Hey y'all!
We hope you're having a great end of the year!
As the year is closing to an end, we would like to reflect on what has happened in these past 12 months, and a lot happened this year!
502's Arcade
We started the year feeling very excited and nervous at the same time. On February 22nd we released 502's Arcade, and it was such a mix of feelings, but above all was that sense of accomplishment and happiness of what we have made.
We will make a proper post-mortem about it some time soon, but to let you know why this was such a huge milestone for us as a team, we'll let you know a bit about this release:
This was our first game being released on PC and consoles, so that was definitely a technical challenge, specially releasing in so many platforms. The game is available on Nintendo Switch, Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series!
Releasing on consoles was particularly special, since that has always been a childhood dream for many of us, and we got to be the first Guatemalan game releasing on PlayStation and Xbox! We were second on Nintendo Switch though, because our friends at Selva Interactive beat us to it with Illuminaria (which if you are a fan of strategy and resource management you should give it a try!).
Besides releasing on a lot of platforms, we manage to release the game in 8 different languages! We're now at 10 and we couldn't be more happy about it. Making the game accessible to more people around the globe means a lot to us, so supporting all these languages makes us super happy.
We managed to get some support from our friends at PlayStation and they were nice enough to feature our launch trailer on their Youtube channel! This video by itself has gathered more than 20k views, which might not sound like much, but for us, being a small team, means the world!
This was all amazing considering the small size of the team (5 people at its biggest size at one point!), as we had to do all ourselves, including marketing, release management, and all the other things involved in releasing besides developing the game.
And as for the post-launch, we've seen so many nice things shared online and read so much feedback through the year, from reviews of the game on Youtube, to full walkthroughs on how to get all the achievements in the game, we couldn't be more happy to see that so many people has been enjoying the game.
Next year we'll keep updating it, and not just bug fixes and small improvements, we got a few surprises in store, including one we'll be revealing really soon, so make sure to subscribe here to be notified when it happens!
Co-development
This is something we haven't talked as much as we want, but we will start doing more as it has become a core part of the studio.
A few years ago we started working with amazing studios to help them develop their games, or porting them to different platforms! Some of them have not released yet so there's not much we can say about those publicly yet, but enough to say we are very happy for the trust other studios have put on us to let us being a small part on their development journey!
One game we can actually talk about is Superliminal! We got the chance to help out with porting it to Android and iOS and it was a great game to work on, having such a particular gameplay, having all that Mind-bending optical puzzles, was a great technical challenge for us. The game even got nominated as "Best Mobile Port of the Year" at the Pocket Gamer Awards!
We are still learning though, so we know we can keep improving on helping other teams with all their development needs, and that's one of the main things we're aiming for next year.
And also on this regard, we couldn't be more grateful to our friends at Plastic Fern Studios with whom we have partnered in most of these projects and have shared a lot of their experience and knowledge with us through the year, which has been priceless for us as a team.
Looking forward to 2025
This year was great, and we know 2025 will be even better! Being releasing new games, updating released ones or collaborating with other studios to make theirs a reality (if you are one of those studios you can contact us through our site!) we'll keep hard at work, learning and happy to get to be a part of all these projects that bring so much fun to people.
See y'all in 2025!