Super Punk Games & The Last Leviathan news

Hi all

This is our first article on indieDB, sorry its taken so long!

First a bit of background:

We are a small team in Nottingham called Super Punk Games and we have 5-part time guys and 1 full time on the project. 2 p/t coders, 2 p/t designers, 1 f/t artist & 1 p/t artist to be exact!

We’ve been working on The Last Leviathan for almost a year now and for most part we had 3 p/t staff (1 coder, 2 designers) working on it when we could.

We’ve all been around the block in the games industry a number of times and decided to branch out from work-for-hire deals and damn well get on with making our own games for a change. Don’t get me wrong, wfh games are good for getting yourself paid when you run a games business, but it really doesn’t give you anywhere near the satisfaction, creativity or terror that making your own game does.

So what have we done in almost a year with a small team?

We’ve built a ship editor, added environments and some nicer graphics (you should see our prototype videos!), added a unique shooting solution and some buildings & ships to blow up, added some UI, designed, then re-designed the whole game multiple times, named it, then found another game with that name, so named it again, then annoyingly found the same issue, stopped naming it for a bit, decided we needed a name really, so named it again, this time… nope, same issue (you’d think by this time we’d have learnt!) and then finally found the current name in mid-jan, phew.

On top of that we’ve played the game every day and tweaked the physics, forces, weights, AI and everything else hundreds of times, till we have something that - we think - plays well for a first detailed pass – its far too early to say its finished, there are so many features and structural tasks that need doing that will mean we’re constantly revaluating the game as a whole and as individual parts, but that’s ok, we like doing that stuff

And this is where you guys could come in (if you fancy it, we’d rather not presume…), our current plans are to go to Steam Greenlight in the second week in April, and then to Early Access in July - which is just about enough time for us to Alpha this first part by end of April and then polish, optimise & bug fix for 2/3 months.

Our content will be focused on the async-battlegrounds and ship building to start with, as that’s the area that we think we need most feedback and help with. There will be many parts to our game by the time its finished (which we’ll detail over time), but starting there means we have the right foundations in place, and more importantly some feedback from paying customers (well, hopefully we will!) before we build out the rest of the systems. This is starting to sound like we don’t know what we’re doing I know, but we do, we’ve made many games before on time and of great quality on console (from PSX & Xbox (the original one) to PS3/4, Xbox 360) PC and of course smart phones & multi-touch screen devices.

This game is our baby, we won’t let it fail or fall, and like all babies, it needs nurturing through good times and bad, it needs some strong lessons and some kind words placed in the right places, some encouragement when the chips are down, and it also needs a life of its own, out there in the wild where we can’t protect it all the time. These are the things we need help from you.

Feel free to ask questions, I realise there aren’t many details as yet and we’ll do our best to answer when we can, we’re a little coy on releasing information (its that terror of not knowing if anyone will actually play our game!), but the time is right for us to just get on with that part…

I promise that the next article won’t take us so long, and if you’re in Nottingham, pop round for a cup of tea. (bring cake ideally)

Here’s some footage of the new Turrets we’ve just added: when dealing with ships of war, a heavily defended island is best.

Next up: a development piece