Hi everyone! I just discovered Open Broadcasting Software and I wanted to try recording a gameplay video with it. I figured I'd show off on a skirmish map against the AI, give it a bit of a head start, and proceed to kick its ass. Well... Something about no plan surviving contact with the enemy? Still, the recording came out OK, so sit back and enjoy!

So yeah, I was pretty sure I was going turn it around. Spoiler: 12:33 is the point where realization finally begins to dawn that I'm royally screwed... and then it's over in seconds.

This week, we started something new: The Daily Blobbie. Turns out that Commander Grak and his colourful pals have more 'wisdom' to dispense than we could fit into our campaign. So we decided to give them some more airtime :). Here's yesterday's #TheDailyBlobbie:

We also made a separate page on our site for the pictures, so they're easily searchable. We made it into a blog page, so each image has a title and the options to tweet, like and add comments.

We hope you'll like this introduction into the minds of our blobbies. Let us know what you think of them!

And an update: we have an actual banner now. And of course, Commander Grak gives you The Angry Eye!

We've just uploaded a new build of the Powargrid demo to the website. We cleaned up the Quod dialogues and made sure all his dialogue pictures are in place (see our previous blog post for more on Quod). And the perk system for multiplayer is now fully operational (read more here). We've also done lots of small stuff like fixing spelling errors, squashing small bugs and planting the seeds for world domination.

In may, we'll demo Powargrid at the Indievelopment conference. We have plans to build two demo cabinets (more on those in a future blog post), but we wanted something more for the demo booth. We've settled on getting one of those fancy roll-up banners. Those look good and are very easy to transport. This is the design Michiel came up with:

Cool eh? :D

And that's that for now. This weekend we'll have a LAN with a bunch of friends at Michiel's house. So we'll be playing other people's games again for a change :).

When we decided to build a campaign for Powargrid instead of keeping it as a purely abstract tactical game, I designed a backstory for Globkar, the world where our blobbies live. The main driver behind that backstory was to have an explanation for the most obvious of our gameplay features; the lack of moving units. This turned out to be very fertile ground for world building, so during the campaign you can learn the backstory about our blobbies' strange way of waging war.

​Since looking for internally consistent reasons for game play features gets the creative juices flowing, I looked for more of these features to incorporate into the story. And instead of looking at our most distinctive feature, I picked one of the most common things in games: restarting a mission. So, without further ado, meet Quod, the tech blobbie who will send you back in time if you are defeated in a mission.

​He's even nicer than is fellow blue blobbie Grak but has a more sciency and experimental bend. As in that he likes to run experiments. On unfortunate recruits. Like you.

​Did we really need extra this content? No, not really. There are hardly any games that give you any sort of explanation about why you can retry after you lose; it's just part of games, or at least the games that don't have permadeath. But I really like the completeness this brings to the Powargrid campaign (also, in breaking news, there is a slight chance I'm weird :). Also, the downside for people who aren't interested in reading Quod's dialogues is minimal, since all dialogues can be quickly clicked away. For the visuals we (of course) added a recruit-grinding time machine in the background and Michiel added some nice special effects to your travels in time.

​In all, I'm very happy with how Quod turned out. Especially since creating Quod also ended up influencing some of our campaing design, making this a nice recursive process.

​If you're curious, you can give our Powargrid demo a try at www.powargrid.com/play. You'll just have to lose a mission to meet Quod :).

During the past week, we've been doing a lot of work on Powargrid. We didn't get round to writing a blog post though, so here is a quick look at some of the things that have been going on:

We've been discussing one final change to the game play for a while. The trouble was that building as much power plants as possible while keeping your opponent at bay was an overpowered strategy. Especially against an AI; a human opponent is much less likely to let you get away with building up a power plant advantage.
I'll write more about this in an upcoming blog post, but we've decided that we'll make power plants progressively more expensive. Every power plant beyond the third will be more expensive to build than the previous one. We're still testing how quickly the power cost should rise. At the moment, we're looking at base costs of 90 power for your 1st through 3rd power plant, 100 for your 4th, 120 for your 5th, and then on to 150, 190 , 240, etc.

We've also submitted Powargrid to the Indiecade festival for the 2016 edition. We were in doubt whether we should submit again, but since we found receiving professional feedback from the jurors very useful and can now present a much more finished game, we resubmitted. And we did so just before the early submission deadline :).

In other marketing stuff, we've been working on what we call #TheDailyBlobbie. Stay tuned to our Twitter account (@weefreestudio) if you're curious. We think we'll start #TheDailyBlobbie somewhere in the first half of april.

And finally, I have a visual for you:

That's the concept-background for Gruntland, the final mission of the campaign. We've been tweaking it for a while, and we're finally satisfied with it :). As you can see, a lot will be going on in Gruntland!

That's all for now. We'll be back later with some more in-depth posts about Powargrid.

​--Willem--