MINI-UPDATE : Rabbits, Pirates, and Aliens. (Patreon)

Welcome to a Wan Wan MINI UPDATE as we give some details on what we've been up to!

Last month we reprioritized our schedule a bit to work in more frequent streaming to help go towards budget. While we've always wanted to be in a position to move things a bit quicker with projects, it has always been a bit tricky with 3 people working under the support we currently have. Thankfully - the stream rescheduling worked out and did help the budget for Tough Bippy! Last month was one of our busiest in awhile, but also built some additional momentum towards our projects!

While we'll still have our game work streams every Tuesday and Thursday at 8 PM Eastern Time, we'll also be working in occasional game streams on Wednesdays and/or Fridays. While ideally we'd like to just prioritize our game work, streams have at least proven beneficial towards keeping things afloat plus providing some growth towards projects.

You can find Julian's game animation streams here on Twitch!  

Our main priority last month wasn't just the redone stream schedule we had alongside work on Tough Bippy - we've been wrapping up and finalizing the launch of our first Wan Wan TV original program. Starting in June - we'll be hosting a multimedia variety show where we look at old games, videos, and technology. We want to provide you guys something you can do while waiting on the games, so we're hoping this can be a fun amusement while we do busy nerd-work in the background.

( Work in progress - Julian's painted work for an introduction sequence to streams! )

The streams have been setup in a heavily modular format, running off of our own custom created software. What this means is that messages and scene transitions on stream can be automatically handled by the software, making it easy for us to do more streams in the future without costing any more time. While getting all the initial art assets done has taken a bit of effort - things at least come easier after this first stream since we now have the tools we need to work with.

( The pre-stream show will catalog all sorts of old gaming media and history! )

We hope you guys will enjoy the show when it launches next month! Ideally if all the new streaming content works out we should be able to expand the budget of Tough Bippy that much more, as well as providing you guys with some entertainment! We're still wrapping up some artwork for it, as well as getting some music written, but you'll be hearing more about it come the end of this month - so stay tuned!

While streaming is helping grow the budget for our games - we still want to prioritize making games above everything else! Last month was a big month for streaming but we still worked hard on Tough Bippy and have been in a process of redoing a few animations to go alongside the retooled combat system.

( Example of a new mid-hit animation for Bippy that give him a lot more impact. )

We sort of underestimated some of the changes Tough Bippy was going to have this year (all of it going towards the positive end at least - the game feels significantly better than before!) What was meant for a start of the year launch seems like it's going to need at least 2.5 months more worth of work before posting. Some animations still need to be redone, we still need clean-up on a few animations, we need to animate some new special effects and get those cleaned up, as well as finalizing a few UI assets and ensuring hitbox data suits new animations well.

Our pirate game (still untitled at the moment) was a game we started last year before taking on some extra side-work. It was meant to be a smaller scale project compared to anything else we've had, meant to be a name-your-price game to download. The reason we started this as a project is that we've never really been able to fully fund Tough Bippy as well as it's needed, so we're hoping that through a smaller game here (that you patrons will be receiving for free) - its sales can go towards getting Tough Bippy to where it needs to be. 

( Various concept art and a look at the third playable character's sprites! )

The pirate game opts for a deliberately stylized look, allowing us to save a lot of time with illustrations, as well as saving time with animations thanks to the loose cartoony nature of the game's look. While the game runs vertically by default, players can also adjust/rotate their screen or enable certain information to be displayed off to the sides of the screen.

( Concept art and rough prototypes of the menus and select screens. )

We spent some time experimenting a bit with mechanics and scoring systems last year, the game's core mechanic functioning around eating bullets. If the player holds down the Fire button and lets go after a bit - their ship will snap shut at the front and will eat bullets about to make contact with you. By properly timing button presses, players can parry and eat bullets to avoid dangerous situations. We have still been experimenting a bit with the timing and function of this mechanic - so when the game is further along we may post a test on here to receive feedback on how it feels to play.

Since we still aren't able to grow Tough Bippy's team for the time being - we're considering switching priority to the pirate game until its completion. We had scheduled work to start on it by this point in the year but are going to figure out in the next week if we try to wrap up Build 2 or switch onto the pirate game and wrap up Build 2's final assets off to the side while doing that.

That is the end of this mini update! In summation, Build 2 of Tough Bippy needs more work than we had initially anticipated so based on budget - it may take a couple of months to knock that out. The pirate game is what we'd like to start work on soon since it's meant to be a much smaller game that can help out the budget of Tough Bippy. Next month we'll be launching our new stream show which will hopefully assist towards all of our projects. Last month actually had more going on than any other month this year for us - but we think June is going to end up being an exciting month! Be sure to tune into Julian's work streams every Tuesday and Thursday on his Twitch, and at the end of the month we'll have a proper Patreon update giving further details about the launch of our stream project, what is left for Build 2, and what we'd like to do for the pirate game. See you all in a week with more updates!

~DD