Hello there fellow Creatures!
Matthew here with another post for the ol’ webpage!
This ones gonna be a doozy, as I need to cover pretty much everything we’ve done this year…
I had tried to start this post much sooner, but ran into some issues, as well as a ton more hours at the day job to pays those wonderful bills that keep the lights on, and totally forgot to come back to it…oops.
None the less, strap yourselves into those preverbal seats, and lets go!
Circus Interstellar hits the Xbox store
In April of this year, Circus Interstellar officially dropped on the Xbox One and Series, literally a dream come true!!
Since showing our game publicly for the first time at the 2023 Portland Retro Gaming Expo, we had many people ask us if we would be releasing CI onto one of the major consoles, Xbox being the one most requested.
We told them that we most certainly would love to port our game to the Xbox, but since we had never attempted a port of that scale before, we weren’t sure where we would even start or whether or not it was in the cards for us.
Well…Read em’ and weep! Cause that dream has now become based in reality!
…Not that it was easy. It definitely wasn’t.
We ran into MAAAAAANY setbacks, and for awhile there we weren’t sure if the port was ever going to see the light of day. But we pushed through, reaching out to fellow developers whenever we hit the inevitable walls, and eventually got everything figured out!
Strangely enough, the biggest obstacle was the website that we had to use in order to get CI onto the console.
Without going too much into detail, we basically ran into an issue that had apparently been plaguing the site for awhile then, and it was putting the breaks on the entire process, almost causing us to miss our deadline!
Thankfully, some awesome folks within tech support were able to help us get through the problems, a sound victory! (Thanks techies!)
Along with this long-awaited port, we also went ahead and tweaked more aspects of the game that we felt were still a bit rough, as we wanted to make certain that the game was at its very best when it began its walk upon the hallowed grounds of the real deal Xbox.
With the release of the port, we created a final trailer that truly showcased the game in its current build, which you can check out here:
Circus Interstellar is available for $9.99 USD on the Microsoft Store now, so be sure to swing by and give it a look!
Circus Interstellar Xbox store link: Buy Circus Interstellar | Xbox
Thanks again for all the support you guys gave us in making this happen, we are forever grateful. 😊
So then…what’s next?
With the completion of Circus Interstellar, many folks have reached out to us wondering what we have planned for our next delve into the mysterious world of game development.
Originally, the idea was to go back to development of our game Murmur of the Flesh, but after already working on a isometric top down game for several years, that idea didn’t seem very appealing anymore.
So we went with an idea that was much more exciting to us: a 2d platformer with inspirations drawn from classic games like Major Havok, Mega Man X, and Tron, with a cybernetic meets medieval dark fantasy theme that we are calling: Cyber Dread!
While we are still in the process of brainstorming aspects of the game such as the story and mechanics, we have made some headway into getting some of the basics finished.
Many of the base player mechanics and various different platform types have been programed into the build, an outline of the story, and right now Stephan and I are working on the level textures and player design and animations.
This time around we want to try an art first approach. Meaning that when we show the games development, it will be through the game’s art and animations first. (Programmer arts not so fun to look at lol)
Lately, we have been a bit quiet on our progress, as Stephan is currently experimenting with new ways to animate characters while I am in the process of figuring out how to design textures for a platformer texture sheet. I did, however, show off some of my process in some YouTube shorts over on the Ettinsoft channel, though admittedly I didn’t show much at the time.
I have included a sheet below of some of the textures I’m working on in the image below, though bear in mind that none of them have their actual colors (just the test color I threw over them) and they have yet to be tweaked with any cybernetic ascetics, right now I’m just starting off with making them straight medieval textures to get the ball rolling, not to mention figuring out how to do the shading.
I will be changing them up later and adding some cybernetics to each texture to give that future vibe.
Also, here is a gif of the Idle animation for the player character that Stephan just finished!
This charming fellow will be our main character Vi, we’ll discuss more on his character in a later blog once we’ve gotten more of the games story together, but all you need to know is that he’s not exactly the “good guy“…
We will be sharing more of our process with you Creatures as we get further along!
The Intergalactic Summer Quest
What did you do for fun in the sun this last August?
If you answered “I went on an epic space voyage to uncharted planets and delved into silly shenanigans with a 2 headed freak of nature!” Then you probably joined us during our Intergalactic Summer Quest event we threw on our discord!
The Summer Quest consisted of various fun activities and games, from VR scavenger hunts, art competitions and Discord Gladiators, to head-to-head Rocket League and Splitgate 2, with a different set of games and activities for each week throughout the entire month of August.
Each event had one or more prizes attached to them that the lucky victors would claim. Many of the prizes were awesome games that we hand-picked with the help of our moderators, as well as a few things of physical merch from our online store! (a link of which is available on the top bar of our website.)
It was a blast throwing this online shindig with everyone, and we’re definitely thinking we’ll be doing more events like this one in the future, as it was a great way to bring everyone together. 😄
Here’s some pics we saved from the event:
It’s convention time again!
That’s right!
The time of convention going HATH ARRIVED!
As per custom, we will be attending the 2025 Portland Retro Gaming Expo from October 18th – 19th. This year we will be presenting the Xbox release of Circus Interstellar, as well as talking with con goers about our next project Cyber Dread!
We hope to see some familiar faces and are stoked to show off the port that many of those familiar faces were waiting to see.
We will also be sharing a booth with our friends from Lazy Warlock, who will be showing their game Lords of Nysera, a strategy rpg akin to that of the Fire Emblem series! This is the first time we have done a split booth like this and are really excited to experience it!
On another note, there will be a plethora of amazing voice actors attending this year. There is one voice actor, however, that I will absolutely be ditching our booth to go and meet.
None other than the legendary soldier himself…DAVID HAYTER!!!! 😮😮😮
Having grown up with Solid Snake and played nearly every Metal Gear Solid title, this is the dude I’ve always wanted to meet!
So I’m certain that this Convention will be one of fond remembrance.
That about wraps it up for this post, sorry again that it takes so long for these posts to come, I’ve never really been one to do social media or make posts of any sort, so I tend to forget about doing them.
We hope you guys are enjoying Circus Interstellar and are excited to see what we can whip up next, and we hope to see some of you at this years PRGE!
See you Creatures on the flip side!
-Matthew and Stephan Hanewinckel; Co-owners of Ettinsoft LLC
We hope to see more of you creatures in the discord. 🙂
