Another PAX has come and gone. We spent 4 wonderful days in Boston showing off our latest games, selling some new merchandise, raffling off custom painted Joy-Cons, and most importantly just getting a chance to meet everyone and talk about video games.
Below is an assortment of pictures from our adventures during the show. Thank you to everyone for stopping by the booth, you provide us with life energy that we use to create more games. Thank you for your life energies!
Lastly, none of this would be possible without the hard work from everyone below. It takes us 3 days to setup our booth, and then another 8-10 hours to tear it all down. We use 2.7 bottles of hand sanitizer each day, shake or fist bump about 100 hands daily, and most importantly we had to sacrifice our sanity by being next to the Mixer booth which played nothing but the most annoying Fortnite sounds you could imagine non stop everyday.
Castle Crashers Remastered is coming to the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4!
For those of you who are not familiar with Castle Crashers Remastered (CCR), here’s a quick rundown of what this version of the game has:
A multiplayer mini-game called “Back Off Barbarian” that’s frantic and weird.
Texture sizes of the game are five times the texture size of the original game
CCR runs at 60 frames per second. The original ran at 30 frames per second which feels kind of like a slideshow if you go back to it after trying this new one.
All previously released downloadable content like characters, weapons, and animal orbs are available in-game
Various performance updates and improvements to gameplay and online multiplayer
Oh, technology, you silly beast. You wonderful, electronic beast.
CCR on the Nintendo Switch has HD Rumble, Switch Online, and 4 player local Joy-Con support. Bring those little knights with you in handheld mode or put them up on the big screen while docked! On your PS4, we’ve utilized the latest in lighting technology to lighten up your lightbars with your character affinity color!
Both of these fine versions have been made possible thanks to the team at PlayEveryWare. It’s like magic seeing the game run on these new systems. We’re all very excited to get them into your hands!
Now let’s get to two of the most common questions we’ve been asked.:
Why bring CCR to two more platforms now?
Well, aside from it being one of the most requested things we get asked there’s some less obvious reasons. With Alien Hominid not being ported often, we’ve seen it slowly become unavailable in most places. When we make games we want them to stick around. Taking advantage of the updated hardware of each generation is also very satisfying. Higher resolutions, higher framerates, chances to make tweaks, and better overall quality. Our debut title (Alien Hominid) was available on both Gameboy Advance and Nintendo Gamecube.
We’ve always eyeballed Nintendo’s platforms with a very warm heart. However, since the Gamecube, Nintendo’s cool features often demanded more development time than we were able to balance while guaranteeing quality. For instance, dual screens requiring UI and design reworks. The Nintendo Switch is perfect for us to make our return on and it brings with it the ability to have our games be portable. We always wanted to get onto the 3DS due to portability, so this is exciting for us!
Why not a sequel, you say?
Spooky tough question (but not really)! I often see people claim we would never make a sequel. That’s not accurate. We might make one someday, but it would have to hit all the right points at the right times. It has to be a product that would end up vastly improved, rather than “more of the same”, which is only something we can accomplish with gaining experience.
Another thing to consider is that there would be no Castle Crashers 2 if we started out by making sequels. You’d have Alien Hominid 2 instead of Castle Crashers 1. Or, alternatively, there’d be no BattleBlock Theater if we made Castle Crasher 2. It’s fun making different worlds and genres you love and want more of. We like the idea of more too. A constant internal battle with our minds! When we sat down to make the company we already had more games ideas than we could ever physically make in the first place and we want to bring them to life. Conflicting stuff!
Game 5 and beyond…
Finally, among the many other projects we have going on right now, we’re working on our fifth game, code-named “Game 5”. Because of this our design babies are gestating within that womb of the development world. We’ll have more information on this later in the year hopefully. One thing at a time, my sweet, sweet loves.
Next Thursday we’ll be attending PAX Boston, and will have the first playable versions of CCR on the Switch and PS4 for those of you in attendance. More PAX booth details to come later this week too. Anyway, I’ve been told that typing is something humans weren’t actually meant to be doing at all. Now I have to pretend I’m Tom Hanks in Cast Away in order to even it out.
Thank you, Tom Hanks. You wonderful, organic beast.
