Happy new year!!! In the past, we’ve done recaps to say good bye to the past year. This year, we’ll recap and say hello to 2018 because there’s so much to look forward to this year with the release of Pit People after we complete the final touches. But first, a year in review to see what got us to this point:
At the start of 2017, we released our first early access version of Pit People on Xbox One Game Preview and Steam Early Access. It is not only our first early access title, but also the first time we’ve developed & released two separate platforms simultaneously since we started working on digital downloads. As a smaller team, doing essentially two projects at a time has been a rewarding challenge for us this past year!
There was an overwhelming amount of support and positive feedback during the early access launch week! But more importantly, there was also a ton of constructive feedback from the Pit People community. We quickly started working on ways to improve based on the comments we got through our support ticketing system, forums, and our Discord.
First, we did overall improvements with Update 1: Home Improvement. Second, we made tweaks to the World Maps and the Pit in Update 2: World Tour. Next, we added a couple new features in Update 3: Emperor’s Orders. Then, we released the next story part and a whole new world map in Update 4: Vibrant Villains. In our latest (but not final) update we included an entirely new challenging mode with Update 5: Infinite Wisdom.
In between all of these updates our team has continued to balance the game and work on story & world map missions. As we mentioned last month, we’re on track to release the remaining story parts and the full version of the game in early 2018. An official release date has yet to be announced, but you can bet your butts that we’ll let you know as soon as we can!
In the meantime, let’s continue down 2017’s memory lane and highlight some events we had…
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Something we look forward to doing every year are the conventions and expos where we exhibit our games. Last year, we tried out a few new activities at our booths.
At PAX East, we held our first ever Pit People Tournament at our booth! Each day of PAX, attendees could join the bracket and go up against fellow players in the Pit. One player would stand victorious by the end of the day! We also had a chance to do a couple stage events, like the Xbox Daily Show (Live) and the Xsplit Road Show, so we could talk about Pit People in detail.
In April, we went to the first ever Tribeca Games Festival. Since only John and Ian went from our team, they brought the portable controllers with them. Always a crowd pleaser!
Another annual trip of ours is RTX in Austin. We decided to switch things up from PAX East since we realized a day-long tournament was a huge time commitment for attendees. Our first Pit People PVP Challenge took place there and our Cow Chop friends stopped by to do their own fights to the death against their fans!
Next up on our trade show tour was San Diego Comic Con. We’ve been going to this con for almost 15 years now, so we decided to try something new and invite a few friends to join our booth! Behemoth + Friends featured our games alongside Oxygen Not Included (Klei), Rivals of Aether (Dan Fornace), Inversus (Hypersect), Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (Landfall Games), Salt and Sanctuary (Ska Studios), and Nightmare Cops (Newgrounds). SDCC attendees got to a chance to try out so many indie games in one booth!
Last, but not least, we had our largest booth at PAX West. We decided to do the Pit People PVP Challenge at this show as well. It was amazing to be able to bring in so many contenders and we even watched a few Challenge winners battle each other!
We can’t wait to do shows again this year because it’ll be another chance to meet fans of our games!
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There were also a few events that happened right in our sunny town of San Diego. The Fleet Science Center brought in the traveling Game Masters Exhibition, which includes both Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers! Dan got to promote the event and our games during a local news segment. We were also part of the museum’s discussion series called “Power Up! Inside Video Games.” Some of our team members got up on stage to answer questions about game development.
Back at our office, we also made sure to get together every few months for some important group bonding time. It was usually over games with our friends at The Research Centaur. You know what they say, “A group that games together, makes even better games together” …or something like that.
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A majority of our community events took place online:
We held our annual Fan Art Contest in February. That same month, we teamed up with a few other indie studios to create the Cozy Couch Co-Op Bundle!
In March, we started posting behind-the-scenes stories about our Pit People voice actors! This continued throughout the year with spotlights on each individual actor.
Before we released Pit People’s Update 4 in June, we gave a sneak preview of some bonus missions we were adding to the game with the update. It was a fun way to show off the work the team had been putting into the game as well as a chance to chat with the community during the live stream.
A few months later, we got to do a throwback stream to celebrate our studio’s 14th anniversary. Of course, we had to play Alien Hominid since that was the game that started it all for us!
In October, we hosted our annual Halloween Contest where fans could submit their Behemoth character inspired costumes or decorations. There were some unique and spooky creations this year!
Last month, the Pit People community got a chance to play against our dev team during our live stream of “Play with the Devs.” Community members went head-to-head in the Pit — some fighters fell while others got to say they defeated the devs!
Hopefully, there will be another chance to do Play with the Devs in 2018 with the full release of Pit People!
TL;DR – We did a lot last year but we’re looking forward to doing even more this year! We’ll be releasing Pit People in early 2018, which means you’ll likely hear from us again soon with a release date.
Until then, we wish you all a wonderful new year! Let’s make 2018 a great one!