Hello folks, hope this blog post finds you all well and excited for the imminent holiday season, 2015 has been a real roller-coaster ride for Flintlock Studios and today we're going to take a little look back on the past twelve months.
January saw Mitch join the team from Teeside university as an intern, originally planned for three months. The energy and ideas he brought along with his knowledge gained during his degree meant that as his internship ended we couldn't let him go, so he stayed with us until September continuing his awesome work but has now left us as he's moving to Japan! We'd like to take this moment to say thank you for your work Mitch and we wish you and Maisy all the best!
Early this year also saw Ryan complete his work on the Spirit Animals, and he joined us on our last two visits to GAMAYO, where he showed us how to drink at a free bar (four bottles of Desperado at a time!) We're looking forward to seeing Ryan again soon, perhaps at the next GAMAYO so here's to free bars and beer!
Speaking of GAMAYO, we attended two GMY developer conferences in Leeds this year, one on the 30th April and then again on the 19th November. In April our Greenlight campaign was just starting to pick up steam (see what I did there?) and it was great to see people's enthusiasm for Lithic. Between the first and second GMY we of course launched our Kickstarter campaign which was sadly unsuccessful but the massively positive feedback we received and GMY9 in November lifted our spirits and gave us confidence as a team.
However! 2015 saw us both set up and succeed with our steam Greenlight proposal, meaning when Lithic's ready we can launch straight away. The whole process was much simpler than we were expecting and the theme of positive comments continued from GMY onto our Greenlight where people were incredibly supportive.
Things weren't all rainbows and unicorns though, alongside the failed Kickstarter we've seen our fair share of bugs, some more disastrous than others. We've lost a fair bit of development time this year down to unforeseeable issues between our original plans for implementing systems and the Unity Engine. These have been rectified now and I can only hope that that's the end of the big problems for Flintlock!
So, looking ahead to 2016, we've something to show you in the new year and it could mean great things for the studio and our followers – but in the meantime I'm going to stuff myself with mince pies for a solid week and Tom and Beki are visiting Lincolnshire for the holiday period. I don't know where that is, but I've heard it's not in Yorkshire which was enough to terrify me half to death! 'Till the new year my lovelies, fare thee well!
-Jon
