Toejam and Earl is finally back! We're goin' indie, and old skool like GAME ONE, with a fun retro-comics style, and plenty of funk!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
PAX Wrap-up, Limited Run, and MORE!
over 5 years ago
– Sat, Sep 15, 2018 at 12:24:03 AM
Post-PAX wrap up
So as we mentioned in our last update, we decided NOT to show Back in the Groove on the main PAX West show floor this year *Gasp*. Instead we hosted our own indie game lounge, FUNKOTRON, near PAX. And it went super duper well! A lot of press came through to play the game and we were happy with how well it was received. And a BIG thank you to all of you who were in the Seattle area that weekend and stopped by. It was a pleasure to see your backer faces and hangout!!
The MIX
In addition to Funkotron, we also showed BitG at The MIX Seattle 2018 Developer Showcase which was a huge success, in our opinion!! Many of the attendees had either never heard of TJ&E or never played a TJ&E game before. We were thrilled to find that this untapped audience genuinely enjoyed their first Toejam & Earl experience with Back in the Groove! I’m sure some of you are thinking “Well DUH! I love Toejam & Earl! It’s great”. But this is a nice indication of how this game will do with a broader demographic.
Limited Run Games
We also announced during PAX West that we’ve partnered with Limited Run Games to produce a physical collector’s edition of Back in the Groove for PS4 and Switch!! At the moment (and for logistical reasons related to manufacturing), no physical XBox 1 version is planned. If that changes, we’ll make sure to let y’all know.
These physical editions are separate from the Indiebox physical editions that many of you tacked on to your backer tiers during the kickstarter. Based on recent fan & backer feedback, we’re leaning towards making this Indiebox physical a throwback to the old Master System cases. But we’d love to hear more from you about what you’d like to see from this! Go ahead and leave your suggestions down in the comments!
While we’re on the physical edition topic, If anyone who paid for this add-on has moved in the last few years, but have not yet contacted us to update your shipping address, please email [email protected]. We’ll make sure all your info is entirely up-to-date. Be sure to include “Address Change” in the subject line.
Newsletter Signup
We now have a newsletter!! As we get closer to really releasing this thang, we want to make sure everyone is kept in the loop. This far out from a Kickstarter campaign, update visibility tends to drop off pretty dramatically, so we’ll be sending out updates through our newsletter as well. Don’t worry(!), we plan to send out updates on here first. But in case you ever miss one in your inbox, this newsletter will ensure you stay up-to-date on all Toejam & Earl news.
We have a few new gameplay trailers in the works, which we are really excited to share with you! One of them has a little animated skit at the beginning with Toejam that we think you all will really enjoy. In addition to these trailers, we’ll be starting production on a TJ&E web commercial with some buddies of ours down in LA toward the beginning of October. AND we’re lining up some really exciting partnerships with twitch and youtube creators. Lot’s to do!!
We’ll also have a release date (Finally!) and information about swapping to consoles in the next few weeks! We want to make sure that the info we give you for these two topics is entirely accurate and not something we’ll have to walk back later -- so that’s why we’re taking our time. Not much longer though! Thanks you for your patience.
And as always, for daily interaction with the TJ&E team, make sure you join our Discord and follow us on Twitter!
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PS. Please consider helping out our sibling team in San Francisco as they continue to fund Starflight 3 over at fig.co/starflight3
New Trailer, PAX West, and More!
over 5 years ago
– Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 07:01:46 PM
Hey you funky earthlings! Time for another update!
But first, we have a new… trailer?
And there’s more where that came from! We’re hoping to put out a new trailer once a month up until release. Oh, while we’re on the subject -- if you hadn’t seen some of our earlier updates -- Back in the Groove will be out sometime before the end of November of this year!! We’re very excited about this and can’t wait for you all to get your hands on it. We’ve also partnered up with some suuuper cool folks for some marketing and commercials. More on that soonish.
Now for some general development news stuff to keep you informed about what’s up at the studio..
Release Candidate
We’re happy to report that we have a potential “release candidate” build of the game! We’ll definitely do some more tweaking and balancing, but this is totally great news and means that we’re confident we can release the game in the internal time-frame we have laid out. We’re not quite ready to give a final date (womp wooomp), as getting any game on a digital store first means you need to pass their quality test. There are many criteria that need to be met before you can sell on these platforms, so we don’t want to give a final date until we get the all clear.
New Merch & Kickstarter Physical Editions
Many fans have been asking about merch.. Will you be putting out new Merch? Will you restock the products you’ve already sold out of? Can we have a life-sized bronze statue of Earl for $100,000?
The answers to those questions are:
-Yes, we are working on new shirt and apparel designs and will hopefully get those in production in the next month or two.
-Yes, we would like to at least restock a few of the products we’ve run out of. Those super cool wiseman keychains, for example. The vinyl figures are more expensive for us to produce, so although we’d like to make more of those, that’ll probably have to wait until after the full game releases.
-I meaaaaan, if you have $100,000 lying around, I don’t think you need US to get a bronze statue of Earl for you. You do you, homie!
As for the Kickstarter Indiebox Physical Edition, we’re starting to rough out what that will look like and hope to share some of that with you soon! For those who have been wondering.. We won't have an official count for how many of these there will be until we get closer to entering the production phase.
TJ&E at PAX West
While we were making sure everything with the game gets wrapped up, we happened to miss the boat on showing the game INSIDE of PAX West 2018. Buuuut you know what? We weren’t going to let that stop us! NO WAY!
We’ll be hosting our own indie game press zone along side PAX..
I think you’ll dig the name we landed on..
Are you or someone you know in the press? Or a streamer/influencer? Email us at [email protected] to make an appointment.
Are you a super cool ultra-fan or backer that will happen to be in the Seattle area next weekend? Come on by! We’d love to have you.
And last but not least..
We’d like to help BackerKit with a little bit of promotion. BackerKit is a truly incredible company and asset for indie crowdfunding efforts like ours. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that we couldn’t have run this operation nearly as smoothly without their help and their platform. So with that said… BackerKit would like to introduce The Creative Fund!
The Creative Fund wants to make sure that every creator who is just starting out gets a chance. They believe that the more projects that are supported on Kickstarter, the more awesome ideas will be brought to you and the world -- which is great for creators and the creative economy in general. Please consider taking a look at their new platform and helping them support creative earthlings all over the world!
OH one fiiiinal thing: join our discord, follow us on twitter and facebook, and we’ll be adding a mailing list to our websites next week if folks want to sign up for that stuff :)
Love ya!
Beta Ending. Thanks for the help!!!
over 5 years ago
– Tue, Aug 07, 2018 at 02:29:06 AM
Greetings from Funkotron!
Well Friday was going to be the last day of our closed beta but we decided to keep it open until today (8/6) so that our backer-testers could have one more weekend. In terms of the amount and quality feedback we’ve gotten on Discord and in Trello (from the F11 key) and in the Hyperfunk.club forum, there’s only one thing I can say is… OMG! It’s been an absolute flood of goodness. SO many great ideas and suggestions, not to mention a mountain of edge-case bugs we probably never would have found otherwise. This has been beyond useful. Thank you!
I’d love to list all of the things we’ve changed and fixed so far as a result of the feedback but this update would get way too long, and it’s probably wordy and boring enough as it is. I will mention just a few of the interesting ones though. Also, so far we’ve only been able to act on a portion of the feedback, but we are cataloging and prioritizing everything, and will be releasing patches later with upgrades as we can get to all the improvements. For the time being though we just need to get this darned game out already. Right!?
By the way, not everything we’ve tried as a result of the feedback has been a success, but we want you to know we’re really listening and trying out some of your ideas! For example, a number of the our fans suggested that we try making the world feel bigger by pushing the camera in closer and by making all of the sprites smaller. This seemed like a fairly simple and good idea. We tried it, and put out a build with this new look for our beta testers to try…. some of you liked it better and some didn’t, but it was clear that it was also creating a whole new pile of bugs that would have slowed us down fixing them all, so we ended up backing out of that change. Rather than this, we have gone back to our level generation and figured out how to make our max-level size bigger – but this too will take testing to make sure we haven’t introduced too many new bugs so it will have to wait for a later update. All of this is a result of you guys saying you wanted bigger levels. Cool!
Many of you felt the game was too crowded and also too easy. These two factors are interesting because they pull in opposite directions. We thinned things out a bit, but it also made the game even easier – so we’ve had to do some tweaking on the Earthling stats and behavior to compensate. We’ve also made hard mode even harder than it was… I totally couldn’t believe people were saying it was too easy… well ok. You asked for it. If you can get through hard mode now without a LOT of tries and effort I will be impressed.
People pointed out that there was a loophole where you could use your present menu to freeze Earthlings and then they might walk away. They don’t do this anymore so… again, no more easy outs. We modified distribution of all the things you find in the game and introduced a rarity system for presents, so presents now vary in rarity and start being introduced at different levels. All Player characters now have special abilities that are unique and interesting. I won’t list them all here. There are so many other tweaks, changes and fixes we’ve done as a result of this testing. So so awesome. Thanks for all of your help.
We will probably be doing another beta test as we get closer to launch. We still don’t have a specific date but as we said before it will be sometime before Thanksgiving. We still have a lot of debugging and porting work to do… so busy around here!!
PAX WEST:
Instead of showing at PAX this year, we've decided to chill NEAR the convention with some other groovy developers. A sort of low-key indie showcase next to Pike's Place. More info to come..
STARGFLIGHT:
For those of you who haven’t heard about this yet, Humanature Studios will be firing up another team in a new location (led by Anthony Vaughn) to try and get crowd-funded (fingers crossed) and to do a reboot of my very first game (from 1986 if you can believe that!) Starflight 3 . Here is a link to the campaign that hasn’t officially started yet. We love our peeps at KickStarter but we decided to go with the Fig platform this time so that our backers could have the option of backing in the usual way, or also of micro-investing and getting a return. Seemed like a fun thing to try. I would really appreciate any support you want to give this team. You can check out a very, very early demo video at this link…
