Hey all! This is going to be a rather long series of updates today.
Yeah, this happens, if you don't update anything for months.
We submitted our final binary and got the go-ahead from Apple last week. The goes along with Steam giving us the thumbs up of both editions, the standard and the special.
Why the fuck would you even submit the old version to Steam? So people can replay Revolution 60 in all it's 2014 nostalgia glory?
Our official release date will be Tuesday September 6th...
...the year 2023. - Another delay, who would have thunk it.
Enjoy the mini-trailer for the game! You are the first people outside our studio to see this!
When I am walking the dog, I am always the first one to see the poop. This has roughly the same level of enjoyment.
Expect to see the full two-minute story trailer next week. If you Tweeted this, our team would deeply appreciate it!
Wu does realize that trailers usually come out way earlier than a week before release, yes?
I know it’s taken a while to get this to you.
Fun fact: When Brianna Wu calls, to tell people that she will run a little late for the Thanksgiving dinner, she usually arrives on Easter in following year.
I hope you’ll accept my personal apologies for that.
No.
Our studio’s approach has ALWAYS been to not ship until the game is really done.
So it really IS 2023 then?
The truth is, this version of the game cost about 10x more than our Kickstarter revenue to produce.
Firstly: No, it doesn't. It is a port, you have to subtract whatever the first version costs. (I always mix up if it is 200k or 400k )
Secondly: Does anyone want to buy an old Mars bar? Only 40 dollars!
We could have shipped a lazy port more quickly, but it’s not a game I would have been proud of.
I would make a joke about her standards being shit... but there's the dust in her house, her filthy table, the way she cages her dogs, the stains on her clothes while she sits on a panel... so yes, this is exactly what Wu would be proud of.
We’ll be including some extras in your Kickstarter bundles as a thank you for being patient, including a 100-page professionally illustrated Revolution 60 Technical Menu, outlining the technology of the R60 universe!
"Frank? I'll just copy some text-files and images out of your SciFiStoryIdeas\Technology folder!"
And, for people in the top-tier - we’ll be throwing in a free-iOS version of the game to go with your Steam release.
Why would anyone want that? Like, at all?
It was just a few years ago, but so much has changed in the industry since 2010 when I designed the characters for Revolution 60. Fat Princess had just come out the year before, and no one had really blinked an eye. Today, we’re a lot more aware of the representation of women in games.
So was having a Fat Princess as a protagonist good... or bad? Or does this has nothing to do with anything?
I am a child of the 90s. When I learned to draw, it was from J. Scott Campbell, Sailor Moon and frankly, a lot of very sexualized anime.
Yeah, it's like she was a dude at that point...
This came through in the character designs of Revolution 60. Back in 2010, my ideal woman character didn’t take any nonsense, didn’t need a man and she was sexy as hell.
"Please, PLEASE,
PLEASE, fellow feminists and SJWs, don't hate me for making this game! I learned my ways! I know I did wrong... Please
Beata Anita... Though I am righteous one..."
This is incredibly embarrassing to me today. Along with a lot of the industry, I’ve woken up and realized just how dated and damaging an idea this idea of women is. It’s not that sexy women are bad - it’s that ONLY having sexy women represented in media is very harmful.
"Revolution 360 Pounds" coming up.
When we made this Kickstarter, I could not have imagined I’d be one of the better known women in the video game industry by 2016. People are expecting me to do better, including myself. I knew for the PC release we’d have to update this.
No everyone is expecting Rev 60 to be a massive failure. Wu really does think that 'being known' equals 'talent'.
Without a doubt, the thing that most delayed shipping Revolution 60 was redoing the body proportions and costumes.
So how did we update the character designs of Revolution 60? We couldn’t just change the body proportions. Everything in Revolution 60 is done by hand - the hair animation, the lip synch, every movement. If we redid the joint position, every cross of the arms, every punch would have to be reanimated.
So, we compromised. I sat down and redid all of the Revolution 60 character from scratch. We thickened the neck and waists as much as we could, and we set about to make all the characters costumes less sexualied.
Wait. So, the main reason why the game was delayed, was the character redesign, but Wu couldn't do a complete overhaul, because that would have been too much work to reanimate the characters. Which means main reason for the delays making... waistlines thicker?
That might have not have been so bad, except that we had to rerender all of our footage in the game to go with it. Because our animated movies were made in 2011, this was the first thing our animator did after leaving college. She wanted to redo most of it. And we did. The comparisons are shocking.
Videogames have two versions of the main characters. There are the high poly versions you see here, and the low poly ones in engine. We had to do a retopology pass and go through the entire game updating animations. I drastically underestimated how long this would take.
Wait? Those scenes are pre-rendered? They are not in engine?
I’m still not happy with these character designs. All the characters are white, another huge oversight from 2010 - and there’s no much body type diversity.
It's like Wu should have hired a character designer or something.
One of the saddest things of George Lucas was he spent his life redoing Star Wars and never went on to make new films.
He did. They are called the Star Wars Prequels. They sucked.
I don’t plan to make that same mistake. Our next game will do better. Stay tuned for a final update on all our lighting and set changes!
That won't be difficult, from what I can tell Minesweeper is a more fun game.
