol>
René - 87 wins</li>
Figgy - 56 wins</li>
Ren - 51 wins</li>
Oiuja - 40 wins</li>
Erin - 39 wins</li></ol>
Usage Statistics</h1>
After the previous Bash, we shared detailed stats on the most used Beasties</a>. With this event having a team-building restriction, the usage statistics are obviously quite skewed… But, for data-hungry coaches, here are the top 10 most used Beasties by players whose Bash Score was 2400 or higher*, excluding theme Beasties.
Noizard</a> (35.7%)
Noizard’s Clamor trait makes it Noisy anytime it tags in. This allows it to redirect attacks away from its allies safely, helping its teammates stay on the field just a bit longer! It fits on just about any team, so it makes sense for Noizard to see high usage. It was popular in the last Bash, but it seems many more players have discovered its utility since then.</li>
Cherrily</a> (18.8%)
Cherrily’s Cheerleader trait adds 10 damage to any attacks its ally does. Combined with an impressive array of support, Cherrily is an incredible offensive enabler that can give any team an extra edge.</li>
Kaleidarn</a> (17.5%)
Kaleidarn may be made of glass, but when you hit it, its Nimble trait activates and gives its team 1 extra action. Actions are incredibly valuable, particularly on teams that want to string together devastating combos and 1-turn wipeouts. </li>
Crabaret</a> (17.0%)
I finally get to talk about Crabaret! This tap-dancing crab is one of the, if not the, most threatening body attacker in the game capable of dishing out big hits. It’s also dangerous to hit into with its ability to Juggle</a>, boosting its power while keeping control of the ball.</li>
Bongus</a> (15.2%)
Bongus recently saw a major change with its new Welcoming trait added, restoring 40 stamina to its allies when it tags them in. It’s also one of the premier users of Rhythm, able to set up the musical field effects which helps it pair well with other popular picks like Crabaret and Hopra.</li>
Heliath</a> (14.7%)</li>
Beetlback</a> (13.9%)</li>
Illugus</a> (13.7%)</li>
Demolipede</a> (13.0%)</li>
Gremlur</a> (12.9%)</li></ol>
*This data samples teams that were used in a match by a player whose Bash Score was at least 2400 at the time when the match started.
I have to say I was surprised to see quite a few different Beasties appear in the rankings this time! This game’s meta is still developing very rapidly, with Beasties seemingly falling in and out of favor quite often. It’s exciting to see players experimenting and finding creative uses for all their favorite creatures.
Thanks for Playing!</h1>
As with the last event, we’ll be looking closely at usage statistics and other results to help us adjust the game balance. On a personal note, it also was a great honor to get to play in this event with so many enthusiastic opponents. I’m already looking forward to the next Bash…
Happy Bigmoon!

PvP Event Results - favorite Beasties & top coaches!

Unknown — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

</figure>
On Saturday we ran the very first Bigmoon Bash</a>, a timed in-game event where players could matchmake against one another! We saw 557 participants play a total of 4,958 matches - the average player played about 18 games, with a median of 11. 
We collected a LOT of data from these games, and for the first time we can identify current trends in player VS player scenarios. In the interest of transparency, I’ll be sharing some analytics here - as well as my own insights into what some of these trends reveal. I’ll take this as an opportunity to highlight some interesting features of the game’s design and meta to players who may not be as “in the know” on the competitive side of Beastieball. 
Where applicable, I’ll be linking to the fan-run wiki</a> so you can see more details on highlighted Beasties and plays. That wiki is not technically official - but it’s very handy and we appreciate the effort fans have put into keeping it up-to-date!
Congrats to the Top-Ranked Coaches!</h1>Dino (Bash Score: 3525)</li>
Bolimar (Bash Score: 3354)</li>
Arc Tech (Bash Score: 3225)</li>
Wavewhyse (Bash Score: 3106)</li>
ArtemTotem (Bash Score: 3105)</li>
Sami (Bash Score: 3068)</li>
SillyAshley (Bash Score: 3011)</li>
Rutabaga (Bash Score: 2925)</li>
Ket* (Bash Score: 2924)</li>
Patatin (Bash Score: 2903)

*(EDITED March 8, 2025: Previously we incorrectly displayed this name as anonymous)</li></ol>
The Most-Used Beasties!</h1>
These stats are counted as how many teams included that Beastie out of all teams that played in any match; or in other words, how likely any given team was to include that Beastie.
Bandicraft</a> (33.9%)</li>
Illugus</a> (28.0%)</li>
Servace</a> (21.1%)</li>
Hopra</a> (19.7%)</li>
Bongus</a> (17.7%)</li>
Beetlback</a> (14.8%)</li>
Vultoxin</a> (13.2%)</li>
Plumask</a> (12.1%) (tie!)</li>
Surgus</a> (12.1%) (tie!)</li>
Hydrolm</a> (11.7%)</li></ol>
These usage stats skew towards starter Beasties and closely reflect how often these Beasties appear on players’ in-game teams. (I’d like to share more of those stats another day). 
If we narrow our usage results to only evaluate coaches with high Bash Scores (>=2400, roughly the top 10% of coaches) then we can get a more direct look at which Beasties are most competitive right now. Those results look like this:
Bandicraft</a> (26.5%)
#1 in popularity at all skill levels, Bandicraft has quickly become the face of PvP Beastieball. Bandicraft utilizes the popular Captain trait which pushes their ally forward whenever Bandicraft passes the ball to them, setting up a strong offensive using few actions. Bandicraft’s killer edge may be its well-roundedness; it has strong support options as well as strong attacking options, making it easy to adapt to any role and to fit onto any team. </li>
Vultoxin</a> (23.8%)</li>
Noizard</a> (17.3%)
Noizard’s Clamor trait makes them Noisy when they tag onto the field, redirecting attacks towards them. Combined with strong disruption options, Noizard is an excellent companion for any strong attacker that can’t take a hit.</li>
Zefyre</a> (16.1%)</li>
Wottle</a> (15.8%)
Wottle’s Shy trait inverts the standard field position stat bonus, such that they have higher defense at the net and higher offense at the back. Coaches typically use them to keep the front lane defended and ensure they don’t give away a no-touch point. In general Wottle was only on 5% of teams, so their 15.8% usage at higher ratings suggests they’re severely underrated by most coaches!</li>
Daredillo</a> (15.5%)</li>
Beetlback</a> (15.3%)</li>
Illugus</a> (15.1%)</li>
Hopra</a> (14.9%)</li>
Surgus</a> (13.8%)
</li></ol>
We’ve been making balance patches throughout Early Access and intend to make more going forward - we’ll definitely be taking a closer look at usage stats like these to identify what strategies may be too centralizing. Still, something heartening to observe: the usage of different Beasties is currently less centralized at higher skill levels. Typically you’d expect high-level players to converge around a smaller set of winning species. Instead, it seems that as players’ skill levels grow, they tend to explore more options and have greater diversity in team compositions.
That said, the meta is still fresh and still has a lot of time to optimize more. And there are a lot of threats that are still likely underrated by coaches. Speaking of…
The Least-Used Beasties!</h1>
Let’s take a moment to honour the least-used full-grown Beasties.
Bindiva</a> (0.3%)
Bindiva is one of my personal favorites, so I’ll just come out and say it here with my platform on the official newsletter; everybody is wrong about this one. </li>
Conjarr</a> (0.4%)</li>
Grazada</a> (0.6%)</li>
Garood</a> (1.8%)</li>
Blitzwift</a> (1.9%)
When we narrow usage results to high-scoring coaches, Blitzwift’s usage jumps all the way up to 7.6%, making for one of the largest disparities in usage at different skill levels. Their trait, Jet, allows them to move any number of times at no cost at all, enabling some frankly insane combinations. </li></ol>
One last Beastie that deserves a call-out here is Skulkapi</a>. Their Stealthy trait lets them instantly teleport to any any attack threatening a no-touch point. They were also 4x more likely to appear on teams in the high-score range, going from 3.1% usage in general to 12.8% at high levels. 
Thank You!</h1>
Thank you to our players for making this event a big success! We’re excited to host more soon - stay tuned for intel on future Bigmoons!


How We Record Beastie Voices!

Unknown — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A special treat today! Em Halberstadt of A Shell in the Pit put together this mini-documentary that shows some of the thought and effort that goes into the silly sounds Beasties make. Stick around to see Juan’s bizarre and amazing tutorial on the mushroom-lizard Beastie vocalizations…
</iframe></div></div>


Sometimes You Go With Your Gut (designing Waglash and Riplash)

Unknown — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Beastieball came out a month ago!!! :D Thank for the incredible reception.
We can finally divulge more behind-the-scenes info on our process designing many Beasties who are no longer being kept secret. Every Beastie had a unique process, and each has many stories to tell… but it’s only fitting to start this series with the first Beastie we ever designed. That same Beastie is paired with the last one we ever finished, only hours before the game released. I’m talking about Waglash and Riplash.
I started prototyping Beastieball in summer 2020, while we were still primarily focused on Chicory. By the time Chicory released in June 2021, I had pretty well-defined systems and a solid game foundation for Alexis to start designing creatures for. She excitedly got to work, messing with shapes and animals and feeling out what we even wanted our creature design style to be. She started out drawing sharks, trying to find an appealing personality and a body that could work on land, and we ended up with a pair of Beasties that looked like this:
For years after this, the little shark-dog was used a placeholder for any Beastie that had no set design, so every little shark-dog you see here is actually something else…</figcaption></figure>
The large shark was based on thresher sharks, which use their tail to create underwater shockwaves (incredibly cool). Alexis imagined the tail as a massive implement that could thwack the ball super hard, and then drew up a cute little baby version to go with it. I found some process drawings for the little shark, who we called Shuppy:
(the animation on the right uses colors that get swapped by a shader in-game)</figcaption></figure>
These designs were a great way to test out our whole system for coloring, posing and animating! But as our roster of Beasties grew, they started to feel pretty thin. Most Beasties are designed with rich underlying themes and personalities</a>, but these sharks were basically just… sharks that looked cute/cool. Worse, we started noticing shark-dog designs were not an especially original idea; there was even a Netflix show</a> that debuted while we were working. So we felt we needed to dig a lot deeper and find a new direction for our sharks.
</figure>
We asked Karolina 'Twarda' Twardosz (designer of Bildit, Gastic, and many more…) to take a shot at a few explorations, trying to find whole new angles to take for the shark designs. It was around here that we really started to feel the weight of the problem. Sharks are an iconic animal; they’ve been cartooned in many ways by many artists. It’s really, really, really hard to make a shark that feels familiar enough to feel like a shark, but is original enough to not look like a shark you’ve seen somewhere else. The tail was the strongest anchor we had (which you can see Twarda playing with in these ideas), but it wasn’t a strong theme to build on, resulting in a lot of drawings that didn’t have a strong impact and no clear path to being finished.
Left: drawings by Twarda. Right Drawings by Tia Rohrer.</figcaption></figure>
When we asked artists to take a crack at redesigning the shark, the first response was almost always “Why? I like this one.” We got a few iterations of artists trying to take the ideas we had already and spruce them up a bit. But the lack of a strong theme felt like it was holding the design back. This was when I proposed a radical new idea: What if the sharks were tennis-themed?! Maybe the big shark’s tail is a racket, and the baby shark is a tennis ball. We could call them Thracket and Pubber! We got artists to pitch us some ideas based on that pitch:
Far left: drawings by Tia Rhorer. Center, right: drawings by Jesse 'Jouste' Turner.</figcaption></figure>
Like before, we had drawings that were good but nothing that felt like “the one.” The big sharks especially felt like they were hitting the prompt, but had lost everything appealing about the original big shark design. We were really stuck on this one and wound up putting it into hibernation for a while, keeping the original prototype sketches as placeholders in the game.
Months and years were passing while we iterated on and processed these ideas. Friends, family, and journalists were playing early builds of the game, encountering our prototype shark, and often recruiting it onto their team - it was one of the more popular designs among pre-release playtesters! This only increased the pressure on us to figure out how to finalize the design in a satisfying way.
Before we knew it, Playtests were coming out, and we’d soon be debuting the Chroma Sea area to players with no final shark design. At the eleventh hour, while sick with Covid, Alexis locked herself in a room and drew shark babies searching for some idea that was going to work. That’s when we got these drawings:
</figure>
This cute design was inspired by land-walking Epaulette sharks</a>, with patterning that rode the line between “Epaulette shark” and “dog.” To solidify the theme a bit more, I suggested shifting the colors to look more like a Beastieball (spotted black and white), with the idea being that they’d be a ball-mimic Beastie. This felt like a solid foundation to build on, but this conversation was happening only hours before Playtest 3 released. We got the updated art in with only minutes to spare, before anyone else on the team even knew we’d done it. It felt like we’d dodged a bullet!
The day of the playtest…</figcaption></figure>
Pubber</a> made a big splash in Playtest 3. The only problem was that we had a baby shark we liked, and no matching adult design that went with it, and the game was coming out in less than a month. NO BIG DEAL!!!!!!
</figure>
On top of everything else she needed to get done in time for release, Alexis was iterating on ideas to merge the spotted-ball theme of Pubber with our existing adult shark design. The key issues were; Pubber's design has a more solid/three dimensional feeling compared to the original sharks, Pubber's colours are completely different, and (maybe most importantly) there was absolutely no common theming or personality between the two. Pubber is a long, cute, floppy critter who curls into a ball, and the bigshark is a toothy guy who hits things really hard with their giant tail. We came up with some designs that kind of approached solving the first two - but the 3rd issue was still totally unaddressed. On top of that, we were struggling to find a design whose appeal surpassed the original bigshark sketch we already had waiting in the game. Everything that brought them closer to Pubber also took them further away from what worked in that design.
</figure>
On November 11, with less than 24 hours before the game came out, Alexis made the tough decision to start over on the baby shark again. We realized that there was just no graceful way to redesign the big shark to match Pubber without a total reboot, including its ingame stats/traits. There wasn’t time left for that; and we all still liked the original big shark!
There’s definitely a lesson to be learned here. All through development we'd been talking about redesigning the sharks, and nearly always that was met with 'aww, why?'. After years crafting designs rich with meaning and theming, it was difficult to just go with our gut and use the simple first idea we’d started on. But in a sea of high-effort Beastie designs, Riplash still stands out as a cool and simple character.
If we took that design as near-final, then we needed to come up with a baby design that matched it better - so Alexis went back to the drawing board, looked at all the iterations we’d done and decided to keep it extremely simple. She tried to give the design a bit more of a thought-out shape and appeal, and put in some thresher-tail flavour to lead into the adult design. Their big boggly eyes are also inspired by threshers.
Back when we were hunting for our perfect shark design, our imaginations were captured by this video on (among other things) Great White Shark social behaviour</a>. Did you know that great whites settled disputes with splashing contests? Contrary to popular understanding, great white sharks are actually risk-averse, sensitive creatures who avoid violence. The fact that they play a game to assert dominance over one another, rather than attack with all the murderous tools available to them, really resonated with the world of Beastieball. So we made sure to include a subtle nod to this in the design and lore of Waglash, the final Beastie we added just before release.
Welcome to the family, Waglash.</figcaption></figure>
As for Pubber, the spotted shark design who we couldn’t fit in, we’d like to reintroduce them in the future with different stats and a newly designed adult form that better matches their particular theme. We’ve still got plenty more game to make, after all!
I’ve been tremendously busy keeping up with bugs and feedback while also planning out the rest of our game’s development in the public eye of Early Access. I missed getting to write newsletters! There’s so much more to share about this game and I can’t wait to get into it more with future instalments. :)


Chicory PHYSICAL EDITIONS available now for Switch and PS5!

Unknown — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

YES!!!! Pre-orders are now available for Chicory physical game editions for Nintendo Switch and Sony Playstation 5. 
</figure>
The Collector’s Edition comes with a ton of extra one-of-a-kind goodies. :) The Coloring Book in particular has a ton of new pieces commissioned from fans and friends, featuring some of our favorite characters in new scenes.
We’ve been working pretty hard on these in the background and are thrilled to finally show this off to you. It’s a special thing for us as a team, because we all adore this game and selfishly want to have physical copies of our own, heh heh… 
These will only be available for a limited time, until December 15!
Pre-order your physical copy here!</a>


Beastieball - available now on Steam!

Unknown — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

</figure>
Get Beastieball on Steam!</a>
Sports!!!!! Beasties!!!!! Friendship!!! Rivalries!!!! Corporate sponsors!!! Yes… All of that and more is here, available right now! We’ve spent years making this incredible thing and we hope you love it as much as we do.
It comes with a launch discount AND a brand-new bundle that packages Wandersong, Chicory and Beastieball all together! If you’re already a fan or owner of our other games, this bundle makes it extra easy to complete your collection and try more of our goofy heartfelt adventures :)
And if you want to give us an extra-big boost, please consider writing Beastieball a review on Steam! It helps us a LOT! :O 
</figure>Check out the Beastieball OST!</a>
Beastieball’s incredible OST by Lena Raine is also available now, exclusively on Bandcamp. We hope you’ll check that out as well. It’s really something else.
Now please excuse me, I need to go scream / cry / nap.

Beastieball comes to Early Access NOVEMBER 12!

Unknown — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Yes! Beastieball is coming to Early Access on November 12, just under 2 weeks from now! We’ve got a brand-new trailer you can watch below! (Note: If you already plan to play the game, and you chose Kichik as your starter, this trailer will contain spoilers for you).
</iframe></div></div>Wishlist Beastieball on Steam!</a>
Wishlisting a game on Steam gives it an algorithmic boost in the same way that liking a social media post or subscribing to a content creator does. It helps the long term success of our game in a big way, so please make sure you have the game wishlisted! :)
OST Pre-Orders Available!</h2>
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Pre-order the OST HERE!</a>
Lena Raine’s incredible soundtrack for Beastieball will be releasing on Bandcamp alongside the game. You can pre-order it today and get access to a selection of songs now! We’ll be adding new music to the album regularly throughout the game’s Early Access period, which most platforms won’t allow for. So until the full release the soundtrack will be exclusive to Bandcamp - you won’t find it on streaming services like Apple Music or Spotify.
Thank you very much. We’ll see you in the world of Beastieball soon!

Playtest 3 results: the most-used Beasties!

Unknown — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Playtest 3 ended on Monday! I want to thank everybody who took the time to play and send in feedback. We had more players than ever, with an overwhelmingly positive response and fewer bugs/issues reported, which is reassuring to say the least. 
In case you missed it, at the end of the Playtest we hosted the first-ever invitational Beastieball tournament for some of the most competitive members of our Discord channel. The games were quite high-level, despite using only a fraction of the Beasties that are coming in the full release. As a commentator, I had a huge amount of fun! For now, you can check out the recording here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2280972379</a>. We’ll be uploading it to Youtube soon so that it’s preserved. Just be warned that it includes a ton of spoiler Beasties!
For this Playtest, we ran some analytics to figure out which Beasties players were using the most. Not the most recruited, which is more sensitive to in-game spawn rates, but the actual most used: what Beasties are players keeping with them and bringing into important matches? To get a sense of this data, we looked at what Beasties players brought to the final boss they could play in this Playtest. Here are the results, excluding the Beasties everyone starts with!
#10: Cherrily! (~11.5% of players)</figcaption></figure>
#9: M??????? (~11.5% of players)</figcaption></figure>
#8: Rookee! (~12.5% of players)</figcaption></figure>
#7: Shooga or S??????? (~17% of players)</figcaption></figure>
#6: Kaleidarn (~17.5% of players)</figcaption></figure>
#5: Skibble or S?????? (~18% of players)</figcaption></figure>
#4: W?????? or F?????? (~31% of players)</figcaption></figure>
#3: Servitt! (~32% of players)</figcaption></figure>
#2: Collarva, W?????? or P?????? (~34% of players)</figcaption></figure>
#1! Sefren or Z????? (~36% of players)</figcaption></figure>
It’s fair to say this ranking is still very biased by the Playtest format; Beasties from earlier Playtests definitely had a leg up on the new ones statistically, since players continuing their saves will tend to stick with the ones they have. It’ll be interesting to see how different the rankings are for the full game, when players have every area available from the outset!
But hang on a second, who were all those mystery Beasties??? Well, there’s definitely too many to show them all off now, but in honor of their popularity, I think it’s time we pull back the curtain just a little bit on our pesky friend at #4.
</figure>
Wagdash, the sheep-dog Beastie! This playful pup is more ball-obsessed than most Beasties, and that’s saying a lot. They’ll chase the ball restlessly and never get tired!
</figure>
In terms of playstyle, this Beastie loves when the ball comes to them and plays a more defensive role on the field. They’re not just a tank, though; their trait, Fetch, makes them feel Jazzed whenever an attack hits them, and that gives their follow-up attack 1.5x boosted damage. As their opponent, you may want to keep the ball away from them!
</figure>
But that’s not all! Wagdash has a variant morph which can appear occasionally, with white fur. It’s not the same as a raremorph, which are ultra-rare; variant morphs are much more common alternative appearances you may find a Beastie in. Generally, variant morphs are statistically identical to the standard morph, and relatively easy to find, so you should mostly just try to recruit the one you like the look of the best!
Anyways, it’s time for us to put our heads down and get back to work on the game! This Playtest was the final one; the next time we release something, it’s going to be the entire adventure. Please stay tuned for news on that soon!


Playtest final 48 hours: EVERYBODY'S IN + Live tourney!

Unknown — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Beastieball playtest is coming to a close soon, and for the final 48 hours, we’re allowing everybody to have access! Just visit the game on Steam</a> and request access to join the Playtest! (And don’t forget to wishlist while you’re there… heheh…)
But that’s not all. We’re ending the Playtest with a big livestream!
This art was drawn by community member Mebo and arranged by SkyBlueStarMoon</figcaption></figure>
This Sunday, October 20, we’ll be hosting an invitational tournament for some of the most competitive Beastieball players in our community. Just us at Klei’s twitch channel</a> from 10AM PST to roughly 1PM PST for exciting matches and developer commentary!
Enjoy the Playtest, and see you at the tourney!

The FINAL PLAYTEST is next week!

Unknown — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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It’s time for the Final Playtest, from October 14 to 21! This Playtest will include all previous Playtest content along with a brand-new taste of the Chroma Sea, a vast ocean area with tons of new Beasties to discover!
If you want to play, visit the game on Steam</a> and click ‘Request Access’! (And be sure to wishlist us while you’re there too 😇)! If you’ve had access to any previous Playtests then you’re already included! Otherwise, we’ll start sending keys out in batches starting on October 14. Note that requests are granted by random selection and not everybody will get in.
(If you’re a Content Creator, you can request a playtest key via Keymailer here.</a>)</li></ul>
Playtest Showdown</h2>
With this being the final Playtest before our Early Access release, we’re going out with a bang. On Sunday October 20 - right as the Playtest is ending - we’re going to host the first ever Invitational Beastieball Tournament for our most competitive community members. Whoever wins will be crowned the first-ever Beastieball champion!
For anybody who wants to be part of the community around the Playtest, or follow the invitational tournament, we highly recommend you join our Discord community!</a>
Lots for us to work on now… see you next week!

Invading Other Players' Adventures!

Unknown — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes while you’re out and about re-exploring previous areas, you’ll find new roaming Beastie teams hungry for a match!
The Wayward Clowns have appeared!</figcaption></figure>
These encounters aren’t pre-designed by us. They’re visitors from another player’s world: an Away Team!
If your team has expanded to include a few reserves, you’ll be invited to create an Away Team from any Railhouse (fast travel location). You can pick any of your reserve Beasties and send them away to challenge other players.
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The Travel Tag is a secret phrase you can enter; you can put anything in that field! Players who share a Travel Tag will be much more likely to encounter each other’s Away Teams, so you can use it to invade your friend’s adventures with your own Beasties, or perhaps a favorite streamer.
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After they’ve appeared for another player, they’ll return to your world. You’ll find out the team name of the player they faced, and they’ll also pick up some extra EXP for their effort!
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I’m really excited about away teams; I think they’re one of the coolest features we were able to add to this game. They’re a super-popular feature among players that have joined our past Playtests</a>. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if other creature collecting-style games start using the idea at some point in the future (I haven’t seen it before). It gives your extra Beasties something to do, and a way to show off your Beasties to other players without having to actively coordinate or play competitively.
In general, I’m really interested in asynchronous multiplayer features and I’m still brainstorming adjacent concepts we could implement. Beastieball is primarily a single-player adventure, with limited multiplayer components. As a small-sized indie studio, we can’t expect the game will ever grow to have a massive and active community which supports large-scale multiplayer. Maybe it will! But many larger companies have tried and failed to sustain an active online community for their games in the past, so it would be unrealistic to plan around that ourselves. Asynchronous features are wonderful because they give players a chance to interact and see each other even when they’re not playing at the same time, making even a tiny community feel active and well-connected.
Speaking of…
PAX Champ Challenge Results!</h2>
Behind the scenes setting up our booth</figcaption></figure>
Last month the team went off to PAX West in Seattle. We had a great time showing off the game to players old and new!
We had many very heartwarming interactions with fans, but just one we’d love to call out was this crocheted Axolati somebody surprised us with!</figcaption></figure>
For this show demo, we added a temporary special feature called the Champ Challenge. Every demo station had a current champion named on the title screen. Instead of playing the usual demo, players could opt into challenging the current Champ; if they did so, they were assigned a random team of 4 Beasties and took on the previous Champ’s team in a bossfight-like encounter. And if they won, their team would take over the demo and their name would be added as the current Champ!
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I’m happy to announce the final results from this silly challenge we put out. Here are the top 3 champs, ranked by their number of wins against opponents!
In third place: Channel, with 5 wins!
In second place: Skyphire, with 6 wins!
And number one was the unstoppable Games, with 22 wins!
The mysterious champion known simply as Games worked hard to defend their title. They held the champ title on every demo station for most of the day they attended PAX. Well done, Games! You truly earned this victory.
Thanks!</h2>
In the background we’ve been incredibly busy working on the game and getting ready for our final Playtest and Early Access release this year. We’re excited to share more updates on those before too long!



Beastieball's 2024 roadmap

Unknown — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Firstly, THANK YOU to our many diligent players who checked out Preview Playtest 2! We couldn’t be happier with the overall reception the game has been receiving. And we’re already hard at work fixing all the new small issues that players discovered. :*)
Before we vanish back into the bugfixing grind, I wanted to talk about our plans for the rest of the year… including our release (!)
This is all happening in 2024:</h2>
August 24: Vancouver Game Garden</a>
I (Greg) am actually one of the main organizers of this event! We’re hosting a one-day arcade of radical local indie developers and studios. If you’re around Vancouver, I encourage you to come check it out. Of course I’ll be there with a Beastieball demo, too.</li></ul></li>
August 30 - September 2: We’ll be showing the game at PAX West! 
We’ll also have some exclusive merch available with us. If you’re in town, we home you’ll come and say hello! :)</li></ul></li>
Q4 2024: Preview Playtest 3 (Chroma Sea)
This Preview Playtest will include all previous Playtest content, with the addition of some areas of the Chroma Sea. </li>
This will be the final Playtest before our release. There will be a substantial amount of content in it - but testing that will help us ensure that our launch is as strong and stable as can be!</li></ul></li>
And finally…</li></ul>
Q4 2024: Early Access Launch</h2>
This is the launch we’ve been working up to and are still on track for! Beastieball will be available in 2024 on Steam for PC and Mac.
We imagine some folks are surprised to hear our plans are for an Early Access launch. Indeed, as far as Early Access games go, Beastieball is going to be remarkably robust and polished. On day 1, the game will have:
A complete story. You can play from beginning to the end credits and see the story’s conclusion. Typical playtimes range from 15 to 25 hours, depending on how thoroughly you explore.</li>
Sidequests and extras. Aside from story completion, there are lots of other sidequests and challenges to discover, including hidden extra areas. Ranked coaches you defeat will be added to your Contacts and you’ll be able to hang out with them to build your friendships.</li>
A robust post-game. After reaching the end credits, many new activities and challenges are unlocked, including some that can go on forever. You’ll also be able to go back and do anything you missed in the course of your adventure. </li>
Networked play. You can create lobbies and challenge other players to 1v1 Beastieball matches using your own in-game team. You’ll also be able to upload teams, share them, and download other players’ teams to experiment with different strategies. Not to mention passively challenging other players by sending your extra Beasties onto the internet as an Away Team.</li>
Diverse game modes. Including multiple randomizer modes, each at different levels of chaos. And multiple ironman challenge difficulty modes, too, which you can combine with randomizer modes as you wish, all of which totally transform the experience of the game from its first moments to the final boss.</li>
100 Beasties to discover and meet. In case we haven’t made it obvious, we care deeply about our Beasties and the design work that goes into them. We didn’t want to merely fill in the slots - each and every one of these 100 Beasties are important to us and had a wealth of thought and iteration put into them. We can’t wait for players to discover them all.</li></ul>
We’re 100% confident promising these things because they’re already in the game right now, and have been for months. Our goal for this entire year has been to refine these features, fix bugs, layer in more side content, and improve balance and pacing so that all these features come together to form an excellent and harmonious package. In many ways, we’re treating this as a full game launch - we want it to feel high-quality, complete and satisfying for players in all the ways that matter.
So: Why Early Access?</h2>
Even with all of the above, there’s still a lot more that we’ll be working on into 2025 and beyond. Those things include:
Player feedback 
Ultimately our goal is to make an incredible game. Rather than toil away in the shadows, hope we get everything right and then find out how players feel about the finished product, we want to engage with our community and make sure that our efforts are focused in the right areas as we add new content or address issues.</li></ul></li></ul>
Beastie animation
As some players have observed in Playtests, not all Beasties are fully animated to the same level yet. We’re diligently working to replace all our “placeholder” art so that the initial Early Access release has all clean, finished-looking Beasties - but animation is another step beyond that which we’re going to continue working on for a while. </li>
Although we believe animation is what takes our Beasties to the next level, we also recognize that its absence won’t prevent players from connecting with their Beasties and having a deeply fulfilling game experience. </li>
Animation takes a long time, but it’s also something artists can work on in parallel while we’re collecting player feedback and addressing technical/gameplay issues. Because of that, it’ll be very efficient to have an ongoing Early Access period while animation is still in production.</li></ul></li>
Additional content
Even with so much in the game, we have a long list of additional things we want to add. This includes new Beasties, new sidequests, and new friendship/bond events with other characters.</li>
We have ideas for ways we want to expand on the game’s networked features too. Nothing too crazy, but some things are easier to implement and test after the game already has an established player base and community to build on. </li>
We also will be working on The Far Out, an additional area of the game which we promised in our Kickstarter. </li></ul></li>
Localization & Other Stuff
There are a lot of slow background tasks that typically happen after a game is “done” (content complete) but before it can properly release - including localization. Our goal is to exit Early Access with finished localization so that players around the world can enjoy the final product!</li></ul></li></ul>
Thank you</h2>
This is an unusually long email - I felt I needed to give all of these details because we have a lot of players who are hotly anticipating this game and I want to be fully transparent about what to expect from us. That said, fans have always been remarkably friendly and polite with us… I’m grateful that I get to make games for such a warm community of people.
Ultimately we’re a pretty small team doing pretty huge things. I’m immensely proud of the game we’ve made, now more than ever. I’ll continue to yearn for the day when I can finally fully eject it from my brain and into your hands.
We’ll see you later in 2024!


Preview Playtest 2 is live now! (+new music!)

Unknown — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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We’re recruiting our first wave of playtesters!</h3>
Visit the game on Steam</a> and click ‘Request Access’ to enter the pool of possible players. For the next week the game will be available for select players, featuring several hours of the game and debuting new story, bosses and Beasties. And if you were in the previous Playtest, you’re automatically included in this one - so feel free to check it out! Discussions and feedback on new content are going to be raging all week in our Discord community!</a>
(If you’re a Content Creator, you can request a playtest key via Keymailer here.</a>)
New Music!</h3>
In the lead-up to this playtest, Lena Raine’s been dropping a new Beastieball track every day on her Youtube channel! If you’re curious to hear them all, you can find the full playlist of revealed tracks right here.</a>
There’s still more music coming, by the way… check back there starting tomorrow for some extra-exciting new songs.
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We’re beyond excited to follow everyone’s reactions to this test as well as collect feedback and find out where we can still improve the game. After this playtest ends, we’ll be back in touch with a big update on our plans for the rest of 2024. :)




Preview Playtest 2: Mythwood is coming soon!

Unknown — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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Our next Preview Playtest is right around the corner! From August 12 to 19, we’ll be letting players explore a bit further into the world of Beastieball with a preview of Mythwood, the foresty area to the north. 
If you want to play, visit the game on Steam</a> and click ‘Request Access’! We’ll start sending keys out in batches starting on August 12. Note that requests will be granted by random selection and not everybody will get in!
(If you’re a Content Creator, you can request a playtest key via Keymailer here.</a>)</li></ul>
Save files from the free demo or the previous Playtest will carry over into this Playtest. In fact, if you had access to the previous Playtest then you will be automatically included in this one as well. And your save data will carry over from Playtests to the final release, too - we know how important your team is and we want you to be able to finish your journey with them no matter what!
PAX West!</h2>
While we’re here, we just want to let you know that we’ll be showing Beastieball at PAX West in Seattle from August 30 to September 2. We’ll also have cool exclusive merch available! If you happen to be in town we hope you’ll stop by and say hello :)
That’s all for now. See you in Mythwood… or Seattle!
</h2>



Squimage, the rainbow painter squid!

Unknown — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ah, the Chroma Sea… a vast ocean zone, dotted with islands and enclosed by a massive barrier reef. You’ll need to take out a rental sailboat if you want to navigate those waters. And for coaches who explore its sun-kissed shores, you might rarely find this colorful challenger hankering for a Beach-stieball match.
Squimage: Each one has a unique ink color. They tend to form colonies of similar color and mark their territory with vivid graffiti.</figcaption></figure>
Squimage is unique among Beasties in many ways. For one, they have an exceptionally wide range of color variations - an individual Squimage’s ink can be just about any color of the rainbow.
Just some of the many colors you may find a Squimage in. Go find one in your favorite color!</figcaption></figure>
Squimage are eager learners, adept at mimicry and able to learn a surprisingly wide range of skills. They’re one of the very, very select group of Beasties who can wield Body, Spirit and Mind-type plays, making them a diverse threat that’s challenging to defend against. It’s not just a gimmick! Their POW stats in all types are quite high, so if you underestimate them then you’ll surely be punished. 
This multi-type offensive style is supported by their unique trait, Protean, which changes any POW boost so that it boosts all 3. For example, if a teammate were to boost their Body POW, their Mind and Spirit POW will go up as well. This makes Squimage very effective at providing additional coverage to a team that mostly focuses on only one type of attack and boost.
The final concept pass by Karen…</figcaption></figure>…And the final in-game poses drawn by Mike Horowitz (along with the animation)! Notice all the small tweaks?</figcaption></figure>
Squimage was the first Beastie designed by Karen Centella Sánchez and came from one of the very first basic creature prompts we ever considered. We were excited to use this design to showcase the strengths of our color variation system - while also paying homage to our history with painting animals.</a> Squimage is a Beastie’s that’s very close to our hearts.
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Our next newsletter will have some big updates on our plans for 2024. We’ll see you there!


How We Name Beasties

Unknown — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Naming a Beastie is one of those things that’s very complex, despite looking simple. Or… does it look simple? I don’t know. Well, either way, it isn’t!!!
Here are some of the guidelines we tend to run through when determining a Beastie name.
It has to convey information about the Beastie</h3>
Servace, Sprecko, Bildit, Gastic, Trat…</figcaption></figure>
Creating Beasties poses such a unique and difficult design challenge. At a glance, players need to understand as much as possible about their personality, theme and playstyle - to create a moment where players see a creature for the first time and have a strong emotional reaction to it, informing whether they want it on their team or not. 
Names are fully part of this! We try to pack as much information as we can in the name to clue players in on who this Beastie is and what their deal is. 
It has to be fun to say</h3>
Another way we think about it is whether the name sounds like a name people would actually give to something. Think about everyday animal names like Kangaroo, Dog, Tiger, Lizard… they don’t “mean” anything besides the animal they refer to. Of course, there’s always a reason behind a name, but often we preference names that are short and sweet and unique. 
Sometimes it’s tempting to go for an elaborate pun name that’s packed with funny flavor, but if the name doesn’t have a nice and simple mouthfeel, then it usually comes off as contrived. Another way to look at it: getting a laugh out of a player when they first hear a name is great, but then they’ll have to keep reading that name and saying it for many hours after that. Every Beastie name has to survive this kind of long exposure and scrutiny!
If this sounds like it’s in total opposition to the previous rule: yep, it is!!! We have to keep all these conflicting forces in balance.
It has to be easy to read</h3>
We’ll often refine the spelling of a Beastie’s name many times after we’ve settled on its phonetics. We go for words which LOOK fun and leave minimal ambiguity for pronunciation. Naively combining words tends to create weird-looking pastiches that don’t look great to read. For example, for a long time this Beastie was called “Kichick.”
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Not that it’s terrible, but all the C’s and vertical lines from K, h, and i all kind of smush together when you glance at the word, don’t they? You notice this friction so much more when you’re sight-reading a made-up word you haven’t seen before. 
All that to say, in my opinion, it’s just a little bit easier to read Kichik! We’ll often look for these small ways to simplify words and spelling without losing the meaning.
It has to sound different from other Beasties</h3>
Each name carves out an audio-lingual space that belongs to each Beastie. Just like their visual design, it’s part of what establishes their individuality! So we go to great lengths to give each Beastie’s name their own unique flavor (unless they are actually related). We try to diversify the letters that names start with, the number of syllables, and the suffixes… As much as we can, anyway. 
The GOLDEN RULE: an ideal name has at least 3 meanings!</h3>
Generally, it’s pretty easy to slap two similar-sounding words together to create a name which suggests the combination of idea A and B. For any given Beastie, there might be tons of possible combinations like these which work about as well as one another. But what we strive for (and don’t always reach!) is for the name to evoke an extra third meaning on top of that - when a name reaches this bar, it almost always stays on as the final one.
As an example, consider one of my favorites - Servace!
</figure>
Their name combines “Serval” (their animal inspiration) and “Ace” (the point-scorer on a volleyball team). But their combination also hints at “Service Ace,” a volleyball serve which wins in one shot. Even though Servace is a net player and not necessarily great at serves, the extra meaning is “close enough” to make this name really land, in my opinion.
A Case Study…</h1>
One Beastie debuted for the first time in our previous playtest with a name we weren’t 100% set on. We’re happy to re-introduce them with an updated name!
Kaleidarn: Their bodies are made from hard translucent chitin. Depending on the arrangement of their cells, they refract light differently and can appear as vastly different colors.</figcaption></figure>
Kaleidarn is a dragonfly-inspired Beastie that appears as if they’re made of glass. They’d been notoriously tricky for us to name for a variety of reasons. For one thing, “dragonfly” is a very cool-sounding name, and it was tempting to make a new name out of it, but it never felt quite right. Calling them a “dragon” distracted from the fact that they’re actually a bug, and “fly” is a fairly generic suffix (which we also already had used for insect Beasties like Cherrily and Merrifly (Merrifly hasn’t shown up outside playtests yet… sorry, all in due time!)). “Glass” is also a tricky word to work with - it doesn’t pair well with other words and when it’s taken out of context it can very easily sound like a cuss.
In the Preview Playtest this Beastie was called “Dragla,” a very straightforward word pairing that was lacking in any special spark. We tried and discarded many names before and after that, including Shatterfly (that generic “fly” suffix, and also this makes them sound fragile…) and Dralucent (which feels “almost there,” but still is a relatively flavorless word pairing without strong extra meanings). 
“Kaleidarn” hits our key criteria, combining “darner,” and “kaleidoscope,” itself a word evoking glass as a beautiful refracting multi-color effect which suits this Beastie’s rainbow theming. It also sounds like “collide,” a suitable word for a bug who regularly rams a sports ball. Kaleidarn’s unique trait, “Nimble,” gives their team an extra action when this Beastie receives the ball, so they do indeed reward players who let them collide. 
This is a game that’s still in development, and we’re always updating our ideas, designs and names in the background before we reveal them to the world. There’s no guarantee that we won’t think of an even better name for Kaleidarn before the game finally comes out. But perhaps this gives you an insight into our process, what makes it so hard, and how it’s always evolving!


Playtest Results! Beastie popularity, fun data and more!

Unknown — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

THANK YOU for playing the Beastieball Preview Playtest!</h3>
This has been an exhilarating and exhausting couple weeks for the team. We had high hopes that players would fall in love with the game after they got to play a bit more, but the overwhelmingly positive response floored us all the same. Thank you, thank you!
If you wanted to play but didn’t get in this time, don’t fret! There will be more playtests this year as we gear up for release. Watch here for updates on that!
By The Numbers</h2>669 unique players played the Playtest build. (Not everyone who was given access played the game). Interestingly, an additional 670 unique players played the free Steam demo</a> in the same time period. I have no idea why those numbers are almost exactly the same. An estimated 40% of our Playtesters were continuing a save they previously started in the Demo.</li>
4,198 people wishlisted</a> the game during the playtest period. (Thank you!). During this time period Steam also ran their “Next fest” event and Klei ran their “Kleifest” event, which both likely drove some traffic to us. However, we were not active participants in either event.</li>
4,786 Beasties were recruited by Playtesters!</li>
1,316 feedback reports were sent to us from in-game!</li>
1 developer is in charge of reading, prioritizing and addressing all those reports. He better finish this newsletter quick and get back to work, yipe!</li></ul>
Starter Popularity</h2>
To get the most data possible, these results consolidate data from Demo players as well as Playtest players over the last couple weeks! 
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The #3 choice: Kichik, recruited by 177 players.</li></ul>
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#2 was Axolati, recruited by 402 players!</li></ul>
</figure>
And #1 was Bildit, recruited by 645 players! That’s 52.7% of the vote - Wow!</li></ul>
Of course it’s only natural for one starter to rise to the top of popularity charts. That’s fine, though… it just means fans of the the other starters are more cool and unique. 😎
Social Bonds</h2>
</figure>
One surprise feature we held back for the Playtest was the Contacts menu, where you can spend social batteries to hang out with other characters you meet along your adventure. We were pleased to see this system well-received by players so far :) But wait, who was the most popular friend?!
#4 was Kaz, coach of the Raging Blazes, with 170 hangouts.</li>
#3 was Riven, coach of the Mythic Dreamers, with 202 hangouts. Kaz and Riven both needed to be unlocked by playing against them, so it makes sense that they had a little less action.</li>
#2 was Reese, with 236 hangouts.</li>
And #1 by a landslide was Riley, with 328 hangouts! </li></ul>
And the Most Popular Beastie…</h2>
…Was recruited 604 times! We actually haven’t ever officially revealed them before, but in honor of their win, it’s time you get to know them.
Collarva: Their spines naturally collect plant detritus as they move about, building up their protective coat.</figcaption></figure>
What’s this bug’s secret to its popularity?! Well, probably it’s that you can find them in so many places at the start of the game. Still, recruiting isn’t always easy. Players had to make the choice to seek them out! So: well done, Collarva! 
</figure>
There were many other Beasties who made their first appearance in the Playtest build. We’d love to showcase more of them in due time - but for now, I really better get back to those feedback reports!




Beastieball preview developer livestream: tomorrow!

Unknown — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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24 hours from now, on June 10 at 3:30PM PST, we’re going to host a developer livestream on Klei’s official Twitch channel</a>! Join us for a roughly 2-hour showcase of new content in the Beastieball Preview Playtest (debuting a few hours earlier, at about 9:00AM PST!) 
We’ll also be taking questions from the chat and having a nice friendly time.
If you’d like a reminder tomorrow, you can follow Klei on Twitch</a>, or set yourself as “Interested” to the event on our Discord</a>.
Hope to see you there!


Announcing: Beastieball PREVIEW PLAYTEST

Unknown — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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Surprise! On June 10, we’re going to roll out our first official Preview Playtest! We’ll be giving select players access to the first major area of the game, including some story, boss fights, online features and other surprises…
If you want a chance to check out the game, be sure to sign up on our Steam page! 
Sign up for the Playtest HERE!</a>
(Note that players will be randomly selected, so signing up does not guarantee that you’ll get access…)
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If you want more details on what this is and why we’re doing it, read on!
What is this?</h3>
We’re trying out Steam’s “playtest” feature, something we’ve seen many games do before. There will be a temporary version of the game available on Steam which includes the first major area of the adventure. Only a few select players will be able to play it, but there are no rules against recording, streaming etc. Signing up and playing is completely free.
Who will get to play?</h3>
Everybody who backed us on Kickstarter will be given a key that guarantees them playtest access (check for our latest backer update</a>!). We’ll also send keys to a small selection of content creators. Other than that, anybody can sign up for the playtest on our Steam page. When the playtest goes live, we will randomly select players from the signups to get access to the playtest.
Why do a preview playtest?</h3>
This will provide us with super-valuable feedback and data. Beastieball is a very open-ended game with many different ways a player can choose to tackle it. We want to see a wider variety of players interacting with the game so that we can find obscure issues & make sure it’s perfect before it goes out to the general public.
We also want to use this as a chance to show off more of the game and attract new players. :) We think unedited gameplay, and players’ honest impressions of it, will do more to demonstrate what’s great about this game than any trailer we can put together. Perhaps we’re over-confident, but we’re very excited to see people’s reactions to these early areas of the game… 
What about spoilers?</h3>
Although this playtest does have a substantial amount of content in it, it’s still only a small fraction of the entire experience we have in store. Also, because every player’s journey and team can be so unique, we’re less concerned with details of the game leaking. Watching someone else play will only highlight all the ways which your own adventure could differ!
Still, depending on your sensitivity to spoilers, you may or may not want to avoid content related to the playtest. Many new characters, areas and Beasties will debut, including the second metamorphic forms</a> of the starter Beasties. Going forward, this newsletter and our social media will NOT assume that players have any familiarity with content from the playtest, and we’ll continue to release new details about the game at a slow and steady pace as if the playtests never happened. It’s totally up to you if you want to engage with it or not.
That’s all for now!</h3>We’re very, very, very, very excited to pull the curtain back just a little bit more on this goofy sports adventure. If you have other questions for us, or want to follow reveals alongside the community, we recommend joining the official Wishes Unlimited Discord</a>! We hope to see you there.


Revealing a Ranked Coach & New Boss Music

Unknown — Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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Right from the start of your Beastieball adventure, you can explore in any direction and take on any of the Ranked Coaches scattered across the map. Today we’re going to introduce one of them!
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Meet Riven, coach of the Mythic Dreamers! She’s a restless creative whose head is always in the clouds, lost in her latest book project. Although writing was her first passion, her prodigious Beastieball skills got her appointed as her hometown’s head coach. She’s truly woman of many talents!
Riven focuses on Mind-type Beasties. Although Mind-focused Beasties are better known for their tricky tactics, she uses passes and type synergy to dish out strong boosted hits so she can quickly win the match and get back to her writing. Coaches who want to take her on should build a team with solid Mind defense!
We’re also excited to debut the music you’ll hear in your big match against her, composed by the legendary Lena Raine!
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In case it wasn’t clear, many of the game’s bosses will have completely unique music when you challenge them. Look forward to hearing tons of different exciting boss themes like this over the course of your adventure later this year!
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That’s all for now! We’ll see you in the next newsletter with an exciting announcement. :)

Gastic, the spooky gas bug!

Unknown — Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For those courageous coaches who brave the Solanum Weald, they’ll be faced with some of the strangest Beasties we know of. It’s a twisted place where you can’t always trust what you see, thanks to the illusory work of this tiny Beastie!
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Gastic in inspired by bombardier beetles</a>’ chemical spray ability, although taken to a ridiculous extreme. They’re able to control the shape and density of their gas to manipulate the ball and spike it! Do the other Beasties even realize they’re playing against a bug?
It’s a struggle, but it works…</figcaption></figure>
Gastic has one of the most unique traits in the game; Intangible, which makes them completely immune to Body-type attacks. If you hit them with other attack types, they can be quite frail, but their immunity to Body makes them a terrifying counter to many of the sport’s strongest competitors. Combine that with their access to some devious Mind attacks and debilitating status effects and you’ve got yourself a tricky Beastie that can’t be ignored by any coach!
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That’s all for now. See you in the next newsletter!

All About Beastie Types

Unknown — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In today’s newsletter, I wanted to talk about some of the considerations we take when designing new Beastie concepts!
This info is taken directly from our actual style guide which we gave to concept artists when we started working together. Originally I wanted to share the entire style guide, but it’s pretty long and dense and full of spoilers. It might be fun to put the whole thing in an artbook someday… but until then, here’s the details just on Beastie types!
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Unlike in other monster games, Beasties do NOT have a strict “type.” Instead they’re measured by their strength or weakness in the categories of Body, Spirit and Mind. Each Beastie’s unique alignment to these 3 categories informs their match-ups in the game, but it also informs their personality and motivations as characters. 
There are lots of ways for a designer to take inspiration from the types. There is a careful balance to strike in how much each design should follow these themes vs. contradict them. Ultimately it’s more important for each Beastie to have a vibe that is unique to them rather than conform to a stereotype!
BODY</h2>
Early Kichik concept art</figcaption></figure>
Tend to have stronger bodies, ie. muscles, armor, or just be bigger in general</li>
Could have exaggerated arms, legs, tail</li>
Dexterity - good physical self control & able to do impressive ball maneuvers like juggling, spinning, etc.</li>
Associated more with the colors yellow/orange</li>
Associated with vitality, healing, energy, exercise, sports, electricity/thunder</li>
Balanced, consistent moves that don’t have obvious weaknesses or drawbacks</li>
DnD stats: Strength, Dexterity</li>
Beasties who are weak in Body power might be smaller or more frail.</li>
Beasties who are weak in Body defense might have difficulty physically handling the ball, due to frailty or lack of dexterity.</li></ul>
SPIRIT</h2>
Axolati concept art</figcaption></figure>
AKA “Heart,” these Beasties tend to be passionate, strong willed and determined</li>
Compassionate, genuine, protects/cares for teammates</li>
Associated more with the colors pink/red</li>
Associated with fire, wind, music, voice, feelings, dance</li>
Could have exaggerated features on their chest/back or have large/beautiful display features (flashy/vivid colours, form over function, etc)</li>
Powerful moves with drastic costs/consequences</li>
DnD stats: Constitution, Charisma</li>
Beasties who are weak in Spirit power might be more apathetic, deceitful, or mean-spirited</li>
Beasties who are weak in Spirit defense might be similar, or they might be overly emotional</li></ul>
MIND</h2>
Bildit concept art</figcaption></figure>
Tend to be smart, calculating, clever, logical, cold</li>
Associated more with the colors blue/violet</li>
Associated with ice, water, illusion, anxiety, games, math, technology, the supernatural</li>
Could be tricky, or even prankster-like</li>
Could have exaggerated eyes, head, features that let them carefully manipulate the ball</li>
May be more likely to have startle/warning displays (deimatic/aposematic)</li>
Moves that are weaker but with powerful side effects/debilitating status effects</li>
DnD stats: Wisdom, Intelligence</li>
Beasties who are weak in Mind power might be more simple, honest, straightforward or less thoughtful in general.</li>
Beasties who are weak in Mind defense might be less observant, more instinctive, or especially gullible/trusting</li></ul>
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So why did we resist making types that were more strictly defined, like in other monster games? Well, bluntly, everybody already knows about Pokemon types. Coming up with our own set of types, with different matchups, and asking players to memorize those feels like a lot to ask. And anyway, even if you switch around what the types are called and/or how they match up, the game won’t wind up feeling very different from what’s already out there. 
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Our squishier “type” system does more to highlight each Beastie’s unique position along various spectrums, rather than simply being one thing or the other. This is more in line with our deeper goal to make Beasties feel more like living, autonomous beings. Because each type is broader in definition, it also means there’s way more overlap in what plays different Beasties learn, and that means there are far more opportunities for friendly Beasties to teach new plays to each another, which makes our relationship system feel more lively and interesting. Players who invest deeply in the game systems will be more likely to categorize Beasties though their individual roles and game mechanics, almost more like fighting game or MOBA characters. Altogether, it gives Beastieball a flavor that we’ve never quite seen before!
Still, I can’t deny the fun that types add to this game’s texture. I love media that offers fun and broad categories for their characters (for example, the 4 elements in Avatar: The Last Airbender). I also enjoy how they can be applied outside their original context. You can reason with questions like: what type is your favorite? Or, what type would YOU be? Ultimately, it’s just plain fun to be able to put things into categories, and “types” are a big, big way of doing that. 
See you in the next newsletter!



</h1>

Servitt, the sporty serval Beastie!

Unknown — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are all kinds of Beasties out there who specialize in all kinds of playstyles. Some leverage unique traits and game mechanics to change the flow of the match. Some have access to tricky techniques to mess with the field or their opponents. And some just like to hit the ball really, really, really hard.
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Look familiar? Servitt is the juvenile form of Servace, the ace spiker Beastie!
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These Beasties are all about damage output. Their unique trait, Spiker, gives their attacks from the net an additional 20% power boost. This stacks on top of the natural 50% power boost all Beasties get at the net to make their attacks extra devastating. 
Whoever they hit, it’s gonna hurt.</figcaption></figure>
But all that power comes with some risks. For one, Servitt and Servace’s playstyles are pretty linear: if you see one on the field, you pretty much know the only thing they can do is rush the net and hit. Secondly, their defenses are brittle, and that’s only magnified by the vulnerability that all Beasties have when standing at the front. Players who want to mitigate their weaknesses might want to shore up their defense with a tanky partner who can redirect attacks; or perhaps a teammate who can support Servitt’s damage so they win in just one shot. You could even consider throwing down a second attacking Beastie who lets Servitt steal the attention of the enemy defense to sneak in an unexpected attack. However you use Servitt, their presence on the field exerts indomitable pressure on the other team.
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This Beastie’s spread of stats, trait and plays was one of the very first I implemented when I first started testing out the game systems, before we had even a single creature designed. Their playstyle was inspired by - who else? - Hinata from the volleyball sports anime/manga, Haikyuu. It wasn’t until much later, and through much iteration, that Tia Rohrer</a> put such a cool and cute face to them, and Mike Horowitz animated them.
</figure>
See you in the next newsletter!

How AI works in Beastieball

Unknown — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With this newsletter I generally try to stick to broad concepts, but this post will be a bit more technical and specific. It’s something I’ve been excited to write a bit about!
Update and Render</h2>
To explain the first and weirdest detail of how the AI is written, I need to briefly explain how games are generally programmed. Essentially, you break every step of the computing process into two main phases - updating the game state, and then rendering that state to the user.
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But Beastieball’s “battle” system works like this.
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The code which renders and displays all of the clickable buttons that the player uses to select their actions ALSO contains the logic for clicking on them and what that does (advancing the game state, queuing turn-based actions, etc), and it ALSO contains all of the logic that the AI uses to make decisions.
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Here’s an example of what the code for these clickable buttons might look like:
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Doing the logic for clicking on buttons at the same time as you render them isn’t too-too weird in the grand scheme. It’s nice that you can re-use the on-screen render bounds for box to also detect when the user’s selector is overlapping that box to click on it. But throwing the AI into there as well is not something I’ve even seen someone talk about before.
The AI Decision Tree</h2>
The way the AI basically works is: Each step, it will run the game UI render code as if it were going to render the UI to the player, but rendering is disabled so nothing new actually appears onscreen. Instead, at the end of the UI render attempt, the AI has a list of all the clickable areas that were rendered. Then it runs the UI render again, but this time it “clicks” on one of the clickable areas, advancing the game state as if a player had clicked on a button there. 
It does this until it has nothing left to click on, then evaluates the “Board Score.” This means assigning a value to how favorable the current game state looks to them. Since each button click also advances the game state, each “run out of clicks” state represents a unique possible outcome for the AI’s turn after all their actions are used. The AI will treat the state as more favorable if, for example, they’re launching an attack that is likely to do more damage, or their team status is healthier.
Typical path the AI will take on its first pass.</figcaption></figure>
The AI then goes back to the start of their turn and starts over, repeating this process ad nauseam until it has clicked on everything it could ever click in every situation, and has assigned a score to all possibilities.
</figure>
From there, the AI goes back to the top one more time, picks out the route that scored the highest, and then clicks on those things in that order, this time actually committing to the choice and playing it out in a way that the player can see. Aside from having the AI hooked up the game’s render loop, all of this procedure is actually fairly standard. If you’re interested in learning more about how AI decision trees work, there are some great entertaining YouTube videos out there on the subject.</a>
Why is it like this</h2>
In the context of Beastieball, I think it’s worth noting how every aspect of this procedure makes it super easy to develop new features.
Firstly, the “Board Score” evaluation is a really flexible and powerful tool. AI for different encounters can be given interesting unique behaviour by adjusting how it values certain things. For example, in our Steam demo’s</a> “Boss fight” against Marlin, he wants to teach you about attacking empty lanes, and so intentionally leaves certain lanes open - we achieved this by assigning a negative value to lane defense in his AI. 
But the coolest, most “magical” quality of this system is that the AI has full access to everything the player does, automatically, with no extra effort on the part of the programmer(s) or designer(s) (me). This was critical when I was in the early phases of prototyping this game, and was frequently adding, moving or deleting features from the system trying to figure out a good design for turn-based volleyball. 
That quality continues to be valuable even as development has progressed. About a week before we first revealed our Steam demo, I made a very big change to the game systems, adding a new “Block” move that any Beastie could do at the net. Simply by adding the button to the player’s interface, the AI also had access to it, and even started using it in unexpectedly optimal ways that helped me quickly test and refine the idea before releasing it.
There are a lot of hidden benefits to testing and balancing the game that were unlocked by having the AI so closely tied to player behaviour, which I’d love to cover in greater detail another time. But suffice to say that the ease of adding new features and move effects and getting to see them played out instantly has been immensely valuable to this project!
See you in the next newsletter.

A Field Guide to Beastie Metamorphosis

Unknown — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Before you read this newsletter, a SPOILER WARNING might be warranted! We’re going to show a small preview of what your starting Beasties could become during your adventure. There will still be plenty of mystery remaining, but if you’d rather not know ANYTHING about what awaits you on your journey, then stop reading this newsletter right now!!!
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</figure>
As you journey with Beasties, you might one day find that one feels strange. They’ll start to sweat constantly, and they’ll struggle a bit more in sports matches. The good news is that this is nothing to worry about! It means their body is working through some big changes. If you help them push through the discomfort, you’ll get to witness the miracle of Beastie metamorphosis!
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In their natural habitat, Beasties will tend to play with others of their own kind, and their physical adaptations reflect the environment they originate from. But by journeying with a coach, visiting new environments and training with diverse allies and opponents, they’ll learn new skills and grow rapidly. Beasties metamorph so they can meet the greater demands that come from high level Beastieball! At least, that’s what we think.
</figure>
When Beasties metamorph, it’s not just a physical change - their personalities will grow and develop too. This can change how they relate to other Beasties and how their relationships develop, too! 
</figure>
Not every Beastie is capable of metamorphosis. Conversely, some are capable of multiple stages of metamorphosis. The 3 Beasties you meet at the start of the game all fall in that category. More rarely, some Beasties have branching lines of metamorphosis and are capable of becoming different species depending on different factors. Beastie metamorphosis is a vast mystery! There are almost certainly more hidden facets still waiting to be discovered…
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That’s all for now! Next time we’ll be back with another new Beastie to show!


Demo update! (& design updates)

Unknown — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Surprise! In celebration of Steam’s Next Fest this week, we’ve updated our demo. There’s no significant new content (we’re keeping it all secret!) but there’s a few nifty new features including expanded character customization, a run button, new character art, and more! 
Especially if you haven’t played the demo yet, now’s the perfect time - your save data will carry over to the full game release!
Check out the demo here!</a>
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(Note that the demo is updated on Windows only - the Mac version will be updated later this week.)
It’s a relief to have the demo up to date, although 99% of the work we’ve been doing on the game is invisible in this tiny slice. We’ll be working hard this year to get the whole thing ready so that everyone can finally play it - wish us luck!
Development Update</h2>
In our last couple updates we shared that the game was beatable and that we’d seen players taking about 25 hours on average to play through the main story. Part of me was excited by this figure - that’s an impressive amount of game for a team as small as ours to have made! But after I sat with it for longer and considered what I’d seen in playthroughs, it bothered me to see how easily players were sinking time into it.
I’ve learned it’s a delicate balance with turn-based RPGs like this. Unlike, say, a platformer or puzzle game where every inch of the game world is crafted and is, itself, the “experience” - in an RPG the game world can essentially be reduced to a container for turn-based encounters. It’s easy for a game’s playtime to balloon out of control if you get into a habit of stuffing mandatory encounters everywhere, or put players into mazes that effectively make them walk in circles and repeat the same encounters many times. Basically: I underestimated how much the game can slow down when players aren’t doing just what’s absolutely mandatory. Especially because of the game’s open-ended nature, I worried that the story dragged, because in some cases players would (partly by accident, partly by willful procrastination) sometimes fool around exploring for hours in between major story beats, especially in the back half of the game where your levels are high enough to get anywhere easily and the map really opens up.
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So: in addition to a lot of new story content and side things I’ve been working on, I’ve been working on a radical (still unplaytested!) new change that will unlock the game’s ending much earlier on than before, effectively turning a massive portion of the previously-mandatory areas into optional or post-game content. My aim is to bring average completion times down lower while preserving all the key story. It feels like a risky change to make, knowing that completion times are often used as a shorthand for how “big” the game is and may make the game seem less valuable to prospective players… but I’m optimistic that players will respond positively to something that feels absolutely packed with ideas and ends before it overstays its welcome. (And just to be clear, nothing is getting cut… it just means that if you go for the ending earlier, you’ll have that much more to check out in the postgame).
I don’t know if I mentioned this on the newsletter before, but really it was sort of an accident that this game became an RPG in the first place - my foremost goal was to make a game about team-building and relationships, which led me to decide on turn-based strategy that highlighted each character’s unique parameters, and from that came the idea to represent characters as diverse little monsters that level up as you spend time with them, and with THAT came all the default baggage that comes with turn-based RPGs. My design process throughout this project has largely been a personal reexamination of what I like about RPGs, what I don’t like, and how many parts I didn’t think I liked were actually necessary structural pieces that hold the whole thing together. This is the 3rd full-scale RPG I’ve made, but I still feel like I have so much to learn. I could go on about this subject forever… Maybe in another newsletter! I’ve gone on long enough!
Thanks for reading. It feels unprofessional to harp on about the things I’m still struggling with in the design sometimes, but it’s also nice to get to share these tidbits about the process. My focus remains on making an absolutely amazing video game that you’ll get to play in 2024!

Trat, the dumpster rodent Beastie!

Unknown — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Geo City! The sprawling metropolis! Explore and you’re sure to see some of the trendiest fashionistas, the biggest celebrities, and the busiest stores. And also this thing.
Trat: They are often found in dumpsters. When they outgrow their can, Trats will gather with many others to exchange for larger cans.</figcaption></figure>
Trats make their homes in cans, which are plentiful in the big city. Their cans come in many varieties, as you might expect, including all the colors of the rainbow. You might even occasionally spot a Trat living in an extra-big can! It can be tough to catch a glimpse of their actual bodies, but you know they’re afoot when you see a can scurrying around. 
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When it comes to sports, Trat is as capable as any Beastie, but their style of play is very unique. They don’t have the strongest statistics, and their special traits aren’t game-changing either; you’ll commonly find one with the Mischief trait which allows them to use support plays during the defense phase. This technical-sounding ability simply means they can use strange and surprising plays to intercept the opponent’s attack or build their defenses.
And support plays are indeed their specialty. Trats can use all sorts of zany plays including Trait Dance, which swaps their trait with another Beasties’s, Reposition, which lets them instantly swap positions with their ally on the field, or Dispel, which makes their ally’s ball become “volleyed,” allowing their ally to counter-attack without passing the pall back and forth as usual. 
Trat’s playstyle is the embodiment of why Beastieball is a team sport; sometimes you need a little creature who can cause some mayhem and disrupt the flow of things just as much as you need a powerful point-scorer. For those players who will learn all the dark corners of what’s possible in Beastieball, few opponents may strike more fear into their hearts than the mighty Trat.
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See you in the next newsletter!

Greg's Cool Games from 2023

Unknown — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.</a>)
With 2023 coming to a close, I wanted to take a moment to shout out some exciting games that came out this year! I do try to take the time to play lots of games, as it helps fuel my work with diverse ideas… this year I also helped out jurying the Independent Games Festival (IGF) which exposed me to a TON of cool games I would have otherwise missed. This is not an exhaustive list of every game I liked, or even a proper ranked list or anything… this list also excludes games made by any friends of mine. These are just some really cool games I recommend in no particular order! OK??? OK!!!! 
(Also note that all(?) of these games are on sale…. right now!!!)
Thirsty Suitors</a></h2>
Available on Steam, Switch, Xbox, Playstation… and also on GamePass (I think)!! I played on Switch.</figcaption></figure>
In Thirsty Suitors, you play as kind of a garbage-fire college-age skateboard punk with a rocky relationship history who abruptly comes back home after several years and has to deal with the fallout of all her past mistakes. You’ll be skating around town to visit friends, cooking dishes to impress your parents, and hashing out your emotional baggage in turn-based RPG battles. The writing is some of my favorite I’ve seen in a game in a long time, and the animation is also outstanding. It’s outrageously funny and gets really personal as well.
Chants of Sennaar</a></h2>
Available on Steam, Switch, PS4, Xbox</figcaption></figure>
A game about deciphering language! As you explore and climb a Tower of Babel, you’ll be exposed to different symbols and it’s up to you to use context to slowly piece together what they each mean so you can navigate a foreign world. What’s most remarkable to me is how NOT daunting this game is - it’s very precisely crafted and paced so that every step from bottom to top was a satisfying little puzzle. (That must have been VERY hard to do!!! Games like this are usually very obtuse!!). It also introduces a number of different languages which each express subtle and interesting details about the cultures they represent, from the way the symbols are shaped to the grammar of their sentences. It’s very well thought out and very engrossing to play… I could NOT put it down and wound up 100%ing it in one long session. 
Final Profit: A Shop RPG</a></h2>
Available on Steam and itch.io</figcaption></figure>
You’re Queen of the elves, except the elvish kingdom is languishing under the boot of the Bureau of Business, a powerful and shadowy organization of businessmen who control seemingly everything. So you hatch a plan to destroy them by becoming the BEST at business. Hilarity ensues as you fall deeper and deeper into the rabbit-hole of economics, finding new and exciting ways to exploit people and optimize your finances. It’s an ugly-aesthetic RPGMaker game but I’d argue that its cheap veneer only adds to this game’s sublime charm. If you like managing inventories, collecting resources and numbers going up then you will get a LOT out of this game, and a lot of good laughs along with it. 
A Highland Song</a></h2>
Available on Steam and Switch!</figcaption></figure>
A story-rich side-scrolling adventure where you play as Moira, a runaway girl on a journey to find her uncle in a distant lighthouse in the Scottlish highlands. Along the way you’ll come across abandoned towns, dim caverns, strange people, ghosts, folklore and most importantly, MAPS! This game is all about getting lost and finding your way through ambiguous directions and sketchy maps that can point out hidden shortcuts or send you even further off the trail. It’s hard to capture what’s really special about this game because it’s succeeding in a way I have a hard time comparing to anything else. For a side-scrolling game it does an exceptional job of capturing the vast feeling of a 3D open-world game, but rich with little stories and discoveries that make every moment a delight. There’s also inexplicably great musical game elements while you sprint through the fields as fauna run alongside you. 
Cassette Beasts</a></h2>
Steam, Switch and Xbox</figcaption></figure>
A monster-taming open-world turn-based RPG! You find yourself thrown into a strange world under threat by giant glitchy hellbeasts where people can “record” monsters and transform into them! The game has a couple standout features, namely: when your meter’s full, you can fuse any two beasts to create a temporary new super-beast! And, every beast has its own type(s) which have advantages and disadvantages against other type(s), but the way every type interacts is unique and creative - for example, a fire move can melt a plastic-type beast and lower their offense. This game offers satisfying open-ended exploration and cool strategic battles as well. I had my gripes with it, but as someone who has been looking into many different games of this format, this one stands out quite a bit. And for anyone following the development of Beastieball</a>, I strongly recommend this game to enjoy in the meantime!
Games to watch for next year….</h2>
I’ve also had the opportunity to see a lot of games that aren’t quite done yet! I recommend you keep an eye on these next year.
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Anthology of the Killer</a> - A collection of short story games about a zine artist in a surreal murder-friendly world. They’re weird, witty, incredibly funny, and incredibly well-paced too. There’s a potent creative energy here that harkens to zine culture or, at least to me, the wild world webcomics. 8 out of 9 episodes are actually already available! But with the release of the final episode it will be collected into a single handy anthology experience which might be worth waiting for. 
Phonopolis</a> - This is a game by a new team under the umbrella of Amanaita Design, known for titles like Samorost and Machinarium. Phonopolis is an incredibly exciting project full of playful interactive dioramas and character animation. The art direction is just divine.
1000xRESIST</a> - An intense and high-concept walk-and-talk game about a cult of clones in a post-apocalypse underground bunker. A lot of the game revolves around exploring memories and piecing together the history of your cult and the apocalypse that birthed it, and it quickly gets into some heavy and confronting things. It’s as resonant and compelling as some of the best Prestige TV I’ve seen but constructed out of many creative interactive setpieces. The dev team comes from a background in stage performance and that skillset comes through really clearly here.
See ya next year!</h2>
I have so many other articles and things I wanted to write up this year that I just couldn’t make the time for. But, I want to thank everyone following my newsletters and everyone who’s sent in a nice comment or reply too. It’s been really fun for me to have a space like this to collect my thoughts and talk more about what’s exciting to me in games lately. 
More to come soon! :) Happy new year~

Introducing Platenna, the electroreceptive Beastie!

Unknown — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve got a brand new Beastie to show off today!
Platenna: They use their bill to detect electrical fields. They rely heavily on this sense while the rest of their body develops.</figcaption></figure>
Platenna is a quintessential Mind-focused Beastie. Their unique trait, Neural Net, makes it so that all Mind-type attacks that target their side of the field automatically go straight to Platenna! This means your opponent can’t use Mind attacks to score a free point, nor to harm their ally. On the other hand, even when Platenna is low on stamina, you can’t stop your opponent from hitting them with any Mind attack no matter what you do…
Concept art by Karen Centella Sánchez and Tia 'TK' Rohrer!</figcaption></figure>
Platenna was first conceived by @HABANIRRO</a> and the design was then polished off by @Irischroma</a>. They were inspired by the very real ability of the platypus to detect the movement of prey by changes in their electrical field (which is… awesome?!?!?!).
Look at her go!</figcaption></figure>
The final animation you’re seeing here was done by Mike Horowitz</a>, who joined our team this month as a full-time animator! He’s got a great attention to detail and an extraordinary way of capturing the little personalities of each Beastie. His amazing work on Platenna already has us excited to see more!
We’re at a point in the project where ~95% of all the Beasties have a finished design, concept, stats, traits, plays etc. (!!!). But there’s still a ton of work remaining to get all of that art cleaned up and animated for players to appreciate. Thanks to Mike we’ll be able to speed up that process a bit, which hopefully means more cool creatures that we can show off to you in the coming months. :) 
See you next time!
-Greg & The Beastie Team

10 years of Roguelike Deckbuilders

Unknown — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Coin Crypt, the world’s first roguelike deckbuilder, is 10 years old today!
When I was making it at the time, it seemed a totally off-the-wall combination of ideas and genres, but one I was fascinated by and kept falling deeper and deeper into. A seemingly endless design space where every idea would beget even more ideas. I put everything I could into it, thinking it was up to me to explore the space I’d found. I had no idea that later it would become its own genre, let alone one that nowadays gets labelled as crowded and competitive.
Coin Crypt has always been a lesser-known title and in the grand scheme I really can’t take credit for inspiring anything that came after because I’m pretty sure none of those later works were aware of it, LOL. But I always have been proud of it and I think it is a pretty dang cool game. Of all my works it’s still the one I would most readily want to boot up and play again, 10 years later. It’s definitely needlessly opaque, but it’s also full of fun ideas that still stand apart from genre contemporaries.
To commemorate the anniversary, I was interviewed by a blog called Sunken Shrine, which has been exploring the history of the genre and identified Coin Crypt as the earliest entry. Check it out here! 
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If you’re curious to check the game out, it’s available on Steam! </a>
But in the spirit of recommending roguelike deckbuilders, I’d really like to shout out more recent exceptional games that have both tightened the design and introduced more storytelling into the mix:
Cobalt Core</a>, which features spaceships on a small tactics grid, just came out this month.
Inscryption</a> is a thrilling and gorgeous adventure with many twists and turns.
Although not a roguelike, Signs of the Sojourner</a> is a brilliant take on deckbuilding & card games with emotionally resonant storytelling.
Happy carding!

Open-World Storytelling (Struggles)

Unknown — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This past month has been a big one for us & Beastieball. I spent a fair amount of time designing, scripting and laying out the game’s ending sequences - and as a result of my labour Beastieball (finally) has an ending and is a beatable game from start to finish!
It’s a major milestone for sure, but there’s still a long road to having a finished video game. Especially because of the game’s open-ended nature, a lot of what we have feels more like an outline that still needs filling in. In particular, I’m most concerned with doing more work on the story and world-building over the course of the adventure. Typically in these newsletters I try to share what wisdom I’ve accrued from experience… but this time I’d like to be a little more candid and share aspects of this game that are still ongoing challenges for us.
The stories in my games are almost always the focus of the project and something we put a lot of care into. I’ve tackled a lot of different game genres and story presentations. Notably, the second half of Chicory presents several major story threads that can each be experienced in any order. After the success of that experiment, I felt more confident stepping into Beastieball with the plan to have almost all of the game’s events be unordered. I’ve never really loved the storytelling in the open-world games that I’ve played, but I was excited to take the narrative design experience I have and apply it to that problem to see what I could do. But I didn’t anticipate all the ways that I’d be challenged by the process along the way! 
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For starters - because any given event could be visited at any time, each event often has to be written with very little outside context. In my past games, I always had a clear picture of the journey over the course of the adventure; which parts are happy, which parts are sad, what the protagonist is feeling when they first reach a location and what happens to them there. Wandersong, Chicory and Phantasmaburbia all feature dramatic story reveals followed by sections that reckon with the fallout of those events - and that context shapes how small interactions with every NPC was written, the mood of the music in certain areas, etc. While there is an overarching plot which connects the smaller events of Beastieball, we don’t always know where each step of the story will happen for each player, so we don’t get to have that added direction for every area and character in the story.
The protagonist themself is fully customized and named by the player - and has no formal dialogue of their own, so that the player can project themselves into the story. We want players to express themselves through their Beastie recruit selections, their Beastieball strategies, and the ways that they explore - but what we lose is that there is no central protagonist whose shifting emotions and perspective can guide the story. Instead we put the focus on the characters you meet along the way. Ironically, even though this is by far the largest adventure I’ve worked on, it is necessarily constructed out of the smallest pieces of self-contained stories in different parts of the map.
</figure>But the challenge that I least anticipated was how much the storytelling is beholden to the structure of the game itself. Because every piece of the story is small and self-contained in different areas, we have to devote an outsized portion of the wordcount just on instructing the player and pointing them in the right direction so that they know what to do next. I’ve hinted at this challenge in previous newsletters</a>, but it’s exacerbated by having so many small “quests” that don’t relate to each other. In larger linear games, players eventually fall into a pattern where they generally know the direction they’re going in, and the game can explain a little less and start to have more breathing room for flavor. That’s not quite the case in open-world games like Beastieball, and at times as a writer it can be suffocating!
In the bigger picture… The best stories are always built on surprises. If you already know what’s going to happen, there’s no suspense or excitement pulling you forward. But games are the opposite; if you don’t know where to go next or what to do, it quickly gets frustrating and boring as you go in circles without a clear purpose in mind. An open-world game where the player can do things in any order therefore needs to establish clear goals for the player in every direction, and at its heart needs to fall into some type of repetitive structure or pattern the player can learn to recognize, ie. “defeat the big boss in each area.” While there are many cool surprises in store in Beastieball, larger structural necessities like these are always exerting force against us.
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Every story always comes with its own challenges, of course. And to some extent, it’s true that if the process for anything is easy, then you’re not really doing anything ambitious. But there are also a lot of hidden compromises that come with the decisions we made about this game early on, and we are at the point where we need to accept those compromises and move forward with the best version we can create. There are many amazing things about this game which will only be possible because of those compromises, too. Ultimately we have to find a path and plan that leverages the game’s potential strengths the most, rather than spotlighting its weaknesses. This project has done a lot to show me my limits as a creator, but I’m still loving the challenge and optimistic that at the end of our struggles we’ll produce something truly excellent.
Wish us luck!!!

A new Beastie! + Starter popularity results

Unknown — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’re back from PAX West 2023! We had an amazing show - thank you to fans who came out, and to all the new players who took the time to try our demo out :)
We had standing cutouts of some of our favorite Beasties there - and we even got these amazing fan drawings from a couple talented fans who swung by the booth too. We adore them!!!</figcaption></figure>

Right before the show ended, someone came up with a blank board and a set of copics and asked Alexis to draw something on it.</figcaption></figure>
Starter Popularity Results</h2>
The demo we brought was quietly tracking how many times each starter was chosen - mostly to satisfy our own curiosity, lol. I’m excited to announce the final results from 393 demo sessions played at PAX!
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In third place was Kichik, with 106 players - roughly 27%</li>
Second was Bildit, with 142 players - 36%</li>
The number one choice was Axolati, with 145 players (!) - 37%!!!</li></ul>
The ratio of selections was more even than I anticipated! And as a personal Axolati enjoyer, I’m happy to see them come out as number one against Bildit, who generally gets all the hype online. Although I’m not usually big into tracking stats, I’m starting to want to track some stats like these for the actual game release… it’s just fun to know.
New Beastie Data</h2>
Eagle-eyed Discord members</a> noticed that some items we had at the booth were previously unrevealed. One of which was the Beastiepedia entry and stats for Servace - here they are!
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Servace also has a unique trait called Spiker that makes their attacks from the net 20% stronger. This stacks with the universal net attack bonus, making them a HUGE offensive threat! But their low defensive stats can also make them a liability - coaches who want to make the best of Servace will have to learn how to mitigate the inherent risks of their playstyle.
And we’ve got one more NEW Beastie to reveal details on!
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Webbounce, the jumping clown spider! Right when we started making this game, for some reason, I really wanted to do a clown bug. Alexis was vehemently against it, but eventually I was able to make it happen when we recruited Harlow Diggs to the concept team, a fellow clown bug enjoyer who successfully changed Alexis’ mind with their adorable designs. Like many other Beasties, we actually started by designing their mature post-metamorphosis form… I’m excited for players to discover that one someday.
Webbounce has a few unique plays and traits, but for now I’ll reveal just one- their Plucky trait which makes it so that they can’t be given FEELINGs by other Beasties (our version of status effects). They aren’t the most powerful Beastie stats-wise, but their feelings immunity makes them very difficult to impede. No matter what the other team throws at them, you can count on them to get the job done!
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We’re still working on their animation, but I thought it would be fun to share the work-in-progress. It’s hard to appreciate how much work and how many drawings go into making each Beastie when you only see the clean, finished product… but you can also appreciate how their personality and charm comes through even in these early stages.
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Now that we’re home, I’m excited to dive back into development! I’ve been drafting out the final challenges in the game and having a blast seeing it all come together. 
See you in the next newsletter :)
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Introducing our redesigned characters! (+PAX West)

Unknown — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! Exciting update today - following our Kickstarter, we have been working with a new human character artist! Her name is Chloe Ezra, formerly the character design lead at Brace Yourself Games (Rift of the Necrodancer, and other titles…)
Check out some shots of some of the updated characters:
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Our goal with the redesign was to maintain the game’s weird, goofy shapes and character vibes but also make it more graphic and clean. Up until now I have been the sole person in charge of all the human character art and animation… on top the game direction, programming, design, writing, et cetera… and with the rest of the game coming along so well visually, I was definitely starting to feel that I was not giving the character art all the time and energy it deserved. We couldn’t be happier with how the new characters are turning out. We hope you love them too!
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In other news, the team is going to be at PAX West this year! Feel free to come find us at booth #758, helpfully identified in this map:
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We’ll be there ourselves to say hi and chat! We’ll also have an updated demo with the new character art - and possibly other surprises?? Hope to see you there!
-Greg

Designing Hidden Information

Unknown — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hidden information has got to be one of the coolest trenches to explore in the vast sea of game design study. Put simply, it’s the information you don’t know in a game. In many card games, every player knows what’s been played on the board, but won’t know what’s waiting in their opponent’s hands. Chess is famous as a game with “no” hidden information… although partly what’s made the game thrilling for thousands of years is the fact that you can never know what’s going on in your opponent’s head.
It’s also a design topic that’s often invisible to players, because when the game isn’t presenting info to you, you don’t know that you don’t know it. What information is and isn’t visible to a player fundamentally shapes their experience of that game… in a certain light, all game design comes down to this subject in some way or another.
I had to dig deep into this trench as part of the design process for Beastieball!
Screenshot: Pokemon Showdown, an online Pokemon battle simulator</figcaption></figure>Beastieball’s design lineage is mostly from JRPGs, like Pokemon, which are generally very “squishy,”</a> creating lots of space for minor statistical variations that make every player’s experience feel unique. One of the simple ways that surfaces is in damage calculation. In most RPGs, like Final Fantasy, Pokemon, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, or heck, even Dark Souls… dealing damage can feel a bit like a slot machine, where the player inputs an attack, and then finds out how much damage their attack resulted in. Often there’s a bit of randomness added in, so that the same character hitting the same enemy over and over produces varying amounts of damage with each swing. 
This way of revealing the damage dealt is another form of hidden information, and one which contributes to the fun of those games. In Pokemon, for example, you’ll learn to intuit how much damage your attacks will do, being able to predict for example that your super-effective fire attack will probably take down the opposing grass-type in one hit. In high-skill Pokemon competitions, players compete with a vast amount of knowledge and intuition, being able to identify almost exactly how much damage any interaction between any two Pokemon will have - indeed, this ability to accurately foresee the outcome of any given attack is often what makes the difference between victory and defeat. Not to mention all the various “surprise” events that can occur which players also have to account for, like critical hits.
While understanding that this huge space of hidden information is part of what makes these games enjoyable, I really wanted to go in a different direction with Beastieball. Surprise is fun, but it’s also opaque; it’s frustrating when you lose to something you simply couldn’t see coming, like an unexpected critical hit, or a mysterious interaction with an enemy ability you haven’t seen before. More hidden information also means players spend more of their early experience with the game feeling lost and confused, not yet knowing how or why things are happening, and more than anything I wanted Beastieball to be accessible to new players.
Screenshot: Into the Breach by Subset Games</figcaption></figure>
This speaks to a trend I’ve observed with a lot of recent high-profile, designer-friendly games like Slay the Spire or Into the Breach. In the above Breach screenshot, while the player is selecting their actions for their turn, they can already see red arrows indicating exactly what every enemy will do; the two bugs highlighted in red will attack a player unit, and two new enemies are about to come up from underground on the right side of the board. Players are allowed to strategize their actions however they want already knowing exactly what their opponent will do. It creates a satisfying, crunchy</a> space almost more akin to a puzzle game than a strategy game. 
Of course, these games are brilliantly and carefully designed to exclude just the right amount of info, too; for example, you don’t know WHAT enemies are going to pop out of the ground, nor is it obvious that the opponent insect attacks will also light the forest under your feet on fire. Tell the player too much and the game feels disorienting with info, or perhaps hyper-linear, leaving no space for surprise, discovery or creativity.
Unlike Slay the Spire or Into the Breach, Beastieball needed to support player vs. player as well as single-player encounters (a totally separate rabbit hole for other articles…). This meant that we couldn’t outright tell the player what their opponent was going to do, because part of the fundamental design is that their opponent might be another player who is deciding their next action at the same time. But I did go out of my way to reveal as much as I could, down to revealing exactly how much damage any given attack will do before the player commits to it - and being able to see how much damage opponents can do to them, too.
Beastieball shows exactly how much damage your attack will do… to a point.</figcaption></figure>
Beastieball is still full of hidden information, though, most especially in the form of opponent actions. For example, while you might see your attack will do 100 damage when it lands, what you might not know is that your opponent is about to boost their defenses right before the attack connects, or put up a shield, negating the predicted damage. Players are allowed to see what all of their opponent’s options are, but they don’t know which one they’ll select, and this gap of knowledge leaves enough space for a universe of mind games that makes the game enriching and surprising.
A seredipitous result of this is how different single-player and multiplayer feel in Beastieball. For an average player, the game’s depth of options usually means it’s a challenge to find the “best” choice, and that makes for fun encounters that feel almost puzzle-like from turn to turn. But the opponent AI is quite logical, which means it’s usually quite predictable, effectively negating the existence of any hidden information. Opportunistic players can take advantage of that to claw a victory out even when they’re quite underpowered - I expect to see speedrunners crack the story mode wide open someday. Opponent players are a totally different beast, though - they can act intentionally unpredictably, creating surprising and chaotic matches where victory and defeat often come down to figuring out not what’s on the board, but what’s going on in your opponent’s head.
As with everything, there’s no “correct” way to design hidden information. It’s a problem with as many unique shapes as there are games. But I certainly had fun challenging myself to explore it further with this game. 


Designing Turn-based Volleyball for Beastieball

Unknown — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! I took a bit of a break from writing devlogs after funding our Kickstarter. We’ve been having fun diving back into Beastieball with newfound energy after finally revealing it and seeing all the love pour out :)
I’ve been holding a lot of thoughts about this game close to my chest for a long time. So many that it’s a bit daunting to actually sit down and try to unpack it all for a newsletter now! But, I think it’s time I talked a little bit about what inspired its unique turn-based volleyball system design. Many details really won’t make sense to dive into until the full game is available, and others still won’t all fit into one brief newsletter. This is a topic I’m passionate about and I expect I’ll return to it in future newsletters.
Why Turn-Based?</h2>
I’ve wanted to make a game about “building a team” for a LONG time; it’s a seed that I’d been cultiviating for nearly 10 years, slowly working out the practical details of how to build the game I was dreaming of.
One of the fundamental themes of “building a team” comes from learning about and deeply understanding each of the team members so that you can get the most out of their potential as individuals and in combination. Player’s success in my dream game had to be based on them forming this kind of understandning.
Screenshot from Nintendo Switch Sports</figcaption></figure>
In any typical sports or action game, success is based on player reflexes, and you always overcome challenges by “getting good” and mastering the action, physics or controls better. Even in games that combine action elements with RPG elements, like Dark Souls, or active-turn-based RPGs like Superstar Saga or Super Mario RPG, there’s a sort of friction; after losing to a difficult boss, you’re often caught between trying again with your current equipment and just playing a bit better, or backing off and grinding for a bit to get a statistical edge. These games are hugely popular and engaging, but I came to understand that in my game I wanted none of this friction. Success and failure had to come down to your understanding of your team, and how well you strategized around them. And so the game had to be turn-based!
I had figured out this much, but was stuck there in my thinking for a long time, because I couldn’t decide what turn-based thing I wanted the team to do. Obviously there are lots of turn-based war and battle games out there and it would have been easy enough to make another one of those, but I wanted to challenge myself to explore new directions, if only to make something more creatively stimulating for me.
Haikyuu</figcaption></figure>
I couldn’t figure it out until I saw the anime Haikyuu in 2020, which pretty much wrapped together all the themes of teamwork and personality chemistry that I’d been trying to synthesize in my head. And perhaps most importantly, it showed me that volleyball is an inherently turn-based sport, with each side equally trading control of the ball. Suddenly my idea for a team-building RPG was starting to make sense.
Mind Games</h2>
At this point I had an explosion of ideas and I was rapidly prototyping game designs. There were hundreds of decisions made about Beastieball around this time and I’d like to examine more of them in future articles, but for now I want to highlight one innovation that became a key feature for this game.
It started from thinking about what the essense of strategy is in the context of sports. Obviously there is the larger game plan; each player on a sports team has a specialty, ie. one player might be the designated point scorer and one might be there to play defense or disrupt the opponents. But in the micro, reflex, moment-to-moment decision making, it all comes down to mind games. If you can anticipate the very next thing your opponent will do, then you can move to block that choice and get an advantage; like making a block in volleyball, or intercepting a pass in basketball or soccer. High-level sports is not just about who is faster or stronger, but how effective you are at misdrecting your opponent and being able to move in a way they can’t anticipate or react to. I would say fighting games are best known for isolating and elevating this aspect of competitive games. I was interested in finding a way to make this part of the very DNA of Beastieball, giving players an opportunity to call out what their opponent will do, or misdirect them, to gain a statistical advantage.
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This was the basis for the lane-based targetting system. Rather than targetting an opponent, you hit the ball across a lane or row of the field, and the attack is received by the first Beastie standing in the ball’s path. Beastie’s field position has an impact on their power and defense, too; Beasties at the net do boosted damage but take extra damage, too. Altogether it adds just a tiny bit of complexity and ambiguity, enough to create space for mind games.
While you prepare you offense, the opponent always has the chance to take a defensive action which is revealed right before the attack lands. This creates opportunities for the opponent to swap out who is on the field, or reposition their board to change the outcome of the attack. Similarly, as the attacker, you’re trying to anticipate what the opponent might do to defend, and often it ends up being “better” to pick a “worse” attacking lane that your opponent is less likely to predict and defend against. 
The sports-like format of the game is limiting in some ways, because the pace of the game is so tightly constrained; exactly ONE attack is made every turn, no more, no less. This is different from other strategy games where you might have some turns where you stall out and build resources, and other turns where you attack from multiple fronts simultaeously. I tried to lean into this weird property of the game and turn it into a strength, by making every attack interaction have a bit of build-up and surprise factor to it. 
This is probably enough from me for now. If you haven’t played the demo on Steam and are curious to learn more about the specifics of the sport systems, we made this helpful explainer video that shows a little bit more of it.
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I’ll see you in the next newsletter! 

Kickstarter final 48 hours!

Unknown — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a whirlwind of a month since we first revealed Beastieball to the world!
Our Kickstarter campaign is in its FINAL HOURS</a> now! It’s your last chance to support us at this early stage and get your hands on all our backer-exclusive merch items. We also just revealed the final stretch goal… MOD SUPPORT
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We want to refine and release our dev tools to let players create their own custom Beasties including stats, plays and custom art! Sharing would be enabled through Steam Workshop, allowing you to browse and download other people’s custom Beasties to recruit to your own team. We’re excited about all the possibilities and to see what players do with our tools!
If you’re already a supporter, thank you so much! But if not, well… once this campaign is over, IT’S OVER. We aren’t doing slacker backer stuff or post-campaign whatevers… we’re a tiny team with no PR managers and we desperately want to get back to working on the game, lol! So when we say it’s your last chance, we really mean it! 
Check out the campaign HERE!</a>
This has been the hardest secret, the biggest game reveal, and the greatest outpouring of support we’ve ever experienced. It really has been an awesome journey for us. Stay tuned for future game news and dev updates!

Behind the Scenes: Designing Bildit!

Unknown — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Before we get into the art… I want to quickly mention that our Kickstarter is in its FINAL WEEK</a>! We’ve hit nearly every stretch goal, but there’s still a few left and time’s running out. This game will be possible thanks to the incredible support of our fans and friends. If you’re excited about the project but haven’t kicked in yet, now’s your last chance!
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This week it’s time to talk about Bildit, the final starter we finished! This one took us on a wild ride… hold on to your butts!
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Greg: This first drawing was done by Tia Rohrer in reaction to an early prompt for what eventually would become Servace - a “high energy net attacker”! It was Alexis’ idea to potentially use a Bilby for that prompt as an uncommon hopping/jumping animal that might leap and spike the ball. 
Tia: As I was looking through some of the established prompts on our list of ideas for Beasties, I saw how much this one didn’t have an exact feeling down besides energetic. I wanted to give a sort of spunky, go-getter feel from something that appears so small! It was a fun concept, and it’s super cool to see where it went next.
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Greg: Later on Twarda asked if she could pick up the idea. She wanted to combine Bilbies with Aardvarks to highlight their digging abilities! These designs were really charming but didn’t have that energetic personality we were looking for…
Twarda: I really enjoyed the simplicity of the concept Tia did and I was eager to try out the attacker-theme. However soon I realized the blueish fur colour of bilbies is just too cool and we agreed to move on with it as a starter.
Greg: At this point we had ideas for an amphibious (pink) Spirit starter and a bird (yellow) Body starter, but no (blue) Mind starter - which we’d been thinking should be a mammal to round out the starter roster. These sketches fit the box perfectly, so we decided to rethink them as a 3-stage Mind starter!
Greg: With the other starters being themed around musicals and sports, we needed a strong theme for this one too. We thought making them “nerdy” would be a good way to distinguish them, but it was hard to find a visually inspiring theme in that category.
Alexis: I really tried to come up with some kind of interesting math-based inspiration, but I don’t think I’m enough of a math enthusiast to pull that off right now. Plus it felt like something that could be really really cool, but it would be cool in a sort of subtle way; which didn’t quite feel right for a starter Beastie.
Greg: We landed on gaming - ie. Chess and card games, as a visual theme.
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Greg: These were Twarda’s first ideas based on the “chess” theme. We imagined the bilby as a little pawn! Naturally they’d become a bishop/knight and a queen/king as they matured, which all felt like a strong visual direction to build on.

Twarda: On top of that, we also had some ideas how they would use their ears as a startle display, or to communicate with their kind. First drafts sprouted a timid, but smug, little guy with flashy ears. Their closed eyes emphasize their focus on listening to their surroundings.
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Greg: Because the pawn theme felt like it wasn’t giving us enough, we mixed in some other ideas. We thought about styling them as an Entomologist - a studier of insects. We imagined they would live in a hierarchical underground society similar to an ant colony, and we gave them ear patterns that were meant to mimic moth wings, while also suggesting card suits (with the diamonds). The ear patterns were always either red or black, signifying the card suit theme further. At this point, at the time, we felt the design was complete.
Greg: …But after a lot of reflection much later on we decided to revisit it. The Chess theme hadn’t been sitting right with us, for the simple reason that bilbies are an Australian species that are endangered (or in the case of one bilby species, extinct) due to colonization. So it didn’t feel right to have a bilby creature whose theme evoked European royalty, even vaguely! We went back to the drawing board with the chess/gaming themes discarded.
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Greg: We looked for ways to make them “nerdier” - give them glasses-looking patterns around their eyes, and change their focus to be on drawing and note-taking. We thought they might use their ear as a pen to catalog information. That’s also why we had the ears made much bigger, so they could reach the ground to scratch notes in the dirt.

Twarda: I explored various brush-like and pen-like options, but none of them either looked plausible or made sense. At one point Bildit was wearing an unfold-able turban made out of its ears!
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Alexis: Visually, I love these so much! I think the dip-pen ears are SO cool. But I couldn’t picture how they would actually use them in a practical way, and more importantly, I was starting to realize a bigger issue. We were theming these creatures around research, and visually communicating that theme with writing implements, implying that they have a written language of some sort. What would that language be? What do they write on, and where do they keep it? What do they write about? How long have they had a written language? Are they the only beastie who records things in this way? Why? It felt like it raised a ton of questions, and took this creature in a direction that didn’t really fit within the realm of what beasties are.
Greg: It still didn’t sit quite right. We had spent a long time trying to combine bilbies with themes that simply didn’t mesh with them.
Alexis: We wanted to find a direction that celebrated the strengths of bilbies, and by this point I REALLY wanted to come to Twarda with a clear direction forward. She did so much great design work on these; the only reason they weren’t working was because of our prompts.
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Alexis: I went off and did some sketches around the theme of digging, tunneling and construction, based on the shapes and colours Twarda had been using.
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Greg: Twarda sent us this idea back after playing with Alexis’ design ideas. A strong new personality was starting to emerge with its nervous/anxious/overthinking energy that set it apart from the other 2 starters. The “digging” theme was harder to convey visually, but it was a much more natural fit. After going through so many iterations, it was hard to know if we were actually getting anywhere with it - but these drawings were exciting to us and felt like they could be the one!
Alexis: We also, importantly, had a clear idea for how their theming and story would play out as they grow!
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Greg: I think it’s safe to say that Bildit was the most difficult Beastie for us to design so far. 
When you look at a final design, it’s easy to imagine that it simply popped out of the ether looking like that. But the reality is always much slower and harder and more difficult. On this journey creating Beastieball, I’ve been shocked by how many times we had concept drawings that looked great to me, only to throw them out and work our way to something even better. But, seeing so many folks falling in love with Bildit after we finally got to reveal them was hugely cathartic - and it definitely made all this thought and iteration feel like it was worth it. 
Thanks for reading!
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Behind the Scenes: Designing Kichik!

Unknown — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week we’re here to talk about Kichik, the body-focused emu chick monster athlete from Beastieball. Beastieball’s Kickstarter campaign is now in its final two weeks (!!!) with just a handful of remaining stretch goals to hit. If you’re excited about sports monsters and/or want to get your hands on some of the exclusive items we made for this campaign, then now’s the time…!
Support us on KICKSTARTER!</a>
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Unlike the other starters, Kichik was mostly designed just by Alexis, our Beastie director and animator. Alexis always has a hand in every design, but many are driven just by her - like this one, which was a bit special for her.
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Alexis: I had always planned to do some sort of strong-legged flightless bird beastie, though I wasn’t sure exactly what their theme was going to be, other than the vague direction of ‘strong legs, kicks ball, big feet’. I started trying to cartoon an emu chick, figuring out what to emphasize, and thinking about how it would move and hit a ball. I kind of love the big-floppy-wings version, but it felt like they were getting in the way of their legs, and making them feel very duck-like.
Greg: The game starts by having the player choose their first Beastie from a set of 3 - this is something Pokemon does too, and it’s frankly good game design that we couldn’t improve on. You want players to choose their own Beasties so that they feel a personal connection to them; and 3 is the perfect number of choices (just enough to have a “favorite”, but just few enough to not be paralyzing). So before even a single design was done, we knew we needed 3 “starter” Beasties at some point. Once I saw these sketches, they seemed like a natural choice as a “starter Beastie” since they perfectly encapsulate the “sports + animals” theme of the entire game - most designs get a lot more loose with that premise. 
Alexis: These were all done (I think?) before we’d brought other concept artists on board, so I was very much still figuring out what constituted a beastie! It’s hard to know when a design is done at the best of times, and harder when you don’t have much to compare it to. These are still rough drawings, but even considering that, they look a little underbaked in hindsight!
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Alexis: I had originally been going for sort of a kids’ soccer team outfit, with a shorts-like body shape and a vertical stripe along the side. The feather on the head is a nod to a theme that appears in their grown-up form, which… To be frank, doesn’t really come across, even if you know what that form is haha! I felt like it wasn’t quite finished, but wasn’t sure where to go with it, so I stopped looking at it for a while and focused on other designs.
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Alexis: Once we had Axolati finished and Bildit started, I had a good basis for comparison! …..aaaaand it was pretty clear right away that Kichik needed stronger shapes, simpler and more decisive details, and a clearer indication of their theming! And maybe a little more colour.
Greg: Making the stripes yellow here was my idea! We had established a color theme of blue, pink and yellow for the key types in the game (Mind, Spirit, Body) and I wanted to highlight Kichik’s focus with the colors more. Alexis has a tendency to make every creature brown or gray because she prefers naturalistic colors, whereas I’m all about oversaturated neons. Somewhere between our preferences is a happy medium.
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Alexis: I liked the personality of the original design, so I tried to iterate on the shapes and proportions while keeping that feeling the same. I made the shorts a lot more obvious, moved their leg detail down so it didn’t break up the shorts’ silhouette, brought the wings back in a simpler form, and simplified their head feathers to match the scale and shape of the wing feathers. Feet got a lot bigger, and generally speaking I tried to make them look just a tiny bit more grown-up, as the previous version felt very babylike alongside the others.
Greg: Because they’re a starter, many decisions are made specifically to make them stand out next to the other 2 creatures. So with Axolati being such a perfect round circle, we decided to make Kichik more square-like and the last one more triangular. It helped us hone in on what made each one unique - squaring off Kichik’s shapes made them feel more strong and solid.
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Alexis: I definitely have a tendency to lean towards more organic animal shapes and colours when designing a creature. This game is giving me a lot of opportunities to recognize that, and to try to push myself towards stronger shape language and bolder decisions!
Greg: It’s amazing how, even with a simple design, there are so many subtle considerations!
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See you next time, where we’ll talk about designing everyone’s favorite blue bilby, Bildit!

Behind the Scenes: Designing Axolati

Unknown — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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Every Beastie takes a ton of thought and iteration to design! Today we wanna show you our process designing Axolati, the spirit-focused starter Beastie. As this was one of our earliest designs, we learned a lot along the way about how we wanted to approach designing Beasties in general.
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Greg: When we first recruited concept artists we had a long list of one-line Beastie ideas to throw at them. One which was special to me was “Musical frog! Handles the ball with its legs only?!” I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I wanted but I knew it had to be a frog.

Tia: I thought a bit about Flamenco and the strong poses associated with it, along with ballet. For more “vocal” like designs, I couldn’t choose between something that was excited and chirping happily like a frog, or a dramatic Opera singer, or one that sings so sweetly like an angel!

For the Tadpole, or stage 1, I had thought about it not having much vocal skill built up yet, but still liked musical things and dancing. So why not an energetic little guy that loves to bounce around, and maybe sounds like a maraca when it shakes? There’s also a few “unconfident” little tadpole concepts here to reflect the vocals not being built up enough yet, or overcoming its shyness to sing.
Greg: I fell in love with these sketches. Had it just been up to me, one of these frogs would have been put straight into the game as-is. But I had a lot to learn from this process. When making Chicory, we had made 100+ different animal characters, and I thought Beastieball would be like doing that again but with some extra color and animation. But in this game every creature has the potential to be someone’s “main character” and we realized we needed to put in a lot more effort to communicate strong themes for each one.
Alexis: Tia’s poses and designs are always bursting with charm! I loved a lot about these, but they all felt like they were missing specificity; they are all very appealing frog designs, but felt like they were relying too strongly on posing to communicate the secondary theme; which is understandable, since we hadn’t given Tia a particularly specific secondary theme! It’s a tricky balance to get right, even with a more firm starting direction. We want the Beasties to feel like natural creatures, but not just like cartoon animals; we also want the additional themes to be visible, but not so obvious that they make the Beastie look like they couldn’t have evolved naturally into that shape.
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Greg: There are a ton more sketches that were done here as we chased something we all liked. We honed in on the strong “dancer” poses and tried out a ton of ideas in that direction. This is just one example of how weird it got on like, iteration #6.

Tia: When in doubt, throw some shapes down to figure things out. This one scares me a bit… But at least it would’ve had a strong silhouette! I actually am afraid of frogs and toads, but looking up images of them was an okay thing for me to do. Trying to find weird ways to stylize a frog can be pretty hard when they’re already so simple! 
Alexis: I had no idea you were afraid of frogs and toads!!! It was around this point that I felt like we definitely needed to come up with a stronger core theme before we continued iterating. This is my first time directing, so maybe someone more experienced would’ve recognised this sooner! 
Greg: We all got burnt out on frogs and it went into hibernation for a while. But I later came back and put together a pitch of 3 designs based on sketches Tia had already done - altogether it would be an entirely new 3-stage Beastie with a singing theme. If it went well, I was hoping we could make them into a starter Beastie - a crucial milestone for us, because at this point we hadn’t nailed down any of those yet. At this point we also added Harlow to the mix on this design.

Tia: I was sooooo thankful and super excited to work with Harlow on this Beastie together. I was rather jammed up with this concept, and she really took it in a whole new direction and elevated the concept as a whole.
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Greg: The “final” stage (which we don’t want to spoil yet) was the first one we completed. Its design went through its own lifespan of iterations building up from ideas Tia had first put down. Harlow piloted it, with the rest of us throwing in suggestions and sketches. Finally Tia and Harlow came up with their ultimate form together!
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Greg: From there it was time to go back and re-think the first stage. Using some of Tia’s earliest drawings as a base, Harlow tried out a variety of ideas! We were still playing with species at this point - with “frog” as a starting point, it still felt on theme to branch out into tadpoles, axolotls, etc. Beastie designs are rarely inspired by just 1 animal.

Harlow: Tia is a tough act to follow! Now that we knew what we wanted Axolati to become, the next step was to find the key shape language that would bring out the creature’s personality, allowing all but the most necessary details to fall out of focus. A lot of the “evolution lines” in Beastieball are created with a general narrative/emotional arc in mind, so my experimentation here had a lot to do with trying to find that perfect “point A”. 
Tia: 3’s face still makes me laugh. It’s so happy and energetic! I absolutely adored the amount of personality that was pumped into all of these!
Harlow: 6a and 6b were, at the time, my favorite contenders. In retrospect it’s impossible to imagine an Axolati that is so shy and reserved, but the “stage crew/theatre tech” look felt so cute to me.
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Greg: It was getting to the point where every drawing was fabulous and we were having a harder and harder time picking between them. The “singing” theme proved to be way stronger inspiration - for this variation we wanted to highlight that theme moreso with the character design details. Harlow did an awesome job integrating it! This was the final set of variations we tried out before saying the D design here was the one.
Harlow: When finding the final set of ‘accessories’ I wanted to find the right blend of cohesion and anticipation of what Axolati will become! Each of these final four concepts have a little of both, but D wound up being the best mix. I can’t say too much yet, but I’m proud of the little ways we tie this line together, while allowing each form to feel like their own.
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Alexis: I did a little tie-down sketch, adjusting the proportions alongside the other (still WIP!) starters. It was important that they felt like they belonged in a group together, and like they were roughly the same ‘age’. Looking back, Kichik feels very out of place here! But we’ll get to that design later. 
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Greg: The last step is coming up with the character poses.
Harlow: In my experience, the pose step is either the most fun or the most fraught. Making utilitarian poses kind of requires a familiarity with both the personality of the beastie and the physics of their body. Axolati was one of the easiest pose pages. (not only because they’re just a funny little ball!) Finding ways to express depth and chubbiness on such a simple shape is a fun exercise, and I spent so much of my drawing time grinning ear to ear.

Tia: When I first saw these, I gasped super audibly. The personality.. The strength and joy of this little Beastie… It all was shining through in such a spectacular way. It’s so cute! The Spike pose and Cheer fills me with joy. Every iteration that came from this collaboration was so cool, and something I certainly couldn’t have imagined at the end!! It was a lot of fun to see it come to life.
Alexis: I love these so much. The most important thing we try to do when posing Beasties is to communicate something about their personality with every pose, and Harlow totally achieved that here. 
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Alexis: We ended up making this Spike into the Cheer pose because it was soo cheerful, and coming up with a headbutt Spike instead. For the in-game drawings, I tried to keep all the charm of these, but for gameplay clarity I rotated them a little to match the angle of the idle.
Greg: I also want to call out the name Axolati, which I proposed at around this time. The “joke” probably isn’t very obvious, but it’s “axolotl” + “so-la-ti”... a solfege reference for our little singing friend. 
Harlow: I had no idea that was the reason behind the name until now. 0_0
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Thanks for joining us! This was a journey that we took over months… hopefully it gives you some idea of just how much thought and effort we put into each concept. Axolati was the first starter design we finished. Next week we’ll look at Kichik, the one we finished next!

Kickstarter update: new stretch goals, new rewards!

Unknown — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello!!!!!! It has been a stunning first week for our Kickstarter. We hit our ambitious goal in the first few days and are already soaring past 110% funded... thank you so much to everyone for your support!!
New Rewards coming soon...</h1>
We've heard from a few people disappointed that all the high-tier rewards sold out so quickly. Our surprise Kickstarter launch caught a lot of people off guard! To help mitigate that, we're pleased to announce that we'll release a new batch of high-tier rewards manually at 9AM PST on June 24... 1 week from today. If you have been itching to get a high-tier reward, please set a reminder and be ready to grab 'em, because after this we don't plan to add any more!
The exact numbers are subject to change, but this is what we are planning:
3 additional "Get in the Game!" slots (CAD $1000)</li>
3 additional "Become a Coach!" slots (CAD $1500)</li>
A brand new reward: Team Portrait, priced at CAD $900 with 10 slots. At this reward tier, Alexis (the Beastie director!) will draw a portrait of your in-game coach along with your team of favorite Beasties - up to 5. This could be done as soon as the campaign ends, but we expect most players will want to wait until they've played a full adventure and have a portrait to commemorate their unique final team. This reward will include all the tiers below it, including designing a custom clothing item!</li></ul>
Stretch Goals Update!</h1>
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We're thrilled to have hit Ironman mode today! Randomizer-Ironman is real... we can't wait to see what crazy runs ya'll get on. The next goal is Online Matchmaking, which will let you search out opponents to play online with skill-based matchmaking!
We're also pleased to reveal a new stretch goal... The Far Out. This rugged badlands/desert-themed area would be packed with new Beasties, characters and quests to discover, making your adventure that much bigger. We've been forced to shelve many of our favorite Beastie concepts because they didn't quite fit into the areas we had planned out for the base game... with this bonus area unlocked we'll have the opportunity to pack in lots of those ideas!
Stretch Goals and Development Schedule</h1>
We realize this new goal promises a fair amount of new content, which can be nerve-wracking for folks that have seen other large kickstarters fail to deliver on their biggest promises. We want to be clear about this: in order to make sure our dev schedule doesn't dramatically change, we are planning bonus content like this as a post-release item. 
The response to this game has been honestly incredible, and at this point there's no doubt for us that we'll be pouring our hearts into this project and trying to get everything we want into this game whether the stretch goals are met or not. However, whether or not we hit the goals will likely have an impact on our plans and timing. For example, content updates might need to be released as paid DLC to help cover production costs, rather than as a free update or part of our initial release. 
Also worth mentioning: all the prices we list are distorted from reality because in truth, we are covering a lot of cost through our own savings, and only using Kickstarter funds to supplement that. 
Last Notes</h1>
We've been floored by the positive response to our demo. If you haven't already, and you have any lingering questions about how the game feels overall, we'd encourage you to check it out</a>! 
Thank you again to everyone for your huge support :) Coming up soon we'd like to share more behind-the-scenes updates that detail more about how this game is being made. Please look forward to them!
- Greg

Free Demo now on Steam!

Unknown — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

You can now play a free Beastieball demo on Steam!!!
This demo showcases the beginning of the story, the basics of the sport and lots of cool little creatures who will play with you. We hope you love it!!!
Play the demo for free HERE!</a>


Our next game BEASTIEBALL is on Kickstarter!

Unknown — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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Support us on Kickstarter HERE!</a>
YES. We’re making a turn-based volleyball RPG. YES, it’s a sport played only by creatures called Beasties. And YES, the Beasties become friends by playing together. 
I am incredibly proud to finally share this project with you. It’s the most ambitious and crazy thing I’ve ever done. Please support our Kickstarter! And if you think the game is cool then tell your friends about it too! 

Our next game is BEASTIEBALL

Unknown — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is the most difficult secret I’ve ever kept in my life. Our next game is a turn-based volleyball RPG called BEASTIEBALL which you coach a sports team of Beasties!! YES!!!!
We just revealed a teaser of the game at Day of the Devs. Watch the full segment here!
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We’ve got a Kickstarter coming very soon… and you can also find us on Steam, Twitter, etc. 
Check it out here!</a>
Not only that, but we have a ton more news coming very soon. Like, SATURDAY. Join us for the Wholesome Direct at 9AM PST</a> for our next big reveal. :) 
See you then!

Game reveal & watch party tomorrow!

Unknown — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Our new project will be unveiled at Day of the Devs tomorrow!
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Watch the stream and get details here: https://www.summergamefest.com/</a>
If you want to watch and cheer along with us, we’ll be hosting a watch party in our Discord. Here: http://discord.gg/BCrVZQNfwu</a>
It’s gonna be a riot. We’re bouncing off the walls with excitement :) See you tomorrow!

Chicory is now available on Game Pass!

Unknown — Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What’s up gamers! If you’re a Microsoft Game Pass subscriber you can now access Chicory: A Colorful Tale on XBox consoles or on Windows!

This release also comes with a lot of new fixes and localizations to Japanese, Chinese and Korean (!!!!)
We have been working on this new version of the game for a long time and are still working on getting it out on every other platform. It will be available everywhere as soon as possible. 
Be seeing you in the Picnic Province!
-Chicory team

Game Musings - Quest Logs pt. 2

Unknown — Thu, 25 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a sequel to my previous post on quest logs</a> because… apparently I have more to say about them! I wanted to talk a little bit about how quest logs impact how a game is written, for better or worse.
The simple fact is, players always need to know what to do next. If they don’t have some guidance towards their current goal, the game quickly becomes frustrating. Quest logs fulfill this need automatically.
So in games that don’t have quest logs… you wind up writing a LOT of hints into the game text. This was absolutely true in Chicory; I’d estimate than about 1/3rd or more of all the text in the game was gameplay instruction and quest hints. A quest-giving character can’t just tell you what they want; they have to remind you what they wanted every time you talk to them. And if you do a partial step, they have to recognize that and then give you the next partial hint. For every step of every quest, for every character. And then when you finish the quest, a clear resolution and “thank you for doing that!” so you know you’ve completed it. I put a lot of effort in to weave all this information naturally into each character’s story and unique voice, but beneath every conversation there’s always this rigid structure.
There are definitely times where I bemoaned these limitations. Characters can never “just say something” - I had to think about what impression it will give the player, and whether they will mistake any passing comment as an actionable item. But, there’s also huge benefits to this in the long run, since players are actively engaged in all the text because it also contains all the info they need to beat the game. Even if flavor is only doled out between practical information, at least you know players are receiving it.
Quest logs provide a tool for helping the player sort what’s relevant, so the writing has a lot more freedom. It doesn’t have nearly as much responsibility to relate to or connect with other elements of the game… so often it winds up becomes a lot more “book-like.” Indeed, it makes a lot more sense for games to be made this way when the teams are larger and writers aren’t working directly with the rest of the team; quest logs help paper over the little inconsistencies that can fall into the project from that kind of environment. 
When done really well, the existence of “writing” and “quests” as two separate “systems” in the game actually can create really fun opportunities for new storytelling. For example, imagine an NPC who says “I heard Bob say something really rude about your friend,” and then you get a new side quest pop up: “Teach Bob a lesson.” That kind of little joke/interaction gives you a satisfying bit of characterization. In a log-less game like Chicory, I’d have to heavy-handedly make the protagonist respond by saying “I better go teach that guy a lesson…” and instead of being a little joke it would just be kind of boring and straightforward.
There’s so much to get into! I find myself wanting to keep saying more about this but let’s leave it there. The important thing to remember is that no solution fits every project. Every decision you make as a creator always offers benefits as well as costs; the more aware you are of them, the better you can decide what solution best fits your goals.


Introducing... the Official Chicory Artbook!

Unknown — Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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Check it out HERE!</a>
It’s been a long time coming. We’re proud to reveal this 189-page official digital artbook for Chicory :) We had promised to (and wanted to!) make this for Kickstarter backers… but what started off as a seemingly simple project became a long journey for us. We collected art and notes from many years of development and worked with a fabulous layout artist (Hayley Ng!) to make a professional final package.
There are concept drawings, sketches, articles, interviews, never-before-seen characters and all manner of juicy process details to uncover in here. We wanted to give fans a new peek into the world, but we also wanted to share our process in a way that we think any creator can get inspired by.
We’re very proud of this and are excited to finally share it with you all!!! We hope you love it.


Game Musings - Tears of the Kingdom

Unknown — Thu, 18 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[I won’t spoil any story details or game mechanics here which aren’t apparent from the trailers.]
This is a new format for the newsletter, but I thought it would be fun once in a while to talk about big game releases or interesting things I’ve been playing. I don’t often get to candidly share my thoughts on games… every game that releases is momentous and I generally like to focus on promoting things I think are cool. But, it’s also fun to talk candidly, and I can get a lot more nuanced here than on Twitter. (lol).
So anyway Tears of the Kingdom is a bizarre thing.
Firstly I’m struck by the technical achievement of it all. It boggles my mind that the game works so smoothly. Every individual part of its system is something that has been done somewhere before - building physics machines, rewinding simulations, crafting weapons… but I’ve never seen all of those things done all at once and in such a sprawling, open-world game where everything can interact. For example, it’s crazy that every single physics object can be rewound individually - but even cazier that they continue to interact with correct physics while they’re rewinding and create new interactions. Gluing wheels and planks together, playing it all forward and backward, while having your player character climbing all over it at any angle, and it all works seamlessly and feels the way you expect it… I don’t think I can put into words how impressive it is. It terrifies me to think that they might not even have done anything that “smart,” per se, and instead just had to work crazy hard and methodically test SO MUCH to get it this stable. 
The flip side is just how finnicky and janky the game is, overall - I can’t avoid mentioning this. It’s not a flaw, but an inevitable outcome of a game that works the way Tears of the Kingdom does. The player is given so much freedom and so much fine-tune control to do so many things at so many times that you can’t help but spend a lot of time experimenting and building ideas that don’t end up working. Nothing is as simple as bombing a cracked wall or hitting a switch… solving even the most basic puzzle takes some amount of thinking and labor to put together a solution. I adore that they took the game in this direction and trusted players with something so overwrought, but it’s undoubtedly a weird choice that will be a turn-off for many that enjoy what Zelda usually offers.
But, ultimately, I think a lot of what works in this game is only possible because it’s Zelda. If I imagine someone making a game like this from scratch in a new IP, I think players would have way less patience for it and would bounce off the steep learning curve and strange open-ended structure. But here, the familiar world of Zelda is a perfect canvas that this strange and beautiful thing is built on top of. I think that’s part of what gives you a hidden joy to fly over (and skip) a vast stretch of the world with your hand-crafted airplane, or to catapult a Korok across a canyon… these places and people are familiar, and that makes it extra fun to hold so many crowbars that can pry it open and pull it apart. 
(I’d be really curious how this game feels to someone who’s never played a Zelda game before.)
It takes huge confidence and boldness to make something like this with an established and beloved world. I respect and admire every decision they made here. And I’m excited to keep playing it!!!!
(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.</a>)

News on our next game is coming soon...!

Unknown — Tue, 16 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’re very excited to finally show you what we’ve been cooking :)
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Our first reveal will be during the Day of the Devs stream at roughly 2PM PST on June 8th, directly following the Summer Games Festival. Details on the show are here: https://www.summergamefest.com/</a>
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Following that, an additional announcement will be made as part of the Wholesome Direct at 9AM PST on June 10th. Details on that are here: http://wholesomegames.com</a>
If you want to watch and cheer along with us, we’ll be hosting watch parties both events in our Discord here: http://discord.gg/BCrVZQNfwu</a>
…Wish us luck!
-Greg

Game Musings - Quest logs

Unknown — Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I think Quest Logs are really interesting. They’re something I tend to appreciate as a player, and I often see user reviews complaining when an open-ended game doesn’t have one. However… I also am trying to never put one into any game I ever make.
When I talk about “quest logs” I’m talking about a game menu that maintains a clear record of all your current objectives and “quests” - the player’s active to-do list. Often this will keep a record of past finished quests too. On paper, this seems like a straightforwardly good idea. Having a quest log means players always know what they need to do, and they know where to go to find that information if they forget, like for example if they haven’t played the game in a couple weeks. Having info organized like this can be especially indispensible for larger games with many overlapping tasks.
The hidden downside of these logs are that they tokenize every interaction playrs can have with the story. For example, imagine meeting a character in a town who mentions offhandedly that their cat is missing and they’ve been feeling sad about it. Details like that can help enrich the world by giving you the feeling that other character have their own lives and problems going on alongside your own. But a player might naturally wonder whether that information was just for flavor, or whether it’s a problem that they are meant to solve - a quest to find the missing cat. A quest log system makes this completely unambiguous; if you suddenly get a popup saying “New Quest: Find the missing cat,” then you know now that it’s a problem to solve, and if the game has a quest log but doesn’t log this as a quest, then you know that it wasn’t meant to be a task for you.
If something is a task for the player, then they naturally will pay more attention to it. The unfortunate other side to this is, if something is “just flavor” and isn’t actually tied to any task or reward for the player then they’ll tend to ignore it. It’s very easy to get into a mode where you’re simply clicking through all the dialogue and interactions you can have with townspeople to see what actually lands in your Quest log as a to-do item, and then focusing on that in order to progress through the game. (I’ve done this in pretty much every game with a quest log). 
Amgiuity is “worse” for the player in the sense that they don’t always clearly know what they’re supposed to be doing, but “better” in that it actually forces them to pay more attention to the story of the game, and make their own inferences about what’s important. If there’s a missing cat the player can find, but they aren’t explicitly told that, then they get to have the thrill of finding that out organically, and the satisfaction of remembering that townsperson who said her cat was missing. But of course, it could be bad if it wasn’t really intended to be a quest, but a player wrongfully assumes that it is, and gets frustrated looking for a cat they’ll never find. Or perhaps worse, they *have* to find a missing cat to beat the game, but they missed the hidden cue about it when they talked to that one townsperson and now they’ll never figure out what they need to do without looking it up…
All games have a hierarchy of what’s important and what isn’t, whether that hierarchy is exposed to the player or not. Athough I love the convenience of always knowing what my tasks are, I value games that allow space for ambiguity. Ultimately it makes for a more believable world, full of potential surprises and depths that you can uncover only through your own judgement and curiosity.
There’s a lot more I could say about this, including how we approached this problem in Chicory (a sprawling, sidequest-filled, open-ended game with no formal quest log…) but I think I’ve already rambled enough in this one.
(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.</a>)

New Studio & Official Discord

Unknown — Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hi! This is something I’ve been working on in the background for a long time. Introducing… Wishes Unlimited!
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Up until now I’ve simply credited my & my collaborators’ names as the “official developer” of each project I’ve directed. I really liked that more personal style but it had a lot of limitations and challenges, too. Going forward I intend to use this company interchangably with my own name to indicate a project made by me and my friends. 
As part of this reveal we’ve created, for the first time, an official Discord community which is comprised of all the different games and worlds I’ve had a hand in… and it will be a home for future ones too. Whether you’re a fan of Wandersong, Chicory, my older titles, or want to be a part of whatever comes next, let me formally invite you to come hang out with us here!
Join us on Discord!</a>
We’re very excited for what’s coming later!
-Greg

Game Musings - Setting goals in open worlds

Unknown — Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Open-world type games are all the rage lately. I’ve recently played a lot of long-anticipated such titles like Tchia or the most recent Pokemon games, and I’m also eagerly awaiting the new Zelda game too. But making an open-world game is a process full of pitfalls! I wanted to share just one bit of wisdom I’ve gained from experience.
When making open-ended exploration titles, my intuition was simply to build lots of space filled with things to do, and present it all to player equally and let them decide how to approach it. The thinking was to inundate the player with options, so that they’d feel empowered and free.
But this actually had the opposite effect and made players feel totally lost, and ultimately, bored. Because if everything is equally important, then nothing is actually important. And without clear guidance on what they should be doing next, players quickly lose interest. Even when the answer was “you can do lots of things - just poke around and you’ll find fun stuff,” it’s just not a satisfying answer.
What I found works very well is to set very, very clear goals for the player with very, very clear steps toward progress. Make sure the player ALWAYS knows what the next step is, and/or has easy access to find out.
It turns out that in open-world experiences, it’s not actually fun for things to be completely open. What is fun is to know what you’re supposed to do, and then having the choice of doing it or doing something else instead. Players who want to explore and “break the system” know what to avoid, and get the satisfiying feeling of playing outside the intended bounds of the game (even when they actually aren’t). And when players want an easy, direct checklist of things to do to move towards progress, the game offers that as well. I’ve found that when games offer both of these “modes” of experience, they are way more satisfying for way more people—because, it turns out, just about everybody feels both of these needs at different times, and when they have the freedom to switch how they’re approaching the game they’ll tend to stick with it longer and not get exhausted as easily.
There’s a lot more I can say about this topic, but I will leave it here for now. Open-world style games are really, really fun to play and really, really hard to make—I’m excited to share more thoughts on them in the future.
(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.</a>)

Game Musings - In-game editors

Unknown — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Every project I’ve worked on for the last 8 or so years has started with creating an in-game editor. Even though I use Game Maker Studio 2, which ostensibly offers a nice visual interface and its own built-in “Room” editor (kind of a level editor), I strongly prefer to build my own. And I always start over and build it from scratch for each project.
I find the process extremely useful because the process of figuring out what the game is always goes hand in hand with figuring out how I want to make it. I care a lot about keeping my work process fun and creative - and ultimately, no universal game editor or level editor will ever be as powerful for building your specific project as one which you make yourself. 
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For example, this was the Chicory level editor. Although the levels were pretty simple in that game, it still added a lot of character to the game that they were created in this custom, toy-like editor. I used the same system for “painting” levels that players used to “paint” in the game, so there’s a certain harmony of shapes in what players can create and how the world is shaped. Practically speaking, this also kept everything aligned to the same grid so that player drawings are always naturally aligned with the level geometry. It took a fair bit of time to set this up at first, but in the long term it made it so fast and easy to create more content for the game that it definitely sped things up overall.
Another hidden benefit is that working this way skips the process of building your game. (Ie. the time it takes for the game to actually start after you hit “play” from the game editor you’re using). Being able to flip back and forth between editing and playing the game instantaneously without restarting is a HUGE advantage for time and just general mentality/flow. When playtesting the game with a friend in-person, if they ran into an issue, I could just lean over, open up the editor right in front of them, fix the issue, then put them back in the game - all within seconds. 
The joy I get from building editors definitely grew a lot after I first played Super Mario Maker, which replicates this experience for building 2D Mario levels. It opened my eyes to how fun it could be to make games, and I’ve held that in my mind ever since. 
(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.</a>)

We finally made a Chicory plush

Unknown — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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Check it out!</a>
This has been a long time coming!!! Getting Pizza’s weird, beany head and body shape just right took some real time and effort. Fangamer also went above and beyond with cool features, like magnets in the hand + brush to make them all stick to each other, and, yes… the entire plush is made of washable, markerable material so you can go nuts and draw all over them. It’s kind of cute, and kind of deranged, and we love it.
Thank you Fangamer for this incredible opportunity. I genuinely don’t know how many of these they’ll make or how long they’ll be available so don’t hesitate to check it out.
(I migrated all my newsletters to this new consolidated one. If you only want updates on certain topics you can edit your subscription here.</a>)

Game Musings - Finding your game's core

Unknown — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a re-framing of advice that I once got from my beloved friend Maddy Thorson, but it also rapidly advanced how I approached my projects, so I wanted to share it.
The advice is essentially just that, when planning out your game, you should learn what the core idea of your game is - the central pillar that defines what your goal with the project is. Knowing that makes iteration and prototyping easier because any time you’re trying out a new idea for your project, you can ask whether or not it contributes to the core idea of your game. If it doesn’t support the core idea, then you can easily discard it.
For example, in Chicory: A Colorful Tale, I wanted to make a game where players could be creative and draw freely as their main method of interacting with the world. I tried a lot of ideas early on that broke this rule. At one point I thought the game might be about the world missing bridges or other landmarks which the player had to fill in. But this made the game into a simple lock-and-key “fill in the blanks” experience where your actual drawings were meaningless, and instead were a means to a more important end (replace the missing landmarks). This led me to the idea that the world has lost its color, so that your drawings themselves were the “solution” to the problem in the game, and not a means of fixing some other problem. There were a lot of possible “drawing games” that Chicory could have become which would have been perfectly OK, but by focusing on the experience I wanted players to have, I narrowed in on exactly what pieces the game needed to have and which it didn’t.
Lately, I feel like I’ve met more and more designers working on projects that don’t have a clear core. Sometimes this is because the game is very complex, like an elaborate simulation game whose “fun” only becomes clear through many overlapping systems all working in harmony. Other times it’s because the game is coming from a larger team with a lot of different cool ideas mashed together, or it’s based on a really cool story/visual aesthetic that shows really well on social media but doesn’t easily lend itself to generating player experiences. As powerful hardware and game making tools have gotten more accessible, games have gotten bigger over the years, and I think that’s had a negative effect on creators’ ability to hone in on what the goal of their project is. It’s easy for a project to spend years going in circles as it picks up ideas like a Katamari ball, only to drop most of those ideas once it finds its core and starts going towards an end point. (Or, worse, never finishes. Or carries all those ideas to the finish line, resulting in a bloated end product).
For games that are based on a really broad idea or feeling, it can be really hard to hone in on what you’re making, and that can have disastrous effects if you let the problem fester. In the past, I’ve found it useful to hone in on one specific cool idea or interaction that inspired me to want to make the game in the first place - and then decontruct why that idea is cool to me, which aspects of it are interchangable, and which are not. 
One way or another, if you ever want people to play your game, you need to finish it; to finish it, you need to have a plan to get there; and to form a plan, you need to know where you’re going.

Game Musings - Squishy and crunchy

Unknown — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“Squishy” and “crunchy” are two words I use a lot and hear used a lot when discussing games with other designers. It’s a useful way of understanding the structure of games, so I wanted to talk about what they mean to me.
“Crunchiness” emerges when games use smaller or fewer numbers, have fewer pieces in general, and have a more limited set of interactions. “Squishiness” describes the opposite, when games have broader possibilities, with lots of fluidity and amorphousness. For example, you could think about a complex strategy game like X-COM or Starcraft, with lots of moving creatures and structures and stats and numbers to keep track of (squishy), as opposed to Chess, which all takes place on a tiny 8x8 grid and every piece dies in just one hit (crunchy). 
Early in my career, I internalized that “crunchy” games were strictly better, and that the way to improve a game design was to cut down on elements and make the numbers smaller until I found the purest, simplest expression of that game idea. With experience I’ve come to feel that neither is better, but both offer useful pathways to refine a game. Crunchy games tend to be more concise and satisfying, whereas squishiness lends itself to experiences that are open-ended and surprising. I’m also starting to feel that in general, squishier games actually have more mass appeal than crunchy games. That’s one way to characterize why expansive, squishy, open-world titles like Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild wound up being such standout successes for long-running franchises that had previously been much crunchier. 
The flipside to this is that squishier games are much, much harder to make. This works against some intuition; you’d expect it to be easier to work in game genres that organically create tons of squishy permutations and interactions (roguelikes, card games, fighting games, open world games…) because there’s so many cool things that can happen, that even if there isn’t designed intention behind every interaction, players are sure to find something fun in there. But when a game is full of ideas that aren’t thought through, it tends to produce a lot of mediocrity, which colors players’ perception of the experience, even if there are really cool ideas in there too. Lots of “noise” in a game can drown out the underlying structure and make it harder for players to keep track of what they’re supposed to pay attention to or what the point is. 
I think squishy games tend to succeed when designers put an enormously greater amount of intention and thought into them, so that what parses as “squishiness” in the final game is actually a superstructure of tiny, crunchy design decisions. I think this has some parallels with my previous post on how I always aim to have the smallest wordcount I can. Even when something is jam-packed full of ideas, it’s most worthwhile when all those ideas are fully thought through.
There is a fine balance here, because to make something that feels squishy you actually need there to be undesigned space where things can interact unpredictably. Crafting larger games like this always falls into a difficult conversation of “what do I actually design, and what do I leave open?” Ultimately there’s no true right answer, which is what makes it such a difficult problem. Often you can only arrive at your game’s answer through a slow process of addition, subtraction and testing. But when something in my game feels too linear, simple or predictable then I know it probably needs more squishiness… and when it’s all feeling samey, murky, or amorphous then I start looking for ways to crunch it down.


Game Musings - Watch your wordcount!

Unknown — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I get asked my advice on game writing fairly often, and I feel this is the most specific, useful advice I can impart.
CUT OUT AS MANY WORDS AS POSSIBLE FROM YOUR GAME!
Given that my projects tend to be sprawling, over-written adventure games I think this advice comes as a surprise to people who ask me for it. But I promise that all my games could have been a lot wordier, and a lot worse for it.
Whenever I write a conversation or scene for a game, I probably spend the most time going over it and finding every little thing I can remove while retaining the original intention or message. For example, normal conversations will be full of small polite-isms and connecting phrases like “Thanks,” “Oh, also…” and that sort of thing. Removing those might feel unnatural at first, but once they’re gone you’ll be surprised that you don’t notice them missing. I don’t just remove useless turns of phrase - any time I can find a way to communicate even a very complicated idea in fewer words, I will do it.
This is a good rule of thumb for writing in general, because it helps you express your point more clearly. But I think it’s especially critical for (non-VN) games, where people have the expectation of interaction. Every line of text you add increases the time players spend waiting and adds another moment where they have to press A to advance. Players can get exhausted of story very quickly… and if your game is giving them words that don’t feel necessary, they’ll start ignoring them. Once a player starts clicking through conversations without reading them, you’ve basically lost their trust, and all the work you put into your game’s text becomes worthless.
I examine every word in my games from this perspective, questioning if it needs to be there and what it contributes. And if I’m trying to get across a big idea in a scene that I can’t communicate succinctly, I’ll find a way to split it into multiple scenes and spread it out over a longer stretch of the game. My goal is always to leave players with the impression that every bit of text in my games matters, and that they should be paying attention to it. Otherwise, why bother having it?

Hello from Greg!

Unknown — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hi!
It’s been a long time. Depending on who’s seeing this, you might have subscribed to this email list only yesterday, or you might have subscribed more than a decade ago (!). This list exists for me to discuss my ongoing game projects - but I hardly ever send anything out because it turns out games are generally pretty slow to make.
However, I also genuinely like being in touch with people who like my games or are interested in games in general. And I’m concerned about the sustainability of social media platforms, which have come and gone over the last decade, while email always remained. So, I’d like to take a real crack at communicating through here going forward.
Starting tomorrow I’ll begin sending out regular newsletters under the theme of “Game Musings” - thoughts on game design, development, and games in general. I’m still learning how to better my practice every day, and it’s hard to feel like I know more than anyone else. But I’ve also found that I enjoy the opportunity to put my thoughts down, and even when I’m reading something I “already know,” it’s enlightening to see it re-framed from someone else’s perspective or to see how they arrived at that lesson. I’m inspired by Masahiro Sakurai’s “On Creating Games” series</a> - but I especially want to focus on the lessons that are more unique to my games and what I can share from my own journeys into the design mines.
Down the road this list will be a way for me to talk about my secret upcoming project, too. (!!!)
Thank you for your interest in my games! I love making them and talking about them and I only get to do it thanks to the support of many people. I’m excited to be in touch more.
-Greg

Beastieball

Unknown — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A tactical volleyball RPG. Coach a sports team of monsters that form dynamic relationships and rivalries.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale

Unknown — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Zelda-like coloring book adventure. Use the magic brush to make art, solve puzzles, and become a real person.

Wandersong

Unknown — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A musical platforming adventure. Make silly music as you explore the world, make friends, and just maybe the universe won't end!

Super Goo Goo

Unknown — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Fling a ball of goo around a Metroidvania-esque world and find stars! I made every part of this game, including audio & music, in 2 weeks as part of a game jam. (I won it!)

Coin Crypt

Unknown — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The world's first roguelike deckbuilding game, released to Early Access on November 18 2013. Collect & wield magical coins to duel lootmancers... or spend them on items and to curry favor with deities.

Perfection.

Unknown — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Shape-cutting mobile puzzle game, won the "Intel LevelUp Game Demo Contest" and as its prize became my first game on Steam. Original site is here</a> but mostly dead links.

Phantasmaburbia

Unknown — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A JRPG about teens fighting ghosts in the suburbs. My first commercial PC game!

Escape from the Underworld

Unknown — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A Metroidvania where your powers are taken by angels and you have to Escape from the Underworld. Made for a compo, remixing elements from Andy Brophy's old games. Later someone made a Flash remake.</a>

Cowboykilla

Unknown — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A game about bring a murder cowboy I made with my buddy Andy Brophy.

Pollushot / Sling It!

Unknown — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Mobile shoot-em-up game with a slingshot ship. The initial version (Pollushot) was published by YoYoGames in 2010 and was my first commercial game. I self-published a sequel called Sling It in 2011. Lost forever(?) to the tide of mobile OS updates.

Dubloon

Unknown — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A JRPG about pirates!!!

Crazy Over Goo

Unknown — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Silly game about flinging a ball of goo around with your mouse. Linked is a Flash remake; the original is here</a>.

Assassin Blue

Unknown — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A plotty game that combines flashy sword combat with platforming levels. Cool boss fights. When this got posted on "indie games dot com" I discovered there was an indie community bigger than the Gamemaker forums.

Wolf

Unknown — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

My first "finished" game. My grand ambitions for a multi-chapter adventure were cut to a short little tragedy about a girl who becomes a werewolf. Warning: a 15 year old made this!

Wishes Ultd.

Beastieball Update: Rank Defense!

Chicory 4-year anniversary + Tote Bag!

The All-Important Third Thing (designing Albrax and Yueffowl)

Creating with Hearts and Brains (designing Cherrily and Merrifly)

A Hairy Problem (Designing Broslidon and Leobro)

April Bash Results! Top Coaches & Stats!

Usage Statistics!</h2></figure>With the top-used Beasties all missing, we saw quite a different palette of teams emerge this time around! We’ve got all the stats here for PvP Sickos to peruse through.</p>

Expand and Contract (designing Sprecko + forms)

Constructing a Theme (designing Demolipede & Millimine)

A Beastieball update & an apology

March Open Bash - ALL THE STATS

Balancing Beastieball

Follow the Shapes (designing Skibble, Skorock & Boldlur)

Challenging the Rule of Cool (designing Daredillo and Radillo)

Spreckomorph PvP Bash Results!

Starter Bigmoon Contest Results!

Top Players</h1>Let’s take a moment to honor the coaches who earned the most victories for their favorite starter!</p></figure>Team Kichik</h3>Dino - 102 wins</strong></p></li>CORELAR - 43 wins</p></li>Rosery - 42 wins</p></li>P3Rcarus - 41 wins</p></li>

Team Kichik</h3>Dino - 102 wins</strong></p></li>CORELAR - 43 wins</p></li>Rosery - 42 wins</p></li>P3Rcarus - 41 wins</p></li>

PvP Event Results - favorite Beasties & top coaches!

How We Record Beastie Voices!

Sometimes You Go With Your Gut (designing Waglash and Riplash)

Chicory PHYSICAL EDITIONS available now for Switch and PS5!

Beastieball - available now on Steam!

Beastieball comes to Early Access NOVEMBER 12!

Playtest 3 results: the most-used Beasties!

Playtest final 48 hours: EVERYBODY'S IN + Live tourney!

The FINAL PLAYTEST is next week!

Invading Other Players' Adventures!

Thanks!</h2>In the background we’ve been incredibly busy working on the game and getting ready for our final Playtest and Early Access release this year. We’re excited to share more updates on those before too long!</p></p></p>

Beastieball's 2024 roadmap

Preview Playtest 2 is live now! (+new music!)

Preview Playtest 2: Mythwood is coming soon!

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Squimage, the rainbow painter squid!

How We Name Beasties

Playtest Results! Beastie popularity, fun data and more!

Beastieball preview developer livestream: tomorrow!

Announcing: Beastieball PREVIEW PLAYTEST

Revealing a Ranked Coach & New Boss Music

Gastic, the spooky gas bug!

All About Beastie Types

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Servitt, the sporty serval Beastie!

How AI works in Beastieball

A Field Guide to Beastie Metamorphosis

Demo update! (& design updates)

Trat, the dumpster rodent Beastie!

Greg's Cool Games from 2023

Introducing Platenna, the electroreceptive Beastie!

10 years of Roguelike Deckbuilders

Open-World Storytelling (Struggles)

A new Beastie! + Starter popularity results

Starter Popularity Results</h2>The demo we brought was quietly tracking how many times each starter was chosen - mostly to satisfy our own curiosity, lol. I’m excited to announce the final results from 393 demo sessions played at PAX!</p>

Introducing our redesigned characters! (+PAX West)

Designing Hidden Information

Designing Turn-based Volleyball for Beastieball

Kickstarter final 48 hours!

Behind the Scenes: Designing Bildit!

Behind the Scenes: Designing Kichik!

Behind the Scenes: Designing Axolati

Kickstarter update: new stretch goals, new rewards!

Free Demo now on Steam!

Our next game BEASTIEBALL is on Kickstarter!

Our next game is BEASTIEBALL

Game reveal & watch party tomorrow!

Chicory is now available on Game Pass!

Game Musings - Quest Logs pt. 2

Introducing... the Official Chicory Artbook!

Game Musings - Tears of the Kingdom

News on our next game is coming soon...!

Game Musings - Quest logs

New Studio & Official Discord

Game Musings - Setting goals in open worlds

Game Musings - In-game editors

Thanks!</h2>
In the background we’ve been incredibly busy working on the game and getting ready for our final Playtest and Early Access release this year. We’re excited to share more updates on those before too long!</p>
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