Indie Fund is backing The Splatters!

The value of being independent

You may or may not have heard the latest news, but we recently received some funding from Indie-Fund to take ‘The Splatters’ to PC. Now we didn’t really need any funding just to port the game over to PC we could have done that in a few weeks of hard work – so what’s going on?

Well, we wished the XBLA release would allow us all to sit comfortably and keep doing what we want without worrying about the financial side of things (wouldn’t we all?) but that wasn’t the case. There’s many reasons for that and the best we can do is speculate. The important thing is we are very happy with how the game was received and we’re very very thankful anyone who supported the game in any way.

Still, this is our first game and the first time either of us actually designed a game of this scale. We learned so much during the development, but also learned a great deal after its launch (mostly thanks to SplatterTV, which allowed us to actually see how you guys were doing). That made us think there are some aspects of the game we can improve on. Being the fanatic perfectionists we are, we wanted to make those changes instead of porting the game, as is, to PC.

Alas, we hit a catch 22 – if we don’t release the game for PC soon, we might not have enough resources to keep working. If we do release as soon as possible, we won’t be doing a good service to ourselves and the customers (which is to do the BEST we can do, at the very minimum) which might result in being back in the same situation. That’s where the good folks at Indie-Fund come in, that’s the noble cause they set for themselves – to help indie developers “get financially independent and stay financially independent”.

So what’s going to happen? Well we’re already hard at work making changes to the game we think are an improvement. For those of you who already love the game, don’t worry – we’re not changing the actual game itself, only the ‘delivery system’. The rules and mechanics in place will stay intact, we love them you love them it’s all good. What we aim to improve is the method of introducing those onto new players. If you played the game you probably noticed already, it takes a good 20 minutes of your time to actually ‘get’ what’s going on and have that ‘ohhh, that’s freaking awesome’ moment from which you cannot stop. It’s not to say the beginning of the game is not fun, just that it’s not indicative of things to come. You can play the trial or the first few minutes and think – this is really polished ‘angry birds’ style game. Nothing could be further from the truth as this is a game of skill mastery and creative thinking.

So we set out to plan a whole new way of luring you into the world of Splatters while being clearer than ever on what the game is about. As it turned out the changes we want to make don’t involve only the early parts of the game but they resonate throughout the game, start to finish. For the fans of the game it would simply mean you’ll get to see a different way of saying the same thing only with greater clarity. If you liked the message last time, you’ll probably like this even better. Hopefully those who didn’t get what we were trying to say before, will now.

Oh, and last thing, we’re also adding a new crazy gameplay mode and tons of other surprises to keep you smiling as you make those crazy moves and blow up those happy Splatters. Stay tuned.

— Niv

Link to HD version on Youtube