NOOOOOOOO!

We’ve had to make the decision to delay Crawl; we won’t be releasing on July 17th unfortunately – We’re really sorry! I hope this doesn’t mess you guys around too much!

Here is my simplified rendition of how things went down, in GIF format:

(All news should be delivered in GIFs!)

What happened?

There were some tax issues with us being a partnership based in Australia, so we changed Powerhoof into a Company at the start of the month.

Everything was on track until pretty much the last step, where we got hit with an unexpected bit of red tape that we were told “may take up to 30 days” to resolve. We tried to find a way around it, but there’s nothing we can do.

When is Crawl coming out then?

We don’t know how long we’ll be delayed. It could be a couple of days, it could be a couple of weeks (we REALLY hope not!). As soon as we can we’ll let you all know.

What will we do with the extra time?

We don’t know how much extra time we’ll have, but since we already have the build ready to go we can start adding some of our cool wishlist ideas!

-Barney

The Countdown Continues

Nine days to go and here is the second little trailer from our bestiary:

Nice work Shrimpy voicing the narrator and the cackling witches.

-Barney

The Countdown Begins!

Here is the first of our little series of monster trailers leading up to launch.

As per usual, awesome voice work by “old shrimp-eyes” and awesome music by Alex Yoder.

Now I Have A Date To Worry About!

There may or may not be a specific launch date mentioned in the trailer… oh crap, better get to work!

-Barney

It’s so so close, TIME TO PANIC!

We’re working like crazy, and I’m freaking out- it’s almost here- launch time is almost here!

I’m putting the finishing touches on the first of our little sequence of “Meet the Beast” launch trailers introducing people to the mechanics of some of our monsters. We’re planning to announce our launch date with the first trailer but now I’m crapping myself to actually announce it for real!!

What if something goes wrong and we can’t do it on time and the internet hates us? What if our tutorials don’t make sense and what if we choose the wrong price to sell for and what if we should have gone with a publisher and what if my computer has a virus and what if my legs are crushed under an oil rig minutes before I upload the trailer to YouTube and we miss the launch date and I’m forever mocked and called “old brittle Pete” because my legs didn’t have the strength to take it?

In between working on the trailers and panicking, I’ve been putting together all the different art to support our Steam page- it’s all starting to feel way too real seeing the Steam page come together, I really hope my brain doesn’t explode!

-Barney

Where we’re at…

Well, we’ve got our build pretty close to the target feature set for launching on Steam Early Access, so our final testing/polishing phase before release has begun!

We had a playtesting session on the weekend and it all went pretty well- we have a handful of changes and fixes to make, but mostly we’ll be focused on the more boring business/marketing/technical stuff from here until launch…

-Barney

End screen mockup

I’ve already twittered this and facebooked it and tigsourced it… what better way to procrastinate than also blogging it!

This is a sketch for an endgame screen, the idea being that if the boss beats you he escapes the dungeon in your place and gets unleashed on the world… Ideally I would break this up into parallax layers, add some subtle animated elements, and have the camera panning a little to show the parallax and put a little movement and life into it.

-Barney

What a surprise, more pixel art!

I like drawing monsters getting their heads chopped off! I don’t know why… look, his whole head just comes flying right off!

This is my initial sketch for what an intro animatic cutscene thingy could look like- I’d have 3 or 4 of these still frames with some mildly animated elements and text, just to explain the basic gameplay objective for new players…

-Barney

Ridiculous things…

After all the complaints and horror stories and articles about how hard you have to work and how patient you have to be, we bizarrely got through Greenlight in the first day!

It seems like the perfect storm of circumstances came together (I think mostly within Twitter) and splattered our trailer across the industry in record time!

Luckily Crawl seems to be just the right concept to be communicated in a short trailer, and I think what we came up with gives our “elevator pitch” pretty effectively. (Note that I fought my urge to end every sentence with an exclamation mark and just went with the classic full-stop there)… !

So ridiculous!

That green line is us- look at us go! We ended up with 94% yes votes, where we were expecting more like 50%- WOW!

We have been inundated with compliments and kind words from the community, and we are amazed with the positive response! Thanks so much everyone who voted and everyone who commented so kindly!

Comments by people enjoying the trailer built into articles built into more comments- it seems like Twitter just magnified itself and things hit some kind of flash point and exploded.

And then this:

In amongst the crazy positive talk and wonderful overt compliments and encouragement and enthusiasm, I see this:

Jake Rodkin and Jonathan Blow have a minor exchange loosely referring to my game, and it is the most surreal experience. So casual and low-intensity and simultaneously the most ridiculous brain-melting shift in the structure of the world imaginable…

Cropped out of shot is my mouse cursor hovering as I try to build up the courage to post a reply… anything… just “hi guys I think you’re cool!”…

Needless to say I chickened out!

I chickened all the way back to my own blog where I can giggle like a little schoolgirl and try to adjust to this massive shift in perspective- and things seem likely to get more ridiculous still- I’ll try to keep you posted!!

In hindsight I should have just said: wizaaaard!

-Barney!