“You from Nederland?”, he asked us while pointing at us and smiling, “Ajax or Feyenoord? Doel! Tien punten!” (“goal, ten points”). Being the die-hard soccer fans that we are, we appropriately responded “Yes”. We had a conversation about places to go, where to eat, and ofcourse, the wifi password we desperately needed to upload our Reboot material. After getting a brief tour, he pointed at the pile of rocks he swept together and said “you can take one, as a souvenir!”. An interesting offer, considering the wide variation of souvenirs to take home with us.

The next day I was getting some coffee from the local cafe and ran into the man on the way over. After some small-talk about our first night there, he again asked “You from Nederland?”. This time, the subject was different however. “You guys have bikes with four wheels!”. So we both live in Groningen, which has more bicycles than people in it, but I’ve never seen a ‘bike with four wheels’ here, other than the occasional tuc-tuc, tandem, pretty much anything else with wheels which is not considered a bike. At least not in the Netherlands. Before I could reply however, he smilingly said “You guys live life in the fast lane! We in Croatia, we live life in the SLOOOOOOW lane! It’s the promised land!”. Now I don’t consider ‘bikes with four wheels’ to be that much faster than a regular bike, and if anything else, we also have cars with should be able to go even faster. But why does that make us the promised land? This man was really kind though, so all I could do is laugh with him.

Now we’re going to fast-forward ahead to the last day while skipping the details; the most important one being a termite infestation which made the owner feel so guilty that he offered us to stay for free. We didn’t really mind it since he swiftly took care of it, but after this little incident each time we ran into him he kept offering more random stuff; even his trusty umbrella during the rain which was at his side all the time! We declined all his generous offers and still paid him for our stay, but our last confrontation had to be the weirdest one.

During our development I was taking a break outside, where we ran into each other on his driveway. When we locked eyes, he immediately said “WAIT! ...I have a gift for you”. That was when he handed me this envelope:

At first thought I assumed he wanted to return some money because of the infestation. That’s when I opened it and looked at the contents. To this day I still don’t know what to say about it, really. Just take a look:

All of these are printed on photo paper. Did this man snap all these pictures? Or does he have a collection of these? Did he just give away his collection of rare four-wheeled bicycle pictures, or did he painstakingly print out each of these just for us? Does he do this with every traveller, having all these pictures of random objects, ready to be handed out just for the laughs? All these questions rushed through my head while I was looking at it. Are these even bicycles anymore? What is happening here? He certainly caught me off-guard and I had a hard time containing my laughter, instead saying “Ah yes I like this one. Wow that certainly looks great”. Now, I’m not trying to be a unthankful, because I really like the gesture and the effort he put into this, but this has to be one of the most random gifts we’ve ever received. Nevertheless, if there’s a bicycle with four wheels somewhere in town, we’ll snap a picture of one and send it back to him, it’s the least we could do.

Anyway, thanks for reading and if you have any crazy theories on why this happened, do share them with us!

-Meneer Guus

Tweetal Studios

So, being cheap and poor indie game developers, we figured that we needed a game-stand to stand out of the crowd without spending big heaps of money. We’ve been hunting for cardboard within the urban jungle of Dubrovnik and managed to catch a strip of two. All psyched but a bit tired from the days before (which Lars described in the first part of our blog), we walked towards Reboot Develop for our very first time, equipped with sweet-ass cardboard strips, skewers and for-less-than-5-euro-printed-Crimson-Resonance-posters, while enjoying the scenery of the o' so beautiful Croatia.

Once arrived, we started setting up our game stand on a small table and voila, did we feel like 10 year olds again. True craftsman on the job, we were cutting, pasting and folding to get the job done. We had the brilliant idea to tape the cardboard based poster holder to the back of our laptops, which worked like a dream. Our improvised stand attracted much attention because of the folding and cutting, which was a welcome surprise, and naturally, the soul purpose of a game-stand.

Check out that business card holder between the two laptops, haha!

During Reboot we received loads of positive reactions which was a great acknowledgement regarding our game. There were people returning to play again and again, which is awesome because it showed us that we are on the right track with our humble project. The demo has been finished by several motivated and skilled players; that sounds like few people played the game, but it actually shows that Crimson Resonance forms quite the challenge, which can be a turn-off for some yet this was not the case which made us very, very smiley. Our French friend (and biggest ambassador) was actually challenging himself to finish the game without getting hit. He did not make it though and is resting in pieces, somewhere in the world.

On the second day, again, we were quite tired as we had to rehearse our pitch presentation before breakfast. We started our second day on Reboot by presenting it to investors and publishers, which actually went pretty smooth. The nerves were there, but as we rehearsed a few times we were cool and did our job. It really helped getting the product seen, and resulted in a few investors/publishers trying out our game and sharing their contact details. This can be really important if you want to reach the next step with your product; get seen, get funded. We are still working on that last one, though, hehe.

Apart from all the other, less relevant (yet not less fun) stuff like beach parties, basement parties, drinkin’ with Irish lads and dealing with hangovers, Reboot Develop was concluded with the Indie Awards. To our big surprise we actually won the ‘Best Audio’ Award which created the necessary tears of validation, which both I and Lars had separately once fled outside, far from the crowded halls of Reboot. The award is a huge boost for Crimson Resonance and brings us heaps of motivation, as well as the option to visit Reboot Develop Blue 2020 for free! Funny note is that during the Awards ceremony, they actually showed the wrong part of our trailer, which resulted in the crowd laughing (and us DOH'ing), as that part of the trailer is definelty not that impressive audio-wise.

Indie Awards 2019

I can say that it was an exhausting yet uplifting experience full of conversations, small talk, big talk, checking out games, presentations, business talks, and not to forget a lot of standing around; waiting for people to play your game. That’s dang tiring for us, fragile game developers. It was great fun seeing all of the other projects along with their enthusiastic, like minded Game Designers, and it is super motivating to meet all those people giving love to our project as well.

Thanks for reading, I hope you've enjoyed and stay tuned for that true climax of a blogpost which'll be posted by Lars soon!
There, that concludes, meaning that I'm going for that beer...

Cheers,
Tobias, Tweetal Studios

That having said, the weeks before Reboot were, ofcourse, incredibly hectic. We had no idea what to expect at Reboot so we wanted the playable demo to be perfect. Ideas for the game started spiking through the roof, and naturally, we had to implement all of these into the demo júúúst before Reboot. Considering we wanted to completely clear our minds and deetox ourselves of “the resonance” for the first few days in Croatia, that was a risky move. And ofcourse, led to a few days developing the last bits of demo in our hotel room. It was all worthwhile in the end though, and as the weather could’ve been better at the time, we didn’t mind at all.

So for the people who don’t know Reboot Develop Blue, this convention is based near the beautiful old city of Dubrovnik (that’s King’s Landing for all GoT fans out there). While we actually got dropped off there straight after arriving the airport, a certain lack of sleep combined with a slightly tasteless Strüdel made it difficult for us to completely capturize why we were there; it’s because we’re making a game and we actually get to promote it in Croatia of all places! So we bought our first Ozujskos, stretched out our legs and relaxed at the shore.

We didn’t come unprepared for some Reboot action. Equipped with shirts containing the game’s logo on the front and studio logo on the back, posters of the game and a box containing our glossy, shiny, freshly printed and pokémon card smelling business cards, we made sure to throw our logos all over the place.

On the second day, we received a mail about our submission for the Indie Awards at Reboot. We got accepted! That was great news worthy of a couple more Ouzjeskos and, of course, more development on the demo. This also meant that we had to pitch the game at a dedicated pitching session in front of a jury, publishers and investors. A huge chance for sure!  We did a couple more rain dances in front of our hotel and shortly after, we were blessed with the rains that forced us to sit inside and continue the development of the demo.

In the evening of wednesday we travelled to our hotel, which was a ten minute beach-side walk from the conference site. Once in our room, we finished up the demo for reals, and attempted once again to get a decent amount of sleep before the three intensive days on Reboot.

That concludes the first part of our TRILOGY of blogs, so be sure to stick around for part 2 where Tobias explains all the stuff that happened at Reboot!

-Lars, Tweetal Studios

Also, we had a hard time getting some black filter coffee going on at the local places. In a total of six times, we received a wrong order of coffee. For now, we can look back and laugh, but dang that was a serious problem back then.

So what do we find so exciting? Well, last week we received a few notifications from Google Alerts that Gamespot(!), xboxplus.net and the Belgium website gamequarters.be have featured our game and our early development teaser. That. Is. Great. News! Furthermore we are keen to share with you guys that we will be present at the game event Reboot, Croatia, where Crimson Resonance can be playtested as well!

Be sure to stay tuned as we’re currently working on some satisfying additional gameplay elements as well as new video footage of the game!

Cheers,
-Tweetal Studios

But for regular updates, screenshots, movies, soundbytes, blogs, ideas and footage of funny bugs you can check either this website or our twitter (@StudiosTweetal)

A huge thanks to Roelof Hol for building this website, without him we'd still be scattering blog posts here and there. It's better to have them all piled up on a single site, don't you think? We'd also like to congratulate and salute Roelof for surviving the harrowing agony of creating the beautiful parallax at the top. It turned out really great!

For now we're aiming for a bunch of updates to be released around 17th of January, when we have our pitching sessions with potential publishers at Venturelabs. Wish us luck!

The main mechanic of the game (which was inspired by the Ludum Dare 40 theme ‘The more you have, the worse it is’) is still present, in which you fight the otherworldly-looking threat by using their own matter against them using a tractor beam cannon. This time however, you will be able to use the multi-functional weapon in even more engaging and almost puzzle-solving ways, from battling the cataclysmic swarms to opening up more paths to explore.

Stay tuned for weekly blog updates, and if you haven’t tried the Ludum Dare prototype version, you can download it here: https://tweetal-studios.itch.io/crimson-resonance

-Tweetal Studios