Wii-U
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Rescuing Totem Topple
I was pretty gutted with how Totem Topple was received after it launched back in November, both in terms of poor reviews and poor sales. The first reaction is always to get angry, but looking back on the comments, I quickly realised that most of the criticism was justified. When placing myself in the shoes of reviewers or players coming to the game with fresh eyes, the responses to the game were perfectly rational. One video of the game was particularly telling: I watched as the player died, died again, died again. Then they checked the in-game help, compared what all the different totem heads did. They devised a strategy,…
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Closing the Loop
In many ways, Nintendo have been playing catch up with the rest of the industry in the last few months, with their new account system and first mobile app Miitomo launching recently. Nothing exemplifies this more so than the nintendo.com website, which finally allows people to buy digital download games without having to log onto their console. For most consumers it’s a cool, if minor added convenience. However, for developers it represents a major fix to a once horribly convoluted purchasing process. Essentially, developers and publishers can now link directly to a place where people can actually buy their games, no matter what device they are on. This opens up…
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Soft Price Control
Nintendo recently launched a new customer loyalty scheme in Japan, My Nintendo, alongside the release of their first mobile game/app, Miitomo. In the scheme, players are rewarded with “platinum” coins for various activities centred around encouraging engagement with Miitomo and other Nintendo services. These coins can then be redeemed to get discounts on certain games or other digital trinkets like background themes for the 3DS console. However, like all good mobile games, Miitomo has a second premium currency. At time of writing, spending these “gold” coins gives much bigger discounts to a wider selection of games. Unlike other mobile games, Gold coins are earned purely by buying other games on…
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Gear Gauntlet Coming to Wii U
We’ve teamed up with UK based studio Drop Dead Interactive to bring their game, Gear Gauntlet, to the Wii U. It’s a fun but rage inducing 2D action arcade game that we think will be right at home on the Nintendo console. We’ve been hard at work porting it to Wii U for the last few months, adapting it to work with the Wii U’s unique GamePad controller, integrating Nintendo leaderboard API’s and adding a few extras like Miiverse functionality, Wii U Pro and Classic Controller support. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be ensuring Gear Gauntlet passes all the requisite Nintendo checks, as well as promoting it, with the…
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Quick Reaction
Totem Topple has now been unleashed on an unsuspecting world, and the initial feedback on the game is starting to trickle in. To date, when I’ve watched people play the game, I’ve been able to approach them afterwards and quiz them on what they found the game to be like. Those observations have usually been made at gaming events, where there is a very different context to playing the game at home. It’s been fascinating watching the youtube gameplay videos that have gone up so far. Most have been from reviewers or people I’ve provided with early demo codes prior to release, so they’ve all been around the 5 minute mark…
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Totem Topple Release Date
Totem Topple to Launch on Wii U and PC on 19th November 2015 Totem Topple finally has a release date! It will come out on 19th of November on Wii U in North America and Europe, and worldwide on PC via itch.io. For those interested in getting a review copy, email contact |at| crystallinegreen.com Presskit also available It’ll be interesting to see how the game fares, considering this time of year is traditionally not a good time for small independent titles to get noticed. Usually the airwaves (or twittersphere or whatever passes for mass media these days) are filled with adverts for the latest blockbuster hits hoping to worm their way…
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Forward Progess
A brief update from here at Crystalline Green HQ: Exciting times for Totem Topple. We’ve now submitted the game into Nintendo’s Wii U approvals process (aka lotcheck). It takes a few weeks for them to go through everything and probably they’ll spot one or two things that need fixing at our end, so our current thinking is that the game will be released around the end of October or maybe early November. We’ll keep you posted on when we have an exact date! Meanwhile, we’ve switched back to working on Flight of Light. We’re currently rebuilding the game from the ground up in the latest version of Unity (5.2). After…
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Translation Topple
If you’d like to help with translating Totem Topple, you can do so here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16L93VAZys5cdselM08FRpWKwJoZsXb62kiMlBCRoO4Q/edit#gid=0 Totem Topple is the first game where we’ve gone beyond English and translated the game into different languages. It’s always great for people to be able to enjoy games in their native language. All too often, there’s a touch of cultural arrogance from English speaking developers in assuming that the rest of the world will just deal with the fact the game is in one language only, so it’s nice to break that for once. Voice and text can add a huge amount to the playing experience, but for those games that don’t have a narrative…
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On Apple TV (and why we’re sticking with Wii U)
Apple TV has been sat quietly at the back of Apple’s product line, ticking over for a number of years without the company making any sort of big, showy push for adoption typical of their other devices. No longer it seems, with a large segment of Apple’s latest live show dedicated to the newly revamped set-top-box. They also demoed the remote control it will use, which includes amongst other things, gyroscope functions that make it very similar to Wiimote controllers used by the Wii and Wii U. For us, and especially for our game Flight of Light, that might sound almost too good to be true. The game is designed…
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Frantic First
Frantic mode is in many ways the “original” Totem Topple game with other modes coming later. In fact, Totem Topple was first forged in the fires of a 48 hour competitive game jam, meaning that there wasn’t time to implement many of the typical features of a tower defence game. Instead it became an exercise in stripping back all extraneous elements and focusing on a single question: “What do I build next?” Place more wings now or try to build the totem pole up a bit further? Concentrate on damage dealing beaks or health boosting wings? Once the decision is made though, it’s a simple case of pressing the right…