Another month went by and we haven’t posted. I guess we suck pretty bad at blogging and there’s nothing we can do about it. But I’m consoling myself with the fact that other devs suck at this, too. It’s kind of a doom loop – you have to develop your game and “don’t have time for marketing”, but it’s necessary, I know.
Alright, enough wallowing in self-pity. As you might know this week lots of different events are happening in Germany. GDC Europe, Respawn, gamescom. So much is going on and the worst: we can’t be part of it :O
Our schedule and more important our wallet doesn’t allow to roadtrip to Cologne. Need to finish this game, don’t we…alright, enough with the self-pity, for real!
There are some really good news regarding our “Sir Eatsalot”. In the last couple of weeks we didn’t only spent time with working on assets and whatnot but also had some clarification. Did you know there were more than 4 million PS Vita devices installed in Japan? I knew there was a big bunch, but really didn’t know it was that much. That’s around 1/3 of the whole install base. So we sat down and our conclusion was: “Ok. We must not ignore this!” It’s a huge audience, and something told us, that our game could perform really well in that market. It’s colorful, lighthearted and a bit silly. The problem was: as far as we knew it is almost mandatory to localise your game in japanese, since most of the japanese gamers play rather in japanese than in english or don’t speak/read english at all. Nobody of our team could speak japanese and we also didn’t know anyone. Except Hirofumi Yamada! You might remember, that we exhibited “Sir Eatsalot” at the local Comics/Manga/Games-event MaGnology, and conveniently the organiser was Hiro, who is a native japanese speaker. We approached him, pitched the game, talked about the japanese market and he was “in”. As a game-designer himself he sees lots of potential especially for the japanese audience, which was another confirmation for us that we have to bring “Sir Eatsalot” to Japan.
And as of now we will fully localise and support the game with the help of Hiro for all those japanese PS Vita owners out there! We’re also trying to establish a relationship with SCE Japan in order to boost awareness and visibility and maybe also some funding.
To keep up the good news: we will get a feature on the in-house magazine of the Vita Lounge. Big thanks to Paul Murphy (the executive editor) for this opportunity. The digital (free) and print (for Patreons) version will be released around 17th of August, and since the Vita Lounge consists of super-nice people they’ll sent us a print version, too. As soon it’s out, we’ll let you know!