FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Get Ready for Adventure! KarjaSoft Releases Wildhollow

Sweden, November 27, 2009 — Independent game developer KarjaSoft proudly announces the release of tongue-in-cheek adventure/pet raising game Wildhollow for Windows and Mac.

Wildhollow introduces the story of a young boy or girl returning home to find his or her parents missing under mysterious circumstances. The player is tasked with solving quests and ultimately discovering the fate of his/her missing parents, while also restoring the titular Wildhollow ranch to full glory. The game features an original mix of dialogue driven adventure gameplay and pet simulation elements in which animals can be raised and crossbred. A wide variety of breeds can be discovered, and varied food gathering minigames spice things up even further.

The game world is filled with colorful characters and humorous dialogue, and provides many hours of open-ended entertainment. The player encounters inept adventurers, cowardly dragons, greedy merchants, dwarf lords in love and much more as the story progresses.

“If you enjoy funny dialogue, adorable pets to raise and clever jabs at common fantasy cliches you’re going to love Wildhollow,” says Miro Karjalainen, owner of KarjaSoft, not at all deterred by the fact that his opinion might be slightly biased.

Wildhollow is available for Windows and Mac at the price of $19.99. More information, screenshots and trial downloads can be found on the official webpage:

http://www.wildhollow.com

Features:

- Loads of wacky characters to interact with
- Adorable animals to breed
- Tongue-in-cheek humor poking fun at fantasy cliches
- A colorful fantasy world to explore
- Hours of adventurous quests
- And much more…

System requirements:

1 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM. Windows 2000 or higher, or Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.

About KarjaSoft

Founded by Miro Karjalainen in 2006, KarjaSoft has previously released the fluffy arcade game Sheeplings in 2007 followed by superhero puzzle/RPG Spandex Force in 2008. KarjaSoft focuses on developing casual indie games with a twist, including lots of humor and genre blending. Visit KarjaSoft online at http://www.karjasoft.com

Contact:

Miro Karjalainen
www.karjasoft.com
info@karjasoft.com

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“Karja, you lazy sod! Why haven’t you blogged for several weeks now,” I hear you cry. Well, SOME of us have a full time job while we also try to fit in a wedding (not my own!), beer with friends, TV-series (I love House M. D.!) and casual adventure game development. The latter is what’s been occupying most of my spare time these last couple of weeks.

The adventure/simulation game Wildhollow is about to be released November 27, and I’m trying my best to arrange everything for tomorrow. Full version and trial builds for Windows and Mac, press release, webpage touch-ups, ordering system setup, and on and on and on… The time is now 10 PM and I’m starting to question how much sleep I’ll get tonight.

Stay tuned for a press release posting tomorrow…

A little while ago I started a side project to my adventure/management game Wildhollow: a simple Flash game for the website as a teaser. I’m aiming for a game where you learn what animals like what types of food; something that’s useful to know in the real game too.

In my previous two versions I was using…well…Flash, but now I’ve experimented with Flex and lately with flixel, a game framework compatible with Flex. Things are progressing much more smoothly now that I can focus on writing the ActionScript code instead of mucking about with learning basic Flash concepts. This is as far as I’ve come right now:

I’m starting to figure out the different game states, and I’ve added stages as well as a simple scoring system. By the way, if you get past level 5 the game will crash. Just so you know. It’s far from finished – but the main idea is beginning to crystalize.

Things left on the todo list:

• More stages with different animals
• Possibly, an online highscore table
• Sound and music
• Better loading screen
• One-screen tutorial
• General design issues – improve the look of the game
• Try out small things like should the food items start bouncing instead of just moving forward, etc
• Misc things like KarjaSoft logo, link to the Wildhollow homepage, optimize the game for size, etc…

Time to get some work done if I want to finish this before the Wildhollow release…

“Say, Karja, whatever happened to the game you were developing? What was it called? Woodhollow or something? Did you forget about it?”

Why, not at all! Wildhollow has been delayed due to work, personal issues and a long frigging trip to China among other things, but at long last I’m on track again. I’m planning an autumn release, and judging from the v0.3 that I finished today things are looking good.

Here are some screenshots to tease you with:

But you’re not getting a download just yet. I need to have a quick sanity check: some people need to test it before I can make a public release. Just in case I’ve left some horrible bug or other issue that makes the game unplayable and/or unenjoyable.

Wildhollow, the quirky indie adventure game featuring weird humor and bizarre animals to take care of, is slowly starting to come together at long last. The minigames are still not up to par but at least the game is now possible to complete. I still have a few side quests to wrap up, but the main storyline is written and playtested. Up to, and including, the endgame that twists and turns a little but in the end settles into a nice and cozy happy ending.

Here are some tiny screenshots from the late stages of the game. If you’re really sensitive toward spoilers you might want to avert your eyes now. Nothing critical is revealed – I’m just offering a friendly warning in case you really want everything to be a surprise.

Yeah, let’s get it oooon!

I think I smell some fightin’ comin’ up!

Breaking the fourth wall? Guilty as charged!

I went for a very basic credits screen. I think it works, though.

Now, as soon as the minigames are functioning properly and the animal tending sub-game is in order I think the game is just about ready for release. I still wonder how it will be received, and if it will be appropriate for portals. Time will tell I guess.

Stay tuned for more information!

My recent non-public release of Wildhollow (v0.2) has received some very interesting feedback. First of all, many seem to enjoy the art and the writing. Yayness! That’s actually pretty damn cool – I’ve been freetting over whether or not I’m a moron for putting so much emphasis on dialogue in the game. My reasoning is sound: Spandex Force received praise for its humorous writing, so this time I’m concentrating on much more of that. But it is a bit of a gamble. The audio received some mixed comments, but the only thing I really have to change is the typewriter sound in the dialogues. I agree that it’s a tad anachronistic in a fantasy game…but on the other hand I’ve added heavy metal songs for the dramatic scenes as well. What can I say, I like contrasts!

Other than that there are three worrying tendencies in the feedback: the minigames suck (I’m fixing that), the animal management needs to be improved (I’m fixing that)…and I have a sneaky suspicion that some people feel that there’s not enough guidance in the quests.

I’m all for easy-to-play games that one can pick up instantly. But Wildhollow requires you to read a lot of dialogue and deduce what to do based on that. I’ve done my best to have “quest hints” for each stage of the quests and have characters repeat important bits of information if they’re relevant to a quest, but there still might be a lot of exploration required to solve some of the puzzles.

I’m still on the fence whether or not this is a good thing. My initial response is “It’s a good thing, dammit! It encourages immersion and makes the quests flow naturally rather than appear forced.” But yesterday I played Rise of the Argonauts and now I’m not so sure anymore…

I consider myself a casual gamer, and Rise of the Argonauts is a pretty casual action RPG. I click some buttons, and the dude runs around like a scorched ferret, cutting and clubbing people all over the place. I love it! Epic violence, beautifully performed, that requires almost no skill at all. I don’t have to spend hours to learn how to do weird combos – they simply appear out of nowhere!

But all is not well in ancient Greece… The game gives almost no indication as to what I need to do next. I can’t be arsed to read all the text in an action game – I’m playing the game to spear people on my enormous barbeque stick! But if I skip too much I end up with my hero standing around looking dumb, and me sitting there feeling even more dumb. “So… Uh… What? What do I have to do now? Do I have to talk to someone? Is there a list of active quests? I don’t know what to do!”

Now, Wildhollow and Rise of the Argonauts aren’t comparable at all. Not in the very least, and not only because RotA is a frigging multi-million production. My choice to rely on text in Wildhollow is a major part of the design – it’s an integral part of the game. RotA’s focus is on action, with text added on. In Wildhollow you can quickly click around to try out things or talk to people; in RotA you have to physically move your character between the scenic vistas to see if this was where you needed to go…and retrace your steps if not. But at its core, Wildhollow relies on the player to explore to proceed – just like RotA.

I’ve been toying with the idea of adding graphic indicators for whom to talk to next, but… That feels cheap. It breaks the immersion. And it just might make the puzzles too easy. Another approach might be to make conversations pop up more often – make some NPCs initiate conversations on their own. That’s probably a better approach, but I’m still not sure if that would work. What I want is to make a game that’s easy to play and follow, but still not ridiculously simple or lacking in immersion.

Any suggestions for good games I ought to play to get inspiration for how to solve my dilemma?

No one?

Not a single suggestion?

Man, you suck.

Lo and behold, the new Cynical Stuff design is in place! It may not be the most artistic design ever, but I think it will serve its purpose. The purpose is of course to have a common design for all KarjaSoft pages: KarjaSoft.com, Sheeplings.com, Wildhollow.com…and later also SpandexForce.com. I’ve waited with Spandex Force since that’s the most demanding of the game pages. Demanding because there’s a lot of content there, and I’m going for a “less is more” approach with this new design.

It was surprisingly simple to convert the KarjaSoft design into a WordPress plugin. I feared that it would involve days of strange PHP coding – instead it only involved hours of strange PHP coding. I’d like to mutter some choice words about WordPress, but truth be told the more I work with it the more I like it. The themes are structured pretty logically and the default fallback works great. (I.e. if you haven’t written a special PHP file for, say, viewing a single blog entry then it makes some magical assumptions and displays the content as best as it can anyway.)

You can see the result right now: it’s a lighter, happier blog than the old black Cynical Stuff. Granted, something darker would be more appropriate for the title but it’s my bloody blog so you just shut the hell up if you’re not happy! If I want to have a shiny happy blog I’m damn well going to have it! And either way I actually prefer contrasts. Like the suicide bunnies:

Suicide bunnies rule! Or at least they will when the revolution comes.

By the way, I’ve removed the ugly “Cynical Stuff” handwriting from the logo! An era is at an end. Only yesterday I was convinced I were going to let it remain – but today I realized that it simply won’t fit in with the new design. Oh well.

Welcome to Cynical Stuff v3!

In the beginning of the summer I posted an ad where I asked for web designers interested in having a go at integrating all the KarjaSoft pages into one logical unit. Essentially, what I want is a unified presence in order to explore synergies between my different projects – e.g. Cynical Stuff, the KarjaSoft company webpage and the different game pages. Yes, you may now slap me in the face for using both “unified presence” and “explore synergies” in the same sentence. Either way, I got a couple (as in two) responses…that somehow missed the mark a little.

What I desperately need is a designer. Not a programmer (I can code PHP myself, goddammit!) or an artist (what good is a pretty logo if it’s just sitting there like a bloated toad?) – a web designer! But somehow the word design gets lost when one mentions web design. Web design almost inevitably gets interpreted as either “make a logo” or “do a customized content management system.” Design is of course present in both making a logo and writing code, but my needs were for a person more keen on usability and design in the classical sense.

To make a short story long: In the end I sighed and shook my blonde curls in dismay, and decided to have a go at it myself instead. Hey, at least it’s a learning experience, right? Here’s what I ended up with as my first concept:

This is supposed to be the Games page; a list of all KarjaSoft games with easily accessible links to each game. Clicking a game logo leads you to the specific game’s page. The color scheme and the logo is modified for each game, but the main design is kept in order to give a sense of unity. Also, the navigation buttons in the top right are present on all pages. As you can see I’ve used common terms instead of titles. If someone sees a button with Cynical Stuff it is probably hard to guess that it leads to this blog, but by typing out Blog everyone will instantly know where it leads.

And yes. If I adopt this design, it will mean that Cynical Stuff will be redesigned according to this as well. As long as I can make a decent WordPress template out of it, that is.

Any thoughts? Does it look like cat vomit? Does it look okay?

After a short vacation I find myself filled with energy and inspiration, so what better way to spend it than to improve Wildhollow, the strange adventure/management game I’m working on? The general game code is pretty solid by now, but I’ve had some really irritating issues regarding the GUI art.

1. My placeholder GUI art has been atrocious, which makes me unwilling to work on the GUI parts.
2. In order to improve the GUI art I need to find an artist for all the general design/icons/buttons details.
3. But in order to show artists what I need, I ought to have a working game with placeholder art that they can improve.
4. Which I’m of course not keen on doing since it looks like crap.

Now, this is a nice pickle! A pickle of the catch 22 flavour.

Sooo, what would a sensible person do? Find an artist that one can have an open dialogue with, in order to build the GUI alongside the GUI art?

Hell no. Why take the easy route when one can spend an unnecessary amount of time on making slightly-less-worse placeholder art in order to get inspired enough to work on the GUI! That said, I’ll just show some work in progress screenshots from the game:

Look! A title screen! With lots of sparkles that aren’t very visible here. And some weird buttons. I was going for a “semi-bark-looking” theme for the interface. Meh. I’ll dig up some wood textures and see what else I can come up with later.

Our hero is about to finish the first quest: find and bring back Barber Jack’s glasses that he dropped at Zachary’s place when he was trimming some animals. Oh yeah. A sweet $20 reward awaits…

Wildhollow Ranch is destroyed! Solve quests in order to collect cash; after rebuilding the ranch you can buy and breed animals. My goal is that the player should be able to solve some quests, do a first repair of the ranch, and crossbreed his first set of animals within one hour. Why one hour? Because that’s where the demo time limit will run out, and sneaky me thinks that this will be enough of a teaser to make people want to play more…

I’m the first person to admit that this is all very experimental. I have no idea if this concept will work, or if people will shun the game. Shun! Shuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnn…..