Hello all you awesome Creatures!
Lots of big things going on with us as of late, with plenty of sudden life changes that have had us racing around tirelessly. Its been both awesome and extremely stressful, but what can you do?
In the wise words of Frank Sinatra: Thats life.
Lets begin with the craziest thing that changed so much for us, and that’s…
The Sudden Death Of iiRcade
This.
This was a total shocker.
Those of you who have been keeping up with our updates, know we had a deal lined up with iiRcade to get our game Circus Interstellar (once named Killer Clowns) onto their at home arcade cabinet. For a while everything was going great. We were in full development of remastering the old version of our game and everything in the deal seemed secure!
That is until sometime late June when we received notice from the guys at iiRcade that they were suddenly going bankrupt and would be shuttering their doors in less than a week!
Little to say, we sorta kinda, COMPLETELY. PANICKED.
We worked so hard, sacrificed so much of our time, and now it felt like it would all be for nothing.
We didn’t want to give up completely, however. Being that Circus Interstellar was mostly ready, we thought we’d at least try to get the game to a stable enough state so that we could have it uploaded to our personal cabinet as a memento of sorts.
The iiRcade guys agreed and we grinded away for several nights straight trying to get a final stable build ready. We didn’t sleep much, and with us having to work our day job in the lumber mill at the same time, lets just say it was one of the most stressful moments in our game dev career currently.
While we were working however, we received a message from one of our fellow Creatures asking us if we would be able to send the build to their cabinet.
We thought: “what the hell, why not at least ask?” We did, and the guys at iiRcade gave us the green light!
They forgot to mention, however, that there would be a limit to how many people we could send the game to…
1 tweet and a hundred something requests later, we were told “woah! hold the phone, we’ll do maybe 20 cabinets.” (ouch) So after many apologies and much confusion, we finally got the game onto the cabinets of 20 lucky people!
…Only to have the game accidentally removed from their cabinets a day later due to a security breach happening over at iiRcade… (oops)
Thankfully that was dealt with quickly and those people were able to get the game back on their cabinets! (fwew!)
Shout out to the guys at iiRcade, they had to work overtime to help fix that issue and we really appreciate it.
Despite this sudden shutdown being quite a tragic event, everyone in the iiRcade community were extremely supportive of us. Many of them decided to follow us to help support our game development, which was cool as hell!
Some of the community members even purchased the old Killer Clowns version that was available on Steam at the time, just so they could play something close to the version we sent to those 20 people.
That community is badass! 🙂
We couldn’t stomach the idea of people being stuck playing the old version however, so we started working on replacing Killer Clowns with the newer version Circus Interstellar, which is, by the time of writing this blog, now available on Steam!
While this version is missing many of the features that we wanted to add, we rounded it out to be a sort of finished version of what was the classic Killer Clowns.
There’s actually quite a bit more to this tale that I’ve left out, but if I went over literally everything, this blog would turn into a book. (lol)
The future of Circus Interstellar
Originally, we wanted to take Circus Interstellar and change most of the mechanics to make it vastly different from Killer Clowns Berzerk styled gameplay. However, due to us releasing it early, we’ve decided to change our original plan.
We are going to keep Circus Interstellar as it is right now in place of Killer Clowns to maintain that classic Berzerk style gameplay, and have started working on a souped-up version of the game that we plan on naming Super Circus Interstellar!
In this version, we will be changing much of the core game mechanics to set itself apart from the OG game.
Much of the community suggested that we lean into the roguelike mechanics we had added into Circus Interstellar, and that’s what we’ve decided to do.
I will go more in depth on all of that when we get further along in the development cycle.
Just to restate: we will still keep the original version of Circus Interstellar on Steam and continue to do bug fixes on it as we move forward, so fans of the game don’t need to worry about the original experience being lost or forgotten!
We are extremely stoked to be doing this, and cant wait to see what becomes of Super Circus Interstellar!
Possible iiRcade version update?
We’ve had some of the iiRcade community approach us asking if we intended on updating the game on the iiRcade.
Well we spoke with an awesome modder in the community to see if anything can be done about that and he has told us that he is actually working on making it possible to upload content to the cabinet right now, but didn’t have an ETA on when it would be done.
So while it is a possibility, we will just have to wait and see.
If we get the greenlight though, we will definitely be working on an update for the iiRcade version of the game!
Closing thoughts
While this last month caught us by surprise and has had its fair share of stress, we are extremely grateful to all of the awesome people who joined us and have continued to support us and our projects!
Without you guys, this whole shutdown fiasco would have left us feeling at a loss.
So thank you all!!
We will continue to dish out quality updates and content to you guys, so keep an eye out! 😀
If you haven’t already, be sure to join your fellow Creatures on the Discord. We still plan on doing some contests to give everyone a chance to have an impact on the game, and want to have more of you join into that when we get around to it!
I’m going to leave our latest trailer for the release of Circus Interstellar here for those of you who missed it. (btw I had only 2 days to make this lol)
The Portland Retro Gaming Expo
Another thing, we are going to have a booth at this years Portland Retro Gaming Expo and are looking for support in collecting the funds for booth supplies. We want to make the booth look fantastic and the price of everything is getting quite expensive.
So if you’d like to help us with that, we are accepting donations through our Ko-fi account.
See you cool Gremlins later, and stay awesome! 😎
-Matthew and Stephan Hanewinckel; Co-owners of Ettinsoft LLC
We hope to see more of you creatures in the discord. 🙂
