Super Splatters – Playable @ PAX East
Okay, that’s been too long since we posted anything up here. As you recall, we’ve been working on our suped-up version of “The Splatters” for PC. It’s really coming along very well and we even decided to name it “Super Splatters” because it’s just what it is! Also, it wouldn’t be fair to keep the same name with all the changes that we’ve done. 
The core physics based addiction is still all in there, with its sandboxy acrobatic stunts system, but with a completely overhauled progression, much more variation and more finely tuned gameplay. There’s also a bunch of added features and a deeper look into the world behind those fame hungry Splatters. So … as you guess from the title, we’re going to have a work-in-progress build of “Super Splatters” playable at PAX East. We’ll be at booth #680 which is part of the amazing, bigger-than-ever Indie MEGABOOTH.
Indie MEGABOOTH
If you are lucky enough to attend PAX East, drop by to say hi to me or Sagi and play Super Splatters – we’d love to hear what you think. We’ll still have time to make final tweaks before it releases. We still don’t have a date to give out simply because we decided to stop thinking about ‘release dates’ and focus on ‘it feels ready’ kind of metric for that. Right now it ‘feels’ pretty close to done, but there’s still more to do plus we gotta make sure we properly test it. Stay tuned for yet another announcement right before we get on that plane to Boston. Niv
Read MoreIndie 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
The Splatters are heading over to PC
It’s official!
The Splatters will be getting onto PC and will debut on Steam. We’re also planning on going completely cross-platform and support both Mac and Linux with DRM free versions (Mac version will be available on Steam as well).
Link to HD version on Youtube
It’s not just a port
After we’ve given this a lot of thought we decided against simply porting the game over to PC, even at the cost of delaying the PC launch. As much as we love the XBLA version of the game, we also learned so much from it. It wasn’t an easy decision to take as it has financial implications.
But knowing what we now know, the urge to change things around and try to improve the experience is stronger than anything. Besides, it’ll make our work a lot more interesting (straight up ports tend to get boring and technical). Big game development groups can do simultaneous launch on several platforms, we cannot. So our edge here is we can keep improving our craft as we go from one platform to another if we choose to. And in this case, we definitely want to do that.
Unfortunately at this point in time we wouldn’t even want to speculate on a release date since design changes are very tricky to give time estimates to. Rest assured it won’t be that long and we’re pretty confident the result will more than make up for the delay. Stay updated by following us on Facebook or Twitter, or right here on our site – new announcements will be made soon enough.
The SpikySnail Team