Hail to the WiiU

Only days are left till the WiiU launch! We're looking forward to getting our hands on a retail WiiU, with games other than Cloudberry! Not that Cloudberry doesn't satisfy our every desire, just, you know, sometimes you want a little Mario action.

We've been hit with some development setbacks, not least of which was Hurricane Sandy that knocked us out. We're still chugging, we've just decided to push back the Cloudberry WiiU launch to the same time as the launches on other systems. Thanks to all our backers for being patient. Our Kickstarter had originally said the game would be done in September 2012, so it looks like we're going to be a couple of months late =P The good news is this means we get extra time to polish up the WiiU version! We promise the delay won't be too great. We've already got an official launch date in mind.

We're definitely bummed to be missing out on the WiiU launch. Nintendo has been incredibly gracious in giving us an opportunity to launch, as well as being incredibly understanding that our dev cycle got a little out of whack. We're still pumped to be launching on WiiU in the months to come, and we're equally pumped to be seeing the WiiU come out in a few days!

Onward!

Storm surge!

Hello world!

Manhattan got slammed pretty hard by hurricane Sandy. The Pwnee crew has been without power since Monday. We're all safe though, tucked away in pajama pants and eating ramen, trying not to die of boredom and internet withdrawal.

To all of you out there in the East coast, I hope you're all well! Stay safe, enjoy the vacation.

All the best, Pwnee Team

We Like it Harder

It's the middle of crunch time. Coffee cups and ramen bags litter the office floor. I don't even drink coffee, where the hell are all these Starbucks cups coming from? Whatever. Can't sleep, marketing dragons will eat me. All the WiiU articles talking about launch titles and Cloudberry keep pointing to our old trailer. No more!

Behold!

Kotaku!

We're up on Kotaku, in their list of WiiU indie titles. Check it out!

http://kotaku.com/5946726/the-wonderful-surprise-hiding-in-the-wii-u-launch-line+up?post=53016687

We're extremely proud and humbled by the opportunity Nintendo has given us to launch on the WiiU. We would never have gotten here without the attention and support the community has shown us. You all paved the path for us. Now let's kick some ass!

Maximum zoom!

Scene from the opening cinematic. A beard after my own heart. Click on this baby to biggify! Yeah!

Indie love, activate!

Our indie brothers over at Studio Nasu -- by now world renowned for their awesome concept design work on Cloudberry -- have just launched a Kickstarter project to infuse their official Otakon beat 'em up project Crisis Heat Brawler with some sweet, sweet indie-love.

Damn, I sound like a bad car salesman. Let me try again.

These guys are awesome! Go check them out!

Podcast interview with Nintendo Okie!

I swear we're hard at work and not just shooting the breeze with every podcaster that crosses our path. Nonetheless, uh... well, here's us shooting the breeze with the awesome podcast guys over at Nintendo Okie:

http://nintendo-okie.com/2012/08/23/pwnee-studios-audio-interview/

Despite the hefty 40 minute length of the interview, we really didn't talk that much about Cloudberry. It turns out we're horrible at self promotion and instead just like talking about nachos and incest scenes in Back to the Future. If I had a DeLorean I would go back in time and deliver a finished Cloudberry to a nascent Pwnee Studios, along with a giant platter of Velveeta nachos, before committing incest on myself. That counts as incest right? (Disclaimer: Velveeta is disgusting)

P.S.: We also appeared on their quiz show segment Question Block, where we surprisingly subdued and dominated some tasty Warcraft 3 trivia questions. I've never won at trivia before!

It isn't mine, but I'll pretend to love it anyway.

Some of you may remember that Pwnee already has a blog, self-hosted and partially self-created. The blog was a satisfying Frankenstein of Wordpress and AWS, with an invisible Python soul that I lovingly crafted from scratch to form the backbone of the simplest blog possible. It didn't even show dates of posts!

Why did I even write that monstrosity in the first place? We started out with a vanilla Wordpress install, hacked to pieces to conform to the layout of our website. I'd never touched PHP before, but by some grace of Knuth my meddling didn't destroy the install, and things were working pretty well. But it was slow. Not least of all because it was hosted on a shared Godaddy box (I KNOW, DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT. This was before SOPA. Godaddy was still sleazy, but to my defense, I really like race cars in commercials). Anyway... we were just then getting some attention on reddit and the likes, and pwnee.com was about to implode into a pool of HTTP request molasses. So I decided to half-convert the blog (and almost all of pwnee.com) into static pages hosted on AWS. I forged some Pythonic Scripts of Helpfulness to allow me to easily add new entries into the blog, and added a really important looking bullet point to my infinite to-do list:

• Add support for commenting.

That was 6 months ago. The good news is the static hosting on AWS has been awesome. Not literally the fastest provider in the world (although there are additional things like CloudFront to make it even better), but it was pretty fast, and stable. But no comments. It wasn't really a place for the community to get involved. I kept telling myself I would add commenting and then really, truly start blogging regularly... but, well, making a game is hard, and the little time I have not-programming is usually spent pretending like I'm asleep while my mind loops through my to-do list like it's a block of DRAM personally responsible for refreshing to maintain integrity.

Your brain on DRAM

The commenting system was never going to get written. I wanted to write it. I wanted nothing else but to take a break from programming Cloudberry to program a totally new beast. It was going to be fast and shiny and totally better and more stable than any other commenting system ever. But ultimately, I was just using my desire to write my own system as a poor excuse for not blogging. As hard as it is to accept, you don't always have the time to make the perfect system, sometimes you need to go with the 99% solution that comes ready-made in a shiny box that smells slightly of chemicals, but in a good way, really, don't look at me like you don't sniff that stuff too, I know it kills brain cells, damnit.

Right... so, uh. Oh, blogger.com! The 99% solution. It's not mine. I didn't write it. I didn't craft it lovingly from the forlorn nights of my fleeting youth. Nope. I signed up, swallowed my fear that Google is taking over the world and owns too much of my data, and started writing this blogpost. Because Pwnee needs a blog. For the people! Rah-rah-rah-rah.

Now leave some goddamn comments to make me feel better!

Soon.