So what can I say about 2008? A year full of work, releases, more work, ups and downs, cognitions and experiences. It already started at full speed with the release of our 2d submarine multiplayer shooter Waterstorm in February. It was great to see this going to 1.0 after a rather long time in beta. We did some updates to the game shortly after, as well as we made plans to update the game to feature bots to both give players a possibility to practice and to avoid the situation where a player joins a game server and the server is empty.
We already have a lot of the bots stuff implemented, but unfortunately other projects also needed a certain amount of time and dedication so that we couldn’t come up with a release of it yet.
On the contract work side, we were happy to see the finished version of the snowboarding game Drop Point: Alaska for the Mac in stores, also in February. At the same time, we were already working as contractors on another project of the same Austrian-based developer, Bongfish. This project, Stoked, also a snowboarding game, will be released on January 20th, 2009.
During spring and summer, we worked on super-secret stuff. A fresh, new game concept that we showed off at the Games Convention in Leipzig in August. Only a few people have seen this yet, but we hope we can bring this to a stage, so we might get a publishing deal for it. If not, there is always the chance that we will take our demo and release it to the public, to get feedback from gamers around the world.
The Games Convention itself was a huge experience for all of us – we really had a lot of fun there. I’m already thinking about attending it next year.
Later in 2008, we started working on iPhone/iPod touch games. With White Mouse and iPentris being one of the first releases, some great stuff is to follow. I’ll post some more details about iPentris very soon.
So let’s take a deep breath, and then go on to take all the challenges 2009 has to offer!