We’re humbled to be part of Itch.io's 'Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality' with three of our games (Whipped And Steamy • Cosplay Café, Petty Puny Planet and Super Sellout), along with hundreds of other creators and games.

All proceeds go towards NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Community Bail Fund, helping support #BlackLivesMatter. Our society has to continue denouncing racial violence, harassment and toxicity. We all deserve to live with dignity in a better world, and we too, will continue seeking for ways to make the world a better place.

If you want to contribute your own games to the bundle, you can check this thread.

If you’re looking for more ways that you can help, support the movement or educate yourself and others about current events, you can find more information here.

Happy 3rd Anniversary, Whales And Games! It's been three years since we founded our studio and have developed over ten games since! We can't thank every enough for being part of it!

Going into our 4th year, we want to focus again on games. Primarily, Bunny Splash Casino but we'll also be developing other one-off projects for Whales And Games such as Roboto Repairaton! We're also celebrating with a dedicated server event and participating in the GDC Relief Bundle helping developers in need!

Happy 3rd Anniversary, Whales And Games! Just a few weeks ago we were celebrating the first anniversary of Whipped And Steamy. Now, mere weeks later, we’re commemorating the three-year milestone of our studio’s founding! 🥂

It's been one huge adventure ever since we’ve gotten started with Whales And Games, from the time we got started with game jams and academic projects, to kicking off this new year full-time with the studio. We’ve had a lot of highlights over these past years releasing ten different games, supporting our ever-growing community and expanding our cast of characters!

While this year we don’t have any surprise announcements like sudden game releases, we still wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate this milestone! And it wouldn't be a celebration of ours if we didn’t have some stylized artwork to share! Here’s Whalechan with a bunch of wrapped gifts picked just for you for our 3rd Anniversary! 🎁

Last year, most of our attention was focused on Whipped And Steamy • Cosplay Café, and its aftermath as well as the elusive Colossorama • The Champions Update. However, as you know, the development of both of these projects didn’t go as smoothly as planned. Instead, we felt most of the shine last year was in the footnote details.

From our server activities, the crazy aftermath of Whipped And Steamy, to being spotlighted in events, to participating in Art Fight, having both of us co-founders meeting up in person for the first time! When we think about those, it looks like certainly had an eventful and thrilling year! For example, we constantly remind ourselves of some art we’ve received as part of Art Fight! Seeing so many people celebrating our characters fills our hearts with joy up to this very day! 💙

(Credits from left to right and top to bottom:

‘Buns Buns’ by yolk-sac, ‘Jazzy and Bluessom’ by MDLune, ‘Cheqmate’ by CKoenig88, ‘Jazzy and Bluessom’ by Dxmyxix, ‘Whalechan’ by SweetKooky, ‘Caffie’ by tofumeat, ‘Whalechan’ by nyancatimusprime and ‘Monetizationman’ by mot-bot)

However, we feel the actual ‘Games’ part of Whales And Games could have gone been better during the past few months, and we feel we could definitely be pushing for more game-related content! This year, we want to make a complete 180-degree turn, and put (almost) all of focus on the games again.

If you’ve caught up with our anniversary post for Whipped And Steamy from earlier this month, we’ll now be focusing our attention mostly into Bunny Splash Casino, our new adult-oriented management simulation novel game and its new sub-brand of the Bunny Copulation alongside it!

We’re currently getting started with the proper development of the game, and over the next few weeks we will be closing in concept art, key art, finishing off design decisions and getting started with prototypes!

If you haven’t done it yet, follow our new Twitter and Discord for Bunny Copulation as well be sharing progress on it as they start happening!

While we will be relaying most of our attention on Bunny Splash Casino, we will still continue supporting Whales And Games and making new character-focused art! ✨

Like we’ve mentioned in the Bunny Splash Casino announcement post, we’re also currently getting some final changes done to the post-jam version of our Global Game Jam game, Roboto Repairaton before we get it released. These changes are practically done and once the game gets out there, it will mark our 11th Game!

In case you haven’t seen some footage of Roboto Repairaton from our social media yet, Roboto Repairaton is both a single-player and couch co-op robot assembly game! There’s a barely functional factory that can mend and fix all kinds of robots, but putting them all into repair assembly is easier said than done! Grab robot pieces across conveyor belts and assemble robots together, but watch out for factory malfunctions! 🤖

Roboto Repairaton will be the first of the game jam games we’d like to get underway this year, and we hope to get even more done as the year progresses! However, if there’s anything that experience has told us from this past year, is to stop promising bogus-dates until we’re absolutely sure. You’ll have to keep an eye out for those!

Like all of our major celebrations, we are also running a small Discord server event alongside all of this! Participating on it will grant you the Anniversary Guest 🎉 role!

Head over to the #commands channel in the server and leave a nice celebratory message using the !celebrate command to claim it! We have all the instructions over at the server!

We also have some of our games as part of Game Dev World’s GDC Relief Bundle over on itch! Like many other developers, our opportunity to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was postponed because of COVID-19 pandemic concerns. While it didn’t affect us as much, a lot of disempowered developers were financially hit hard with travel and visa cancellations. Thus, we wanted to help contribute to ease their woes.

While you could already play them for free, the bundle features our Whipped And Steamy • Cosplay Café, Jazzy Beats, Onigami and Super Sellout, alongside a bag of 163 other goodies including games, assets and music! Bundle donations are purely for charity and will go directly to developers in need to help cushion the impact that the sudden changes across the world have caused!

If you have some extra pocket money around that you’ve saved for having stayed at home, we’d be thankful in the name of all of the game developer community if you could dedicate some of it to the cause! 🙏

We have a great year on the horizon, and we want to make sure we start the year on the right note and aim to continue helping the world! Over the next few weeks we will be getting development in Bunny Splash Casino and sealing-off Roboto Repairaton for shipping, and we’re looking forward to a year full of pleasant surprises!

Thank you once again for a happy 3rd anniversary and year year, and we hope that you stick along for another one discovering a sea of fun! As always, you can keep up with our Discord community, Twitter or Facebook page for more!

Finally, remember to wash your hands and stay safe! Cheers! 🐳

Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café is celebrating its first anniversary! One year ago we launched an adult game and it’s been a wild ride since. We're planning on updating it, but decided it’d be better to focus on a new game entirely.

We’re soft-announcing ‘Bunny Splash Casino’ and the ‘Bunny Copulation’, our new adults-only game and brand. You can start following its channels here on Newgrounds, Twitter and Discord as we get started on the project!

Happy First Anniversary, Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café! One year ago, we decided to create a completely different game to those we had done before and took a jab at developing an adult-themed game during the one-month game jam of Strawberry Jam 3. 

What resulted from the it was the game we originally called Cosplay Café, an adult-parody visual-novel mixed in with light-management elements. Set in a world where adult media is king, Cosplay Café gave us the liberty to try a whole new level of world characterization and character depth that we hadn’t tried before. Touching on topics normally regarded as taboo gave us a lot of room to explore themes that we felt we’re not often explored in video-games, and opened a lot of opportunities for original writing. 

Ever since we’ve shipped the original version of Cosplay Café, things certainly have been a wild ride. We re-branded the game to its new name of Whipped And Steamy, won the Strawberry Jam across five different categories, got awards and selections for events, made a explicit-collaboration with another game and much more. It's flattering to see how many milestones Cosplay Café hit as a single-month project.

Not only that, but Whipped and Steamy and Cosplay Café have changed us as developers, as a brand and changed the way we look at the strengths and uniqueness of our games. Last year was a very big puzzle in-regards to ‘What’s next?’ but we believe we’ve finally found where we want to go with our projects.

But before we go further, we'd like to highlight the celebratory art we made for the game’s anniversary, of course! You can see it in all it's full glory in this Art post!

What's the plan going forward? What’s happening to Whipped and Steamy?

We’ve talked about back in our December Status Report about how we were originally planning on developing updates and expansions for Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café, but we unfortunately hit some personal road-blocks that led us to freeze development on the game. 

During that frozen-development period, we started considering the future of the game and what we could do with its themes. Whipped And Steamy left us with a taste to explore the adult game genre even further, and we felt the management side of the game could see a complete remake from the ground up to feature even better gameplay.

Taking into account that realization and the different ideas we had for Cosplay Café expansions, as well as feedback we got from the ‘What would you like to see next?’ from the last report, we decided it’d be best to go from Cosplay Café into a completely new follow-up project.

As we started scrambling and putting ideas together, thinking about how we could keep some familiarity between Whipped And Steamy and this new game, we realized that we had already accidentally made the pitch of the game we wanted to make ourselves before. That idea was actually embedded within Cosplay Café all-along!

If you haven’t caught on yet based on the screenshots above and from all the build-up, we’d like to make the ‘soft-announcement’ that we’ve begun working on Bunny Splash Casino!

Soft-Announcing ‘Bunny Splash Casino’ and the ‘Bunny Copulation’!

Bunny Splash Casino is our spiritual-successor to Whipped And Steamy, a full-blown, adults-only, erotic management simulation novel! Bunny Splash Casino was designed from the ground-up with a new emphasis on management and simulation gameplay and featuring an even stronger adults-only label on top. It takes all of the ideas we've had for Whipped And Steamy and turns them into an even stronger game.

If you’ve gone through Cheqmate’s story in Whipped And Steamy, you already have some idea of what to expect, and sure enough, Cheqmate will be taking the lead as the main character of this new game. You can even notice her (and Buns Buns) new updated design for Bunny Splash Casino featured in the anniversary artwork! Likewise, given the previous familiarity talk, we also plan to have some other characters and ideas from Cosplay Café appear in Bunny Splash Casino some way or another.

As teased in our Lunar New Year celebrations, this is the game we have planned to be our first commercial game, and we’d like to release it on storefronts (Steam, Itch, …) later down the road. When time is right, we’ll be talking about how we plan to manage demos, roadmap and more. Yet, at this moment, it's still too early to make any formal announcements.

Given how Bunny Splash Casino is going full hands-on with adult content, we thought it’d be best to subsidize it to it’s own sub-brand. This way, you know exactly what to expect when you look up either. 

For that matter, we created Bunny Copulation, our (appropriately named) new brand that will focus exclusively on adult-only media like Bunny Splash Casino. It's still the same crew you know from Whales And Games but with new channels specifically marked for when nobody's around!

Despite this announcement, Bunny Splash Casino and the Bunny Copulation are still in their early days. This announcement is more of a ‘Yes, we’re working on something!’ than a full reveal, and we’ll showcase more of the game as it starts taking shape as we’re only now preparing to begin hands-on development.

In case you’d still like very-very-early-access look into what we’re doing, you can follow us on our new dedicated Bunny Copulation Newgrounds, Twitter and Discord! Be wary of the ‘Adults Only!’ label on them though!

What happens to ‘Whales And Games’?

Even with our newfound plans with Bunny Copulation and us beginning development on Bunny Splash Casino, we still want to carry forward with the main Whales And Games branding that we’ve built across the last years. 

While our efforts will be focused primarily on developing Bunny Splash Casino, we’re still eager to continue developing other safe-for-work projects! We want to continue participating in game jams, making Whales And Games art, and to continue developing other one-off projects as time moves forward (we do want to make that Trivia game).

In fact, we're already currently working on improving our Global Game Jam game, Roboto Repairaton, with some few quality-of-life additions, and that one will be coming out soon as well!

As impressive as it seems, our Whales And Games’ third anniversary is coming up on March 30th and there is a lot changing going forward. Earlier this year, we finally had the opportunity to start investing into Whales And Games full-time, and we will be going hands-deep (no pun intended) into Bunny Splash Casino development and beyond!

We hope that you look forward to what we have in store! As always, you can join our usual Whales And Games discussion channels over on Twitter and Discord, or if you want to keep up with brand new Bunny Copulation news, you can also join its new respective Twitter and Discord!

Q&A, because you likely have a ton of questions again?

We have a whole section of Questions & Answers about Bunny Splash Casino, Bunny Copulation and Whales And Games available at our website's version of this blogpost!

Back in February, we released our adult-parody game Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café here on Itch, mixing-in some management and visual novel mechanics with some suggestive writing and imagery. Tackling a world where adult entertainment became the hottest thing in town where, you just happen to become a café waitress at the ​Whipped and Steamy Café​, a place dedicated to cosplayers of the kind.

If you've followed us for a while - since we've released the game - things have been a bit different from what you are probably expecting regarding development. While our plan was to originally jump in into making continuous updates to the game and while we’ve had the opportunity to show Cosplay Café at a few events and made a talk about it at a local developer conference, at the present moment, further developments with Whipped and Steamy are frozen in place until we conclude another project’s final update.

A few months ago, we released a collaboration with an adult-project, and we have been considering different possibilities regarding what we want to do with Cosplay Café or other similar projects in the same vein once we’re done with that update.

Some of these include updating Cosplay Café including more refined gameplay and more characters or even designing a completely new mature or adult-oriented game. There’s really a lot of paths we can go down through, and we thought it'd be best to ask around about what people would like to see!

So we'd like to know! From these, which one would you prefer to see from us?

•  Continue Cosplay Café's (suggestive game) development!
•  Focus on a new SFW game! ✨
•  Focus on a new suggestive game! 🙈
•  Focus on a new NSFW game! 🔞

You can answer through the comments here on Newgrounds, or you can also reply with your opinion through this form! Feel free to tell us anything specific, or mention anything you’d like to see in more detail through the comments or over at our Discord!

You can find more information about this other update and other milestones from us at Whales And Games on our latest Status Report for December!

Cheers! 🐳

Whale! It's been quite a while since we’ve had a Whales And Games Status Report, hasn’t it? It's been challenging to actually get one of these done lately but it's time to get back on track and bring out a new freshly-fished December Status Report right before we close-off the year for good!

While you probably expect a ton of game-related news whenever we make one of these posts, ever since last August’s report things have certainly been a bit hectic with a variety of not-game-related tidbits of Whales And Games happening all over the place, hence the delay in getting around to actually write one of these again.

Strap onto your sea-horses because we’ve got a lot of small but very important milestones to cover! Let’s get into it!

A Whale of a Meetup and a Talk!

When we mentioned that we were extremely hyped for this year of Whales And Games we didn’t expect things to culminate with our co-founders meeting up in person for the first time in Portugal after seven-years of internet-friendship shenanigans!

Given how long we’ve worked together, it made for a very sentimental reunion which has started to change how we take-on WAG and our games going forward. Not only that, the meetup also happened immediately after one of us had just been relieved of their college duties and had just graduated!

To make things even more interesting, our meet-up was set up to align with our first public WAG talk at Game Dev Camp, Portugal’s highlight conference for game developers. Our talk was all about Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café and how we envisioned it to break the mould of adult games, refine our character’s writing further while developing it and how we fit everything into an ‘impossible deadline’. We ended up having a total of 70 people in the room, and a lot of them expressed to us how they found the talk really interesting! ✨

If you want to take a peek at the slides from the talk which are almost readable by themselves, you can download them here! If there’s enough interest for it, we might even make a full-fledged development insight covering the topics of the talk! 😊

Colossorama’s Time-Bending Finish Line!

This past month of November, we had the opportunity to showcase Colossorama • The Champions Update, along with Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café at a couple other events in Portugal as well! The idea was to collect feedback and further data that would let us wrap up Colossorama’s development neatly, taking notes of what should be tweaked, typos to be corrected, and which challenges still needed to be balanced.

In the end, we took notice of several small rough-corners, and even had to chance to tackle a few changes between the days of both events. The final high-score for the main Colossorama mode was 171 heads, meaning the overall experience of the game is much more balanced compared to previous versions of the game! Of course, some people also gave a try at other newly tweaked challenges such as Party, Trickster and 1-Hit Wonder.

Aside from just showing our games, we had the experience to live through what so many others in the industry do, by setting up our own booths for our own the first time! Planning, printing, purchasing materials, etc. Overall, it was still a very rewarding experience that also gave us the opportunity to socialize and network!

Whipped and Not So Steamy? What would you like to see?

As for Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café, things have been a bit different from what you are probably expecting. While Cosplay Café was also shown at events together with Colossorama - and got some very interesting reactions while at it - and at our talk at Game Dev Camp at the present moment, further developments with Whipped and Steamy are frozen in place until we conclude Colossorama • The Champion Update’s development. We really want to focus that specific update so we can advance with future WAG plans, including those related to Whipped and Steamy.

A few months ago, we released a collaboration with an adult-project, and we have been considering different avenues regarding what we want to do with Cosplay Café or other similar projects in the same vein. Some of these avenues include updating Cosplay Café including more refined gameplay and more characters to designing completely new mature or adult-oriented games. There’s really a lot of paths we can go down through, and we’ll be conducting several polls in different sites to gather feedback on what people would like to see.

We would really love to know what you think about Whipped and Steamy and what would you like to see us do with it going forward! Would you like to see more updates to it, or would you like to see us see a new project? We would like to know your opinion over on this blog post or over at our Discord!

A Fishnet of Assortments!

Like we mentioned at the beginning of this report, there’s an assortment of things that have happened satellite to all the event preparations, decisions we’ve been making with our games and there’s been a lot going on with our Discord community as well. Here’s some highlights:

• We’ve got stickers! Since we’ve been around some events, we thought it’d be a nice-gesture to hand something over to those who came to see our talk our play our games. We designed four different stickers featuring Polite Whale and Whalechan, our mascots to give around! We even made a public vote for the Whalechan design people liked the most!
• Can we call ourselves an award-winning studio now? Because at one of the events, we were crowned with a #spotlight award and will be getting an opportunity to travel to Pocket Gamer Connects in London! We don’t have any games that actually go on your pocket other than Petty Puny Planet, but maybe we’ll find a game-changer there! 🏆
• Holiday spirit might be around the corner, but back in October we celebrated Halloween with style, pitching Skeletons ☠️, Vampires 🦇 and Witches ✨ teams all against each other-in a set of Halloween Server Events at our Discord! It was some of the most fun of the server so far, and Skeletons took the winning spot! We’ve been working on a Skeleton Whalechan and she’s practically done (just missing animation now)!
• We’re also changing the way our #creative rooms work on our server since a lot of artists have been joining recently! We’ve now got a room just for showcasing completed pieces, a room for work-in-progress sketches and scribbles and we’re also making a whole new dedicated gallery on this website to highlight some of the best work that’s been pinned there!
• We’re not the types that like to waggle numbers around, but we’ve reached 700 followers on Twitter, 300 followers on Itch and 300 likes on Facebook! Our games totalled have also gathered more than 150K views across all the websites we have our games at! ✨

And that’s just some of the highlights! Honestly, there’s been so much stuff that has happened since our latest report that its hard to keep track of everything that has happened! We believe that rounds up things nicely though. 😊

That nails it for this time around! We talked about so many things here, yet there’s always more we want to have around coming 2020! Things are shaping up quickly, so you may want to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay informed about more and other future announcements!

Alternatively, you could get informed or hang out with us at our Discord server! Not only can you meet some of the artists we mentioned before, but also engage in more Whales And Games talk, gaming discussion and much more! Dive in and say hello! Cheers! 🐳

Boo! 👻 Were you spooked? Well, you should have, because we've made our Discord and Social Media all festively scary! That’s right, instead of cleaning away the cobwebs, we placed them around all over the place, just in time for this Halloween! And of course, we have to once again feature the incredible banner art from last year from VampyrOfSwords!

Festivities are a bit busy with our upcoming talk, Moski’s trip, making stickers and the upcoming (at this point that’s our actual Halloween monster) Colossorama - The Champion Update but we still wanted to do something special to vary things a little this season on our Discord Server! Here’s what we came up with!

Hope you’re ready to become the monster under your bed because you’ll have to pick between becoming a Skeleton ☠️, a Vampire 🦇 or a Witch ✨! The team with the most members by November 2nd will result in a special Whalechan-design themed after that team’s monster, to be posted at a later date!

You can join a team by heading to #commands-cemetery on our Discord and typing !skeletons, !vampires or !witches to join each respective team! You can only be in one team at one time, but you can switch to another team by using that team’s command! You can also leave the competition entirely by using !leaveteam but that would be a bummer. 😱

We want to see your spooky art! No, really, any spooky art that you have around at all! From monster girls that you’ve drawn, to special Halloween commissions that you’ve been making! We want to see what you have been up too, and we would love for you to share it with us on the Server over at #creative-candy channel! In fact, there’s already been some spooky art shared there! 🍭

Also make sure to tweet it over at us at @WhalesAndGames, or send us a link to a tweet of some of the Halloween stuff you’ve made so we can share your stuff in all of its glory! ✨ We’ll be making a art-thread later on just for Halloween art, but you can tweet it at us at any moment!

It's time to bring it back from the dead one of old server events for a one-off! Join us on November 1st (Friday) at 9:30 PM UTC for a night of spooky-scary glorious multiplayer video-game fun through our special Halloween Gaming Nights Club! Don’t know what that time-zone corresponds to? Check this link out!

We’re taking suggestions for games to play so we can announce them in advance for everyone to get ready at hand! Make sure to drop your spookiest suggestions down on the #gaming-ghouls channel! 

Who doesn’t like a good crossover? Be it in films, videogames or even wrestling, we fans of multimedia enjoy seeing the multimedia become, well, less ‘multi’ and more ‘uni’. So, we at Whales and Games have been wondering, what do we need to be a part of the crossover craze?

Turns out that, together with the collaboration of the creative minds at Cactus Labs, some exotic characters with lots of personality and inversely proportional amount of clothing would do the trick! On our last monthly status report, we talked about a small collaboration between Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café - our ero-themed visual novel management sim - and Draw the Seedies So I Can Has Feedies - Cactus Labs’ underpaid-commission-artist sim.

As we go into detail about how this match-made-in-a-sexshop came to be, unlike Cosplay Café which has no-explicit imagery but explicit text, this post (and the game) contains visual and explicit Not Safe For Work content from here on out!

You may be wondering, who is Cactus Labs? Not unlike Whales and Games, they’re a team that also develops games of varied styles, themes and with creative minds. We met all-the-way-back during Ludum Dare 41. While we made and developed Wizsnooks, they created Super Slime Slasher Ultra, a match-3 action game with, well, slimes! We liked the energy of each others’ projects, and have been in contact ever since!

While the possibility of collaboration had always been on our minds, we never expected it to take the shape of a morning-cartoon-crossover-like collaboration between two adult-oriented games, namely Whipped And Steamy • Cosplay Café and their own Draw the Seedies So I Can Has Feedies.

Seedies (for short) is a game where you take the role of a digital artist taking e-mail commissions for things to draw as you struggle to pay off your rent for the month. From there, you are taken to an art assembler where you mix-and-match characters, foregrounds and backgrounds, hoping to achieve a result that meets the expectations of the client who ordered it.

Each day, you can pick between a set of different commissions, but you’ll soon come to realize the different nature between them. Will you strive to answer only to the safest-of-work ones, or will you go for the extra-spicy and lewd requests in exchange for some extra cash? After all, there is a rent that needs to be paid off. 💰

Since both Whipped and Steamy and Seedies are receiving updates, the developing teams talked to each other about the possibility of adding cameos from each group into the other’s game. One thing lead to another, and it became a plan for a full blown collaboration!

On the latest Seedies 2.0.0 and 2.0.1 updates, which you can play right now on either Itch.io or Game Jolt, you’ll find a lot of new content and improvements to the core game experience (including the ability to export your finalized pieces for safe-keeping)! But wait, there’s more! The update is also packed with backgrounds, foregrounds, characters and commissioners you might have met at Whipped and Steamy! And to sweeten the deal even further, we even helped Cactus Labs porting their game for WebGL so you can get right on with it straight in your browser if you prefer it over a download. Neat!

Will you accept Mop Maid’s outlandish commission requests? What will you pair up with the Bunny Splash Casino background? Will your drawings be Buns Buns approved? Are you ready to feast your eyes on the Cosplay Café characters under much spicier lights? 👀

What are you waiting for? If you’re still here after that last screenshot, it means there’s something in it that interests you! So go on and give the new version of Draw the Seedies So I Can Has Feedies a try! We had a lot of fun bringing everything about it to reality, and we think you’ll have fun assembling the pieces on your own as well! 🐳

Happy Anniversary Colossorama! Three years ago, our original co-founding members joined up together to create a short game that would eventually set Whales And Games and the rest of our game development career into motion. On this day, back in the year of 2016, we released the first version of Colossorama to the world, after an intense game jamming period during Ludum Dare 36.

Being the first time we used Unity to make game jam game, and being our second game overall (following The Farming One), we wanted to keep the scope small. We ended up conceiving a small hack-and-slash side scroller that forced the player to constantly change their weapons and items from a restricted pool of choices and adapt every wave. Looking back at it, we were extremely proud of the result, but obviously, looking at it after three years, it’s hard not to spot the flaws. If you want, you can even play the original build of the game over here!

As it shows, the game gained some moderate attention. A few weeks after the original jam release, we made a post-jam patch known as Colossorama 1.1 • The Colossoral Update, improving on many aspects of the jam version we thought were lacking, adding new weapons, rebalancing the game, and improving on some graphical elements. We even had the chance to show it at some events, motivating us to make other games and projects.

Fast-forward to the game’s first anniversary and looking back at the game and its overwhelming reception, we thought it was justified to go back and add even more stuff to it. For Colossorama 1.2 • The All-Stars Update, which is the version of the game that’s currently live, we couldn’t just add more weapons and call it a day. Nevertheless, we added several new ones, added new effects, a whole new cast of unlockable gladiators, and, aside from the main character, added a whole new cast of unlockable gladiators and game modes to complete. As far as anniversary celebrations go, it felt like a big jump! ⚔️

And that’s when we arrive at where we are at now. While we originally expected Colossorama 1.2 to be the closing chapter in the cycle of Colossorama updates, life would prove us wrong, and we’ve been working on Colossorama 1.3 • The Champions Update on-and-off for several months now. As you might have read in the previous status report, with over six pages of changes, the game feels like pretty much a full reconstruction of the game, adding over eighty new weapons and items, reconstructed physics, several new gimmicky-enemies, more unlockable gladiators, a codex, stats, achievements, leaderboards, more visual overhaul, and more! It's a whale of an update in size! 🐳

The journey over the years as we’ve picked on Colossorama on and off as taught us and showed us multiple lessons, and has validated us in our growth as we’ve picked it up and updated it time and time again. For its upcoming 1.3 release, since development is being made on-and-off, we’re avoiding making specific estimates of when it will be ready, but we’re pretty much closing on the final tasks in order to ship it once and for all!

It's been a wacky three years. Since we’ve released Colossorama 36, we’ve made several other small game experiments on the site, finished up bachelor degrees, fostered a community, grew as developers and artists, and yet, it still feels like we’re at the very beginning of a very long race. We’re not stopping any time soon, and over the next few months, after we release Colossorama 1.3 we want to take a step back and rethink the core foundations of Whales And Games.We have tons of ideas in mind, tons of things we’d like to do, but ultimately we want to really turn the page and move on forward to bigger and more whalistic stuff!

We promised one ginormous year for WAG’s third year and we’ve been working full-steam ahead to make sure we deliver! As always, feel free to tell us what you’d like to see from us over at our Discord and join us for the journey ahead! Cheers! ✨

Whale hello there! It's a brand new month, isn’t it? And that means it's time for another Whales And Games status report about what we’ve been up to and what’s next for our in-development games!

In case you’ve missed it, last month we announced we'd start publishing a new status report at the beginning of each month, and this month we have a whole lot to talk about! From a sudden participation on Art Fight, to even more polishing work on Colossorama •The Champions Update to a whole new collaboration around Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café, and more! Are you ready to reel in? 🐳

An Unexpected Artistic Quarrel in Art Fight!

As a bit of a surprise for us, back at the beginning of July a member from our Discord told us about this event happening in July known as Art Fight. In case you haven’t heard about it before, it is a yearly event all about artists drawing each other’s characters, while scoring points for their respective teams! Driven by curiosity, we decided to give a glance at it and it ended up becoming our biggest highlight of the month as we made a bunch of digital art for other artists and received a bunch of new WAG artwork ourselves!

Credits from left to right and top to bottom: 

‘Crab-chan’ by nyancatimusprime, ‘Molly’ and ‘Ru’ by MDLune, ‘Luna’ by TrashPandaArt, ‘Madoc’ by Wilderness, ‘Alexander’ by AkayriSakidoga, ‘Lisbeth’ by royalspags, ‘Kane’ and ‘Hinata’ by HeroicOutlaw and ‘Pratlene’ by Prate-Dragon

In the picture above you can see some of the attacks (artworks made for other artists) that we’re made by our artist, Moski, during the event. As part of his goal for joining the event, each of the 26 pieces he made feature some twist in their styles here and there, from cartoonish to chibi designs and from pixelart to lineless artwork. And of course, some of us at WAG helped animate a few pieces here and there! 😊

Credits from left to right and top to bottom:

‘Buns Buns’ by yolk-sac, ‘Jazzy and Bluessom’ by MDLune, ‘Cheqmate’ by CKoenig88, ‘Jazzy and Bluessom’ by Dxmyxix, ‘Whalechan’ by SweetKooky, ‘Caffie’ by tofumeat, ‘Whalechan’ by nyancatimusprime and ‘Monetizationman’ by mot-bot

And to our surprise, we got almost double the artwork we received back (we tried to reply back to all of it but we ran out of time 💦)! We’ve received a bunch of new art of Whalechan, Cheqmate, Buns Buns, Jazzy, Bluessom and others! We’ll be looking for a way to showcase them all for everyone to see (as long as each piece’s artist allows us for it)! Meanwhile, the samples above will have to be enough for you to feast your eyes on.

It's been an extremely art-motivating experience and we (especially the artist) have a lot more thoughts about Art Fight and our experience with it that we want to talk about and discuss publicly. However, for the sake of not stretching this post, we’ll be leaving those for its own post-mortem in the future! Keep an eye out for it!

Blood isn’t the only juice flowing around Colossorama!

Like we discussed last month, we have been working on getting Colossorama • The Champions Update ready for release and have been continuously working on its final touches, adding a final coat of polish to make sure we close off the game for good this time! 

What final polish is missing, you ask? Well, we’re currently redoing most of the sounds of the game to make sure they have way more extra oomph than the previous white noise samples, making sure that all of the menus are controller compatible, as well as revising final art assets and gameplay features! We’re also adding a little bit of extra juice here and there to make sure even the smallest stuff stands out and feels great! Here's a look at our fully-polished Leaderboards for example.

Currently, the Colossorama changelog for this version boasts over six pages of changes, from gameplay tweaks to new features and menus, to visual overhauls and more! We’re also working on playtesting the game together with our feedback committee and we can’t wait to get it into your hands and close off a long pending chapter of Whales And Games! Get ready to slay some heads! ⚔️

Whipped and Seedies together for the Feedies

While we’re currently focused on working on Colossorama • The Champions Update, it doesn’t mean we have no news about Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café! While development has certainly taken a bit of a background note, we’re still very much working on the game and even have a little surprise we’ve cooked on the side for this month!

Recently, we finished all of the main writing for the new character we announced last time, Roberta (Caffie’s Roommate), and we have also started working on the writing of the second somewhat-new character! Likewise, we’ve also worked on implementing and polishing some of the new items and even added brand new item filters (art-pass pending) to the item selection screens, making finding items that target specific cosplayer groups even easier!

And of course, we also have to mention the brand new music track that was composed for the new Support group, which Roberta and the second unannounced character will be a part of! Give it a listen, will you? Its considerably long though, after all, it has all four variations of it in a single track! 

As for the side surprise we’ve been cooking, back when we released the game we were invited by the fine folks at Cactus Labs to do a small cross-over collaboration with their also-adult-parody game Draw the Seedies So I Can Has Feedies to add some Whipped and Steamy inspired content to their game’s art assembler! And guess what? That’s coming up next week!

In case you haven’t given a try at the game before, the game is a parody on the age of digital art and being an artist. As you struggle to pay your rent and must take commissions, will you strive to answer only to the safest-of-work ones, or will you go for the extra-spicy requests in exchange for some extra cash? You can pick from multiple preset backgrounds, foregrounds and subjects to assemble art and please your clients. And hey, you can even export some of your finalized art for safe-keeping! 

And, as you can expect from this sort of collaboration, there’s a whole new set of backgrounds, foregrounds and character art all themed around Whipped and Steamy (which materials were handled by both our Moski and Cactus Labs’ Birdpun). Some characters from the game might even send you some interesting requests for you to fulfill! Do have extra caution when we release it next week though! There is actual explicit material in this one. 👀

And that’s pretty much a wrap when it comes to art and games this past month! We are extremely excited for our future plans we have in store for Whales And Games. You can still look for more on Colossorama • The Champions Update, the Art Fight post-mortem and our collaboration with Draw the Seedies So I Can Has Feedies throughout this month! You can keep up with the announcements for all of these over here on our Blog, on our Twitter and Facebook!

On a side-note, some of our team members are also going to be casually visiting both Devcom and Gamescom in Cologne, Germany later this month! If you do happen to be visiting any of the events, look out for some people in extremely royal-blue shirts. There’s a very big chance that’s us! 🐳

If visiting events isn’t really your thing, no worries! You can always hang out with us over at our Discord chat! We just had a bunch of artists join us after ArtFight so feel free to join along and showcase some of your stuff as well! Cheers! 👏

Hey, there! Haven’t heard from us in a while, have you? Well, fear not! While we certainly have been a bit quiet these past few months, we’re still around and swinging in full action, and have a brand new status report full of news to make it clear for you!

We’re currently hard at work in two different updates to existing games: We’re finishing progress on Colossorama - The Champions Update and have also begun working on the first expansion to Whipped And Steamy • Cosplay Café! Likewise, we’ve been revamping our community focus, and have discussed new community events and features we’d like to host. Let’s get into the nitty gritty details, shall we?

The Champions Update is almost ready to make you a Champion!

For Colossorama - The Champions Update, our original target was to release the update immediately after releasing the Whipped and Steamy post-jam patch. Unfortunately, after we released the latter, we underestimated the time it would actually take us to wrap up Colossorama, and have needed a few more months in order to iron out everything!

On the plus side, the game is now feature-complete, making it an all-in-one-package featuring brand new physics, dozens and dozens of new weapons and upgrades, achievements and scoreboards! What was originally meant to be a small update has turned into an almost full revamp of it, and we can’t wait for you to give it a chance and compete for a spot on the leaderboards!

This means the game is almost release ready! However we still have a lot of small quality-of-life fixes and juiceness we want to add before we ship it to make sure the game is just that extra mile ahead in terms of polish!

Presenting Roberta, the latest gal at the Whipped and Steamy Café!

In conjunction to working on the Colossorama update we’ve also been working on our first expansion to Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café! This expansion is meant to be just that, an expansion of the concepts we’ve introduced in the base release, together with extra polish, quality of life changes, as well as a few new characters and scenes!

And surprise surprise! We’re ready to show off one of these new characters! Introducing Roberta! You might have heard of her before, as she was mentioned in multiple conversations of the original game! She’s Caffie’s roommate, and an extreme mecha lover in every sense of the word you can imagine given the type of game we’re making.

In addition to that, the update also introduces new items, fixes, as well as attempts to streamline the management side of the game even more. It's still in very early progress, but you should look forward for us doing some important polls in the future in order to help us decide some of the new scenes you’d like to see in this update!

And that wraps it up in terms of the games! In addition to them, ever since our latest Whipped and Steamy • Cosplay Café patch and the celebration of our second anniversary, we’ve been working on overhauling our working methods and the way we tackle projects and games going forward. This past month our progress at Whales And Games has sped up considerably, and we expect the working rhythm to increase considerably as the weeks go by!

In addition to those, we also recommend you pop over to our Discord Server where we all hang-out and play videogames together frequently! We’re currently planning and setting up a new season of Discord events focused on games and art, and it’d be great to have you aboard for those! 😄

Going forward, we also want to start doing more of these status reports at least every month. We hope that you look forward for them! Cheers! 🐳