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ChubbyPixel

Oct 03
3

8 Years of Chubby Pixel games, year revenues, upcoming games and more!

By | Games | No Comments

Hel­lo my friends!
In this blog post I would like to cel­e­brate 8 years of Chub­by Pix­el games: first of all I would like to thank you all for mak­ing this incred­i­ble jour­ney pos­si­ble, with­out you this would­n’t have been pos­si­ble, so thank you !

Since many of our fans are very inter­est­ed in how we make and mar­ket our game, I would like to show you how we were able to con­stant­ly make big­ger games and expand our team year after year.

With dozens of games released to date, the com­pa­ny start­ed as a sim­ple exper­i­ment for mak­ing orig­i­nal and com­pelling games to be pub­lished main­ly for PC.
After sev­er­al years (in 2017) we start­ed to pub­lish our games even for Con­soles and Mobile with incred­i­ble results.

As exam­ple, Here fol­low­ing the Year 2021 rev­enues recap in in per­cent­age!

With our most suc­cess­ful game being “Sui­cide Guy” for Nin­ten­do Switch
Link to the game: https://www.nintendo.it/Giochi/Giochi-scaricabili-per-Nintendo-Switch/Suicide-Guy-1374572.html

As can be seen from the graph, the high­er rev­enues arise from the Nin­ten­do Switch games (we have pub­lished a total of 4 games games on Switch for now), but this does­n’t mean we’ll not con­tin­ue to sup­port the oth­er plat­forms as well.

The team con­stant­ly expand­ed and now includes a total of 5 devel­op­ers (includ­ing sound design­ers and artists) + exter­nal resources that will help us to con­tin­ue to port our games for all consoles.

With hun­dreds of thou­sands of copies sold world­wide, we’re sure to be able to con­tin­ue to devel­op new great games, so stay tuned!

Recent­ly this year we pub­lished our first game for Mobile and VR Ocu­lus store, as can be seen in the graph this was main­ly an exper­i­ment and rep­re­sents only a small part of our core business.

Our Mobile games are soon com­ing to the Chi­nese mar­ket too thanks to a great pub­lish­er (soon to be announced) that sup­port­ed us and is help­ing to enter in this incred­i­bly big market.

Woo­dle Tree Adven­tures Mobile:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ChubbyPublishing.WoodleDeluxe&hl=it&gl=US

Our first big VR game exper­i­ment (The Guy VR) released this year on Ocu­lus Store, Steam and Soon PlaySta­tion VR is pre­form­ing rather well, but rep­re­sents only a small part of our total income.

The Guy VR (Store link): https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/3088466977939130

As this exper­i­ment worked rather well, expect more VR games soon from us!

We have a lot of new projects in mind too and would like to show some­thing soon.

One of the projects we’re work­ing on right now is a new kind of adven­ture game that will take place in a future where human­i­ty has now dis­ap­peared from the plan­et. Only the inno­cence of child­hood could save it from itself.

Here one of the first screen­shots! Com­ing soon for PlaySta­tion 4, Playsta­tion 5, Xbox, Nin­ten­do Switch and PC!

I hope this was an inter­est­ing read, we’ll soon share more details in the next months, so stay tuned!

Mar 19
11

Considerations and reflections on today’s games

By | Games | No Comments 
What do they give to players? Are they just meant to make money?
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Hel­lo my friends!
In this blog post I would like to take the time to make a con­sid­er­a­tion on the today’s game mar­ket and design: how are they designed and what is pur­pose of most of them?

The imme­di­ate answer to this is prob­a­bly: “To make mon­ey”.
But is it real­ly just this? Or is there more?
This is ques­tion I ask myself many times as a game devel­op­er and design­er since as an answer it always seemed very flat and mean­ing­less in the end. Sure­ly this kind of dis­course can take a deep social/philosofical turn, but I think there could be sim­pler answers.

Game com­pa­nies’ goal in gen­er­al is sure­ly just to sell more copies of their game in order to sus­tain them­selves and make prof­it.

Their goal is to get big­ger and big­ger, mak­ing “big­ger games” in order to make more mon­ey to make even more big­ger games. But does it make sense in the end? Or is it just a dog chas­ing its own tail?
Com­pa­nies that have passed their size lim­it (of prof­it) tend to expand into oth­er fields since they have so much sur­plus bud­get that they don’t even know what to do with it (an exam­ple is Google expand­ing in the gam­ing mar­ket with Sta­dia).

But tak­ing the exam­ple of Google, in the case they squash all the com­pe­ti­tion in the gam­ing field with their prod­uct and ideas what’s left? Just more money?

I think it does­n’t make much sense in the long run.
Com­pe­ti­tion is some­thing that I per­son­al­ly think can also be pos­i­tive and lead com­pa­nies to give their best (but also addi­tion­al stress) as long as they don’t anni­hi­late the oppos­ing com­pa­nies.
This sure­ly can push the tech­nol­o­gy, lead­ing the mar­ket to pro­duce visu­al­ly stun­ning prod­ucts that would nev­er have seen the light otherwise.

Visu­al­ly (and audi­bly) sure­ly progress has been made, but is this the right path? Do games nowa­days are so much dif­fer­ent from the games of the past?
Per­son­al­ly I think today’s games don’t con­vey or teach some­thing real­ly mean­ing­ful and do not yet ful­ly exploit the poten­tial of the medium.

Most of triple A games tend to be lin­ear sto­ries with cutscenes get­ting clos­er and clos­er to the world of cin­e­ma with­out real­ly being able to find its own lan­guage, nor even approach­ing remote­ly to the great cin­e­mato­graph­ic mas­ter­pieces such as Ser­gio Leone or Fellini’s movies to name a few.

Prob­a­bly indie games hav­ing less costs and being able to risk more, tend to explore this medi­um much more deeply.

With this sen­tence I don’t mean to despise triple A games (I still like to play them), but I real­ly would like to see more exper­i­men­ta­tion and not just games that tend to copy each other.

These games don’t real­ly make gamers think or give them pro­found teach­ings (oth­er than thoughts on how the plot will con­tin­ue).
Small­er games like UNDERTALE tend to explore much more this con­cept, and this is also linked to the fact that the devel­op­er’s goal (toby­fox) was­n’t to make mil­lions out of the game. His main objec­tive was to cre­ate some­thing unique and some­thing nev­er seen before with a sim­ple idea:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/257884/Game_Design_Deep_Dive_Undertales_actionbased_RPG_battles.php

With real moral choic­es that final­ly make the play­er think, these are prob­a­bly the games that can lead to the path of pure game design.

I think that in order to cre­ate tru­ly excep­tion­al games, devel­op­ers need to look at oth­er fields: not only Cin­e­matog­ra­phy, but even Art, Music, Pho­tog­ra­phy, Phi­los­o­phy and all aspects of life that can be stud­ied.


After all even Nin­ten­do affirms that when try­ing to search for the best game design­ers, they tend not hire gamers
https://www.insider.com/shigeru-miyamoto-hire-gamers-nintendo-2017–12

This is because gamers tend to take inspi­ra­tion from oth­er games they played rather than from their oth­er life expe­ri­ences, and this is some­thing that we try to achieve too as a small game devel­op­ment com­pa­ny.

Even recent Nin­ten­do best­sellers such as “Super Mario Odyssey” and “The Leg­end of Zel­da: Breath of the Wild” have been laud­ed for being exam­ples of the com­pa­ny’s will­ing­ness to take risks with even its most impor­tant franchises. 

Of course there are many oth­er exam­ples to study, for exam­ple cash grabs games like Fort­nite or Can­dy Crush are designed by armies of psy­chol­o­gists in order to study the bet­ter way to keep the play­ers glued to the game.

This brings the ques­tion I made at the begin­ning of the post: even if these games made 10x more mon­ey then Breath of the Wild, does it real­ly make these games more suc­cess­ful? or do we have to con­sid­er oth­er fac­tors to mea­sure the suc­cess of a game?

here some links that I took the inspi­ra­tion by to write this blog post! I hope you liked it :)

Ref­er­ences:

https://medium.com/@sambro055/scope-of-game-development-and-design-dd187a64fd44

https://www.lcca.org.uk/blog/careers/scope-and-future-of-the-gaming-industry/

https://www.nyfa.edu/student-resources/nintendo-can-teach-us-game-design/

https://www.insider.com/shigeru-miyamoto-hire-gamers-nintendo-2017–12

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/technology/nintendo-switch.html

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/257884/Game_Design_Deep_Dive_Undertales_actionbased_RPG_battles.php

Mar 08
3

Chubby Pixel new games — March update!

By | Games | No Comments

Hel­lo my friends!

In this March blog post I would like to update you on the new games and improve­ments we’re work­ing on. We’re excit­ed to show you some new con­tent from our games!

first of all:

Woo­dle Deluxe new edi­tion is now avail­able on Steam, you can grab it here!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1516090/Woodle_Deluxe/

In this new edi­tion, we’ve decid­ed to include a new extra lev­el and more con­tent updates soon to be announced!

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Mean­while here a glimpse from the new game we’re work­ing on!

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Regard­ing the PlaySta­tion VR the new edi­tion of “Sui­cide Guy VR” we’re work­ing hard to bring it soon to the PS store.


it took us more time than expect­ed to port the game for the new sys­tem,
but we’re glad to announce that it will be released even for the new PS5 VR Visor edi­tion, com­ing soon!

For Fur­ther updates join our Dis­cord Server:

https://discord.com/invite/chubbypixel

This month some of our Nin­ten­do Switch games are now on sale too!

Sales Sui­cide Guy (-88% off) and Sui­cide Guy Sleepin’ Deeply (-83% off):

Sui­cide Guy: https://www.nintendo.it/Giochi/Giochi-scaricabili-per-Nintendo-Switch/Suicide-Guy-1374572.html

Sleepin’ Deeply: https://www.nintendo.it/Giochi/Giochi-scaricabili-per-Nintendo-Switch/Suicide-Guy-Sleepin-Deeply-1459376.html

Feb 18
1

Woodle Deluxe Available today on Steam!

By | Games | No Comments

Hel­lo my friends!

Woo­dle Deluxe is today avail­able on Steam, you can grab it here!

Woo­dle Deluxe new edi­tion is an old school 3D plat­former game set in a super col­or­ful world! You will find all the clas­si­cal ele­ments from the 90’s, ven­tur­ing alone or in co-op with a friend. Trav­el across the Woo­dle Lands in a total of 8 won­der­ful worlds and save every­one bring­ing back peace and balance!

Features:

  • 8 immer­sive dif­fer­ent worlds to explore
  • Local Co-op Main Adven­ture — Play as Woo­dle Beaver!


  • New items and cloth­ing to unlock for Woodle
  • Vast 3D envi­ron­ments pre­sent­ed in smooth 60 fps


  • Jump, Run and spe­cial Attacks are your abil­i­ties dur­ing the adventure
  • A new orig­i­nal extra level


  • Improve­ments to the cam­era movements
  • Jump­ing mechan­ics enhanced for Woodle
Feb 01
1

Suicide Guy Mobile available now and review!

By | Games | No Comments

Hel­lo my friends!

The mobile edi­tion of Sui­cide Guy is now avail­able to down­load for Android and iOS!

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ChubbyPixel.SuicideGuy&hl=en&gl=US

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sleepin-guy/id1543427407

Here the first reviews:

https://freeappsforme.com/suicide-guy-game-review/

https://www.gamespace.com/reviews/suicide-guy-review-kill-me-now/

https://androidappsforme.com/sleepin-guy-app-review/

https://apppearl.com/sleepin-guy-app-review/

Jan 18
6

Year Review and what’s next!

By | Games | No Comments

Hel­lo my friends!
Since is the start of a new year, we would like to take the time to write about all the things that hap­pened dur­ing the last year and what’s next to come.

Despite the Covid sit­u­a­tion we were able to con­tin­ue all our projects remote­ly and were able to release our games :)

More­over the large num­ber of play­ers this year result­ed in an increase of over 200% in sales of our games com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year. This allowed us to increase the team size and work on even big­ger projects!

One of the best sell­ing games of the year has been Sui­cide Guy for Nin­ten­do Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/suicide-guy-switch/

This made it pos­si­ble to pub­lish our first retail game “Sui­cide Guy Col­lec­tion” avail­able on the Red Art games! (and in dig­i­tal edi­tion too)

Phys­i­cal Edi­tion: https://www.redartgames.com/presentation?rp=suicide-guy

Dig­i­tal Edi­tion: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/suicide-guy-collection-switch/

It includes both the Sui­cide Guy chap­ters and some cool art­work inside!

Dur­ing the year we were able to devel­op and pub­lish even our first VR Index game “Sui­cide Guy VR”

It’s the Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty edi­tion of the Sui­cide Guy, com­ing soon to PS VR and Ocu­lus Store too!
Game Link: https://www.humblebundle.com/g/suicide_guy_vr

Anoth­er of our games recent­ly released in Decem­ber is our first game for the next game con­sole Xbox Series X: “Sleepin’ Deeply”!

Game Link: https://www.microsoft.com/it-it/p/sleepin-deeply/9p3lhp0vrhtw?rtc=1&activetab=pivot:overviewtab

This new edi­tion of the game is high­ly opti­mized and enhanced for the next gen con­soles.

Regard­ing the new games for 2021, we’re releas­ing our first Mobile game for iOS and Android on Jan­u­ary 20th: “Sui­cide Guy”. Is our first Mobile game, so we’re excit­ed since many of you asked for it!

Our first Mobile releas­ing next week! from IndieDev

Regard­ing our next Unti­tled game: we’re work­ing hard on it and expect to release next year for all next gen con­soles. Here a glimpse of it run­ning on Nin­ten­do Switch!

New game­play video from our next adven­ture game run­ning on Switch! from ind­ie­games

Since our Dev Kit for PlaySta­tion 5 has final­ly arrived, We’re work­ing to make it run on PlaySta­tion 5 and Xbox Series X too, so stay tuned for an update for those! 

One last update is regard­ing Woo­dle: a new game is com­ing in this series, so stay tuned!
To fol­low the devel­op­ment of the game, you can join our Dis­cord: https://discord.com/invite/chubbypixel

Nov 12
5

Suicide Guy VR Post-Mortem development blog

By | Games | No Comments

Hel­lo my friends!
I would like to take the time to ana­lyze our lat­est game release: Sui­cide Guy VR (Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1316760/Suicide_Guy_VR/)

The game has been released on July 24th 2020 and sold pret­ty well con­sid­er­ing is a VR game (10.000 copies in the first few months).

Must be said that this was our first big VR title released until now and we did­n’t know the mar­ket in depth, so it was an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment for us. (our first game was Heav­en Island VR MMO https://store.steampowered.com/app/400250/Heaven_Island__VR_MMO/)

Today Sui­cide Guy VR has 68 reviews with mixed reviews, but this is man­ly due to prob­lems on cer­tain VR hard­ware that we found out after the release (we did­n’t know there were so many devices that gamers actu­al­ly use, for exam­ple the Cos­mos and the Microsoft Mixed Reality)

The game has been devel­oped with the Valve Index and the Ocu­lus Rift devices in mind, and we did­n’t know so many gamers actu­al­ly have many kinds of VR devices. More­over these devices have all some dif­fer­ent con­trols scheme and hard­ware char­ac­ter­is­tics that makes dif­fi­cult to adjust! So a sug­ges­tion I would like to make if you’re approach­ing to VR devel­op­ment is to have all the nec­es­sary hard­ware devel­op­ment kits.

We’re still work­ing hard on the game in order to make it per­fect­ly com­pat­i­ble for all hard­ware (Cos­mos and Mixed Real­i­ty includ­ed), so stay tuned for fur­ther updates!

Despite these prob­lems, the game has been played by many Youtu­bers, here some examples!

An inter­est­ing thing I noticed is that many of them nev­er played the first non-VR game, so this new edi­tion indeed was a great incen­tive to try it out and get to know the game.

After all this feed­back we’re plan­ning to release the game on Ocu­lus Quest Store and PlaySta­tion VR since we found out that there is a very high inter­est in VR games, but the prob­lem is that the mar­ket is pret­ty frag­ment­ed (check out how many active users has this sub­red­dit for exam­ple: https://www.reddit.com/r/PSVR/ )

A prob­lem we already found dur­ing the PS VR port is that in order to play VR at its best you need 2 PS Moves (for hands con­trol), but those are not includ­ed in the VR head­set. This prob­a­bly makes a lot VR gamers to not have the pos­si­bil­i­ty to play the game at its best with the PS Moves.

Here a pret­ty inter­est­ing VR hard­ware sales graph: https://www.statista.com/statistics/671403/global-virtual-reality-device-shipments-by-vendor/
As you can see the “Oth­ers” is still a very per­cent­age, and this does­n’t help the mar­ket fragmentation!

How­ev­er, even if the mar­ket is so var­ied, it is def­i­nite­ly worth work­ing on the best pos­si­ble port.

I’ll soon update this blog post with some con­sid­er­a­tions on these stores as well, so stay tuned!

Nov 03
6

Chubby Pixel new updates!

By | Games | No Comments

Hel­lo my friends!

Novem­ber is here and I would like to take the time to let you know which are the new projects we’re work­ing on!

Our lat­est game release (in July) with Sui­cide Guy VR (link) per­formed real­ly well with over 10.000 copies sold on Steam in the first few months! This pushed us to port the game for PlaySta­tion VR and Ocu­lus Store.

The PS VR port is tak­ing us more time than expect­ed, but we’re try­ing to deliv­er the game to our fans for December/January, so stay tuned!

Regard­ing our new game in devel­op­ment, here a video update where you can see a glimpse of gameplay!

We’ll soon share more details, so stay tuned!

The full game will be released for the next Gen Con­soles (PS5 and Xbox Series X) + Nin­ten­do Switch and Steam!

Anoth­er news for our Nin­ten­do Switch releas­es: next month (in Decem­ber), we’ll relese a new game!
Stay tuned to find out what it is :)

Have a great Week,
Chub­by Pixel