Hello Friends!
This last week has been a pretty interesting one for us. There hasn't been a lot of game dev, but it's still been a week of big developments and I'm pretty excited to share them all with you.
Marketing
We've finished our month of sessions with Marina from Rebivo. She has been amazing to work with and we have learned a LOT. We still have a lot more to learn, but we no longer feel like we're lost in a dark room when it comes to getting our games out there. Now we have a plan and a direction to grow as a studio If anyone is looking for a great marketing consultant we can't recommend her enough.
As some of you will have noticed, our first newsletter went out yesterday. The plan at the moment is for them to go out on the first Tuesday of each month I'll be the one writing them If you have any feedback please feel free to @ me in general chat or message me directly.
Trade War & Nothing Left (But To Cry)
So we've been over our timeline in a bit more detail and have identified two possibilities for the future of Nothing Left. First off I want to say that development of NL is now at a very advanced stage. The factory prototype has been ordered and we will continue to demo the game and gather feedback right up until we are ready to publish. But there isn't a lot for us to do left on this game, so until we are closer to crowdfunding we will be setting Nothing Left aside.
That being said; as we've mentioned, the trade war makes launching this game tricky. For the rest of the year we have 3 other major event commitments in September and October, so we have decided that the most likely time for us to launch Nothing Left will likely be December. We can't promise that copies will be ready for Christmas, but our plan is to get production files pre-approved by the manufacturer before we even begin the kickstarter, so the day the campaign ends we are ready to confirm the order and have production start in late November. A typical production timeframe is 4-6 weeks, so likely we would be hoping to deliver units around January/February of 2026. Keep in mind this is all subject to further problems between the USA/China, the USA/The rest of the world, and any other unforeseen circumstances, so this is what I would call a very soft timeline.
New Titles & Gamefound
So what are we going to be working on instead? Well, we had already been considering a 2nd crowdfunding of Those Who Dare on Gamefound. But I've also been working in the background on another Daring System title that we've mentioned to a few people. Yesterday we spend a good couple of hours going over the initial design plans for Miskatonic High, where you play as highschoolers in Miskatonic High, our own fictional highschool attached to Lovecraft's famous Miskatonic University. Manage your academic commitments and the social structure of the highschool while sneaking out at night to contend with lovecraftian horrors, maybe some of them could even give you an edge in math class? Think Harry Potter meets Lovecraft meets Bully.
The plan at this point is to focus our development efforts on Miskatonic High over the next month while we evaluate our crowdfunding opportunities. Gamefound has made a great announcement that they really want to support TTRPGs on their platform and are offering some incentives for doing so. We haven't made any final decisions yet, but the big news here is that while there is a lot of development left to go, we will be able to begin playtesting on Miskatonic High this year.
Other News
I will make another announcement but don't forget that this Sunday we will be at the Tabletop Open Day in St Kilda, Melbourne from 11am-5pm. If you've got time please come on down and support these local game designers! It's a free event with a wide variety of games to try out.
That's all for this week.
Lukanis.
