Torus Games company

Torus has been working solidly through 2013. January was hectic as we were completing The Croods with D3Publisher, and we were underway with Turbo Super Stunt Squad. Both platforms were for Nintendo hardware and the first few months of the year were us making sure the titles shipped to coincide with the movie launch. We had a smooth run on both titles, shipped our 2nd Wii U title in 4 months and saw an interesting decline in average bug numbers across the projects. It might have been that because Turbo was a racing title there were relatively fewer bugs, but it was a positive trend.

The other great thing about 2013 was that we started work with a new publishing partner, Little Orbit. Together we worked on Barbie Dreamhouse Party for all Nintendo platforms and PC, and Monster High: 13 Wishes for Nintendo DS. That took our Nintendo DS tally up to 16 titles! Still not as many as our GBA titles (22 in total), but closing in. Little Orbit have been fantastic, and we have continued working with them into 2014 on new projects. We recently shipped Falling Skies: Planetary Warfare for iOS and Android. The Human faction seems to setting the lead in these early days.

2013 also saw our first “combo” pack for a few years. Together with D3Publisher, we shipped The Croods and Rise of the Guardians for Wii, and on DS/3DS we shipped Madagascar 3 and The Croods - two games for the price of one. The DS ended up being the most complicated of all the platforms due to memory restrictions. The tech team worked wonders compressing and extracting what they could out of the cartridge to make it happen and we’re proud of that launch!

We’re also proud of Project Tali, a study and future commercial venture between Monash University, Grey Innovation and Torus Games. The focus of the project was to examine the use of video games to improve attention in children with developmental disabilities. The project had gone into trial by the end of the year and we’ll bring more information to light on that as it develops.

Torus went to GDC, Game Connection, E3 and Gamescom throughout the year, during which one of our most exciting moments happened. On the last day of E3 at 1am LA time, we got a call from Screen Australia that Torus was one of the companies chosen for the Games Enterprise program. The Games Enterprise Program enables Torus to fund original game titles and bring them to market. Angel investment in video games is quite rare in Australia so it was fantastic news, and they’ve been supportive partners.

We have hired 4 new staff to the team during the later part of 2013. Some of that effort is directly being applied to our own original titles and we are currently working on two of our own projects.

All in all, 2013 was positive for Torus – new hires, a grant to inspire original titles, a new publisher partner, 6 titles shipped across 18 different platforms and a great lead up to our 20 year anniversary in 2014.