Woodle Deluxe Available today on Steam!

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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

Year Review and what’s next!

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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!

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!

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

Suicide Guy VR Post-Mortem development blog

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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!

Chubby Pixel new updates!

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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

The Guy VR is now available!

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Hel­lo my friends!

After months of devel­op­ment, our lat­est game has final­ly been released for Steam (and Soon for Ocu­lus Store and PlaySta­tion VR): Link to the game

Expe­ri­ence Sui­cide Guy now in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty for the great­est, most immer­sive snooze!

The Guy VR is our new Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty game out now for
Steam (Soon on Ocu­lus Store and PlaySta­tion VR!)


Is your game able to sell well even if despised by critics?

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Analysis of our game Woodle Tree Adventures and its sequel Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+

Hel­lo my friends!
In this blog post I would like to ana­lyze our first game, since I think could be an inter­est­ing read for the new game devel­op­ers who are approach­ing to this world.

We devel­oped our first full game “Woo­dle Tree Adven­tures” in 2013 (using the engine Unity3D), even though we were total­ly begin­ners we decid­ed to try any­way and see what kind of game we would be able to devel­op.
The game is now avail­able on all plat­forms (Nin­ten­do Switch, Steam, Xbox One and PS4)

Link to the game (Switch): https://store.steampowered.com/app/299460/Woodle_Tree_Adventures/

(Steam) https://www.nintendo.it/Giochi/Giochi-scaricabili-per-Nintendo-Switch/Woodle-Tree-Adventures-1321276.html

Even though we were pret­ty sat­is­fied of our game, the crit­ics judged us very neg­a­tive­ly, and this image is sure­ly enough to show you what I mean:

A 28 on Meta­crit­ic is a score that could destroy your career (and can knock you down), but over­all even if not per­fect, the game sold hun­dreds of thou­sands of copies and a lot of gamers appre­ci­at­ed play­ing it.
As an exam­ple here are some few images that can show you the appre­ci­a­tion of our fans:

70% on Steam reviews are pos­i­tive with 1420 total reviews

That said, I’m not insin­u­at­ing that you have to ignore the crit­ics and review­ers. You sure­ly have to lis­ten to them, and this is what we did for the sequel of the game Woo­dle Tree 2: Deluxe;
We took as les­son every lit­tle feed­back that we gained from review­ers and tried to make some­thing unique, this helped us infact to reach a 71 on Meta­crit­ic: https://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-one/woodle-tree-2-deluxe+

(Now avail­able on all plat­forms too): https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/woodle-tree-2-deluxe-switch/

Dur­ing this time any­way I always won­dered why the first game was so much appre­ci­at­ed by play­ers but not by crit­ics (I still receive mes­sages every­day from fans say­ing that they loved Woo­dle Tree Adventures).

Prob­a­bly the fact is that the game is very sim­ple and many play­ers like sim­plic­i­ty and even though has bugs here and there, many play­ers ignored them after a while.

Or could be the fact that being our first game and hav­ing many defects, many gamers were able to under­stand this while play­ing and even have fun thanks to this fact.

Any­way what I want­ed to tell you if you’re start­ing just now devel­op­ing games is to not take crit­ics to your game as some­thing per­son­al: try to take them for what they are (just opin­ions about your game and not about you) and learn from these.
It’s not easy for devel­op­ers to be able to judge their own game objec­tive­ly after years of work, but it’s sure­ly some­thing that I think needs to be done.

Thank­ful­ly there are many gamers like these that sure­ly will cheer you up and make you under­stand that your work was worth it:


Suicide Guy a port-mortem 3 years after release

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Hel­lo my friends!

I would like to write a post about the devel­op­ment and mar­ket­ing of Sui­cide Guy and its new chap­ters. (link)

Even if is a game of 2017 (3 years ago), the game is still sell­ing real­ly well thanks to the con­stan­cy of our updates and the mar­ket­ing we’re mak­ing to adver­tise the new chap­ters and con­tent that we’re adding to the game.

The game has sold for now a total of over 150.000 copies on all plat­forms (notice that it includes all the chap­ters) and is still sell­ing con­sis­tent­ly like the pre­vi­ous year with­out major slow­downs.

You can check this in the pie chart below:

Here a graph tak­en direct­ly from Steam with the copies sold start­ing from 2017 to 2020 (of course includes sales and deals). As you can see it seems that the curve goes even up and the inter­est in the game is still very high.

The curios­i­ty about the game is still increas­ing prob­a­bly due to the new VR edi­tion that we’re going to release in few months.
(You can join our Dis­cord serv­er here for updates: discord.gg/NZJk9Gr)

I noticed that the inter­est in VR has nev­er been so high, that is why we’re port­ing the game for all VR devices and at the same time con­tin­u­ing to add content.

Since the game is still unknown by many play­ers, I’m even test­ing new mar­ket­ing strate­gies, for exam­ple post­ing video updates of the game on Red­dit. You can check for exam­ple This Post

As you can see the inter­est in the VR edi­tion of the game is incred­i­bly high, with a lot of play­ers that even played the first game and are eager to try this new VR edition!

This kind of mar­ket­ing is both cre­at­ing aware­ness on the upcom­ing VR game and help­ing actu­al sales of the game already released in 2017.

Here some oth­er post exam­ples that I made to cre­ate aware­ness on the upcom­ing release:

Per­son­al­ly I have to say that even after years after the first game, I’m still hav­ing fun to return to the project and con­tin­ue it with new content.

Thanks to this, the team is con­stant­ly expand­ing, so you can expect new games of this and new series com­ing out soon!

Remem­ber that you can grab a copy of the game here if you want:

And here a sneak peek of the logo of Sui­cide Guy VR com­ing soon

Game Development during Covid 19 situation

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Hel­lo my friends!

Giv­en the times ahead of all of us, we’ve decid­ed to write a blog post about remote game devel­op­ment, some­thing that in the next months (or years?) will be nec­es­sary for all stu­dios. Our team has always worked suc­ces­ful­ly in remote dur­ing the last 10 years, so prob­a­bly we have a tip or 2 for you.

We hope that this post will be use­ful for all the teams that are approach­ing this new kind of inter­nal reor­ga­ni­za­tion. our team is rather small (com­posed by 7 devel­op­ers: 2 pro­gram­mers, 1 game design­er, 1 sound design­er, 1 2D artist and 2 3D mod­ellers), but I think this method can be applied even to larg­er teams of 20 or more.

Here are the 10 sug­ges­tions for Smart Work­ing in game development:

1) PERIODIC REMOTE MEETINGS:

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is obvi­ous­ly a must, and it’s some­thing that has to be done in all forms: Email, Chat, Voice Chat and Video Chat are all essen­tials.
Here some of the best soft­wares that we use for this:

Skype (main­ly for chat­ting and voice)
Dis­cord (for chat­ting)
Zoom (for video con­fer­ences)
Slack (for chat with the whole team and team groups)

The project man­ag­er must ensure that every­one is updat­ed on the game: is the key fig­ure that must com­mu­ni­cate con­tin­u­ous­ly with every­one.

It’s impor­tant to com­mu­ni­cate only the essen­tials dur­ing work­ing hours in order not to make time wast­ed for every team mem­ber.
1 Voice chat with the whole team every 1 or 2 days is the right choice in order to keep every­one updat­ed on the game project.

Teamwork Online: The ultimate guide to high performance remote teams

2) TASK TRACKING

the sec­ond most impor­tant thing is to keep track of every­thing that has been done by every team mem­ber. Depend­ing on the team size I would sug­gest the fol­low­ing softwares:

Trel­lo (for small­er teams from 2 to 10)
Jira (for larg­er teams from 10 to 50)
Mon­day (for large teams from 50 to 100)

The most impor­tant thing is to add dead­lines oth­er that tasks for every team mem­ber.
Also I would sug­gest to add depen­den­cies in order to keep track of what is best to give pri­or­i­ty to: you have to avoid the case in which a team mem­ber has to wait for anoth­er to com­plete his task.

Create A Board | Getting Started with Trello

3) USE OF REPOSITORY

The use of repos­i­to­ry is some­thing that needs to be done always and is use­ful so that every team mem­ber can access the project and add his assets.
Here some of the best soft­wares for this:

Source­Tree

GitHub

Bit­buck­et

Per­force

We main­ly use Source­Tree, but since it’s not meant for game devel­op­ment, it some­time has prob­lems due to con­flict­ing branch­es and files size.
Prob­a­bly with larg­er teams and projects, the best soft­ware to use is Per­force.

If a team mem­ber does not know how to use it well enough, or does not know the game engine, is always bet­ter to make him send his asset files to a spe­cial­ized team mem­ber: he’ll be able to inte­grate with more effi­cien­cy the assets, with­out the risk to break the whole project.

Sourcetree | Free Git GUI for Mac and Windows

4) FREQUENT FEEDBACK

Fre­quent and clear feed­back from team mem­ber super­vi­sors are indeed impor­tant, and must con­tin­ue through­out the whole day.
When work­ing remote­ly, you do tend to work in a bit of a vac­u­um and it can feel like you have no idea whether you are doing a good job or not, unless you get lots of feed­back.

Feed­back can be pro­vid­ed direct­ly with screens or mini videos that can help to under­stand what is the actu­al feed­back refer­ring to.

A use­ful soft­ware is Teamview­er, used to con­trol direct­ly a com­put­er from anoth­er: we use it inter­nal­ly even when two pro­gram­mers need to work on the same script file.

Bridging the Gap with Remote Team Collaboration | Cheesecake Labs

5) ORGANIZED DOCUMENTATION

Doc­u­men­ta­tion is impor­tant to be clear and pre­cise, you can’t afford to have docs that are not under­stand­able by the whole team.
If this occurs, the project man­ag­er should improve the doc­u­men­ta­tion or even rewrite it com­plete­ly.

This includes both tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion, game design doc­u­men­ta­tion and assets doc­u­men­ta­tion.

The real­i­ty is that the sin­gle devel­op­er is going to make a lot of deci­sions in a vac­u­um with­out feed­back most of the time, so hav­ing as much back­ground as they can is nec­es­sary so that the deci­sions he takes are fair­ly good.
Be sure that every­one is using the same soft­ware for writ­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion (Word and OpenOf­fice are the most com­mon ones) since pass­ing files from one user to anoth­er could cre­ate prob­lems.

Writ­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion through cloud ser­vices is prob­a­bly the best way to avoid any kind of prob­lem: we usu­al­ly use Google Docs since it includes even sheets and files for pre­sen­ta­tions. Every­one can edit the same file online in real time.

HR Documentation: A Step-By-Step Guide - Insperity

6) RESPECT THE WORKING HOURS 

It’s easy to be dis­tract­ed when you work at home, but is fun­da­men­tal not to lose time or even work out­side work­ing hours.

Since you have your lap­top at every hour of the day, it’s pos­si­ble that you’ll some­times work extra hours, but we would rec­om­mend not to do this: a lot of sci­en­tif­ic papers found out that work­ing too much hours with­out the right bal­ance will inevitably cause a long-term low­er­ing of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

At the same time is easy to lose con­cen­tra­tion due to the house­hold chores you have to do: you have to find a room in your house that is suf­fi­cient­ly iso­lat­ed in order to avoid this.

Typing jobs! Work at home and get paid - create a side job and ...

7) KEEP MORALE HIGH 

Be dis­tract­ed is as easy as los­ing the morale for a team mem­ber.
Work­ing remote­ly is nev­er easy, so try not to be too pre­ten­tious with your team mem­bers: since you’re always dis­tant, is easy to be offend­ed or misunderstood.

You can try to use extra hours for exter­nal team activ­i­ties like play­ing an online videogame! This can def­i­nite­ly improve team bond­ing.

Motivating Your Team: How to keep morale high | Udemy

8) KEEP TRACK OF YOUR GAME DESIGN DOCUMENT

You prob­a­bly have a Game Design Doc­u­ment for your game, and every­one needs to fol­low it as much as possible.

One sug­ges­tion we have, is to write more than one GDD: in addi­tion to the in-depth and long main doc­u­ment, oth­er short­er and more con­cise docs needs to be writ­ten in order for every team mem­ber to eas­i­ly access it.

The short­er docs could even be ad hoc for every team group (one for sound design­ers, one for 3D mod­el­ers etc).

Use always Google Docs so that every­one can eas­i­ly access them with­out the need to down­load large files.

Professional Game Design Document by lhodgesdesign - issuu

9) MARKETING YOUR GAME

Don’t for­get to con­tin­ue to mar­ket your game!
Even if you can’t attend any­more to gam­ing events and con­fer­ences, this does­n’t mean that you can’t con­tin­ue to reach mil­lions of gamers.

Online social mar­ket­ing is today prob­a­bly the most effi­cient way to present your game to the pub­lic in rela­tion to vis­i­bil­i­ty and earn­ings.

Social media cam­paigns on Face­book, Insta­gram, Twit­ter, Google Ads, Red­dit and Linkedin are prob­a­bly the most effi­cient ones.
So keep­ing your gamers updat­ed and engaged on your games even in these dif­fi­cult times is the key.

5 Tips for DIY Mobile Game Marketers - Chartboost

10) PERIODIC REAL LIFE MEETINGS

This is some­thing that I would sug­gest in nor­mal times, but of course is start­ing to be almost impos­si­ble to meet your team in real life dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

The real life meet­ings are essen­tial and we think needs to be done at least one every two weeks:
This helps to focus on the game direc­tion and even to strength­en team union.

If real life reunions are impos­si­ble, we would sug­gest to at least make a video con­fer­ence call using Skype or Zoom.

Illustration Meeting by ziunnnlai on Dribbble

11) FIND THE BEST WORKPLACE

It would­n’t be a game devel­op­ment guide if it did­n’t have some extra con­tent :)

One last sug­ges­tion is to find your best work­place at home: if you have a note­book, you can work almost every­where and will be tempt­ed to work in the most unimag­in­able places (on your sofa or the toi­let for exam­ple), but we would sug­gest to find the place where you will have in the most cor­rect pos­ture.

Your back will thank!

work from home illustration by Sanket on Dribbble

Here you can find oth­er use­ful arti­cles about remote devel­op­ment:

Writ­ten by Jake Simp­son:
Work­ing Remote­ly: Yes, It Sounds Good, But How Do You Actu­al­ly Do It?

Writ­ten by Robert Del­laFave:
Work­ing Remote­ly: Man­ag­ing an Inde­pen­dent Game Devel­op­ment Team

Writte by Daniel Doan:
GameDev Thoughts: How To Man­age A Remote Game Devel­op­ment Team 

Woodle Tree 2: Deluxe+ available now on PlayStation 4!

By | Games | No Comments

Hel­lo my friends!
I’m glad to announce that Woo­dle Tree 2: Deluxe+ is now avail­able for PlaySta­tion 4!

It includes now even the free DLC Sleepin’ Flow­ers! (with many new extra lev­els) Check the game page here for more infos:
https://store.playstation.com/en-gb/product/EP2659-CUSA17904_00-0000000000000000

What does this new edi­tionDeluxe+ includes? https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/woodle-tree-2-deluxe-ps4/


Here the offi­cial trail­er announcehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIYzWGy8qBY

If you want to have a chance to win a pro­mo code for the PS4 game, write to us at info@chubbypixel.com!