Oh hey there, youngster!

People say that time moves faster and faster as you age. My last Ballyhoo marked 4 weeks to the Crashlands 2 launch, and I was so excited about how close that was. The blink of an eye! But 4 weeks was still an eternity for the youths, who only rolled their eyes and yelled, "That might as well be next century, old man!" as they vaped off into the sunset.

But now we're only 2 weeks away, which is truly Soon™ no matter how old you are! I think?

As the launch approaches, I've been feeling rather nostalgic about the original Crashlands and how far we've come with Crashlands 2. So this issue of the Ballyhoo is a little journey down memory lane.


Back in 2016 my two brothers and I launched the original Crashlands. It was our first game that paid any bills and is still the game we're best known for all these years later. It's been played by literally millions of people, which is both amazing and terrifying. Making Crashlands was a harrowing experience (there's a whole documentary about it), and honestly I'm still amazed we pulled it off!

(If you never played the original, or just want a refresher, someone did a delightfully-narrated 100% playthrough video edited down to a mere 2 hours!)

The success of Crashlands gave us all kinds of cool opportunities. From giving talks at the Game Developers Conference, to getting a tour of the Nintendo of America HQ, to being nominated for GOTY awards alongside juggernauts like Pokemon Go and Clash Royale.


We were super proud of what we'd made with the original game, but we were also quite aware that it wasn't the game we wished we could make. We'd only been making games for a couple of years when we started working on Crashlands, and we frankly didn't have the experience to make the game we imagined.

So we spent a few years retooling our studio, skilling up, expanding our team, and learning through launching another game (Levelhead[www.bscotch.net]). And then it was time to tackle Crashlands again, this time to make exactly the game we'd always wanted Crashlands to be. It still took a few years of research & development to become possible, and then another few years to finish the thing, but we did it!

You can get a sense of just how far we've come between the original and the sequel from some of the videos we put together over the past year:

- The release date announcement trailer shows off the benefits of changing from a procedural world to a hand-built one.
- Base-building probably has the most dramatic upgrade in Crashlands 2. Walls are tall! And buildings have roofs!
- Combat got the biggest experience upgrade. We made sure there's room for more casual play (my own preference) but the ceiling for just how interesting things can get is now a lot higher!
- Pets got more interesting, too!


Crashlands 2 is almost here, and the best thing you can do to support the game right now is to wishlist it ahead of time on your favorite platforms[bscotch.net] to let the stores know that they should be featuring it!

That's it for this Ballyhoo! As always, you can stay up to date with how things are going by listening to our podcast[podcast.bscotch.net] and hanging out in our Discord[discord.com].

💖,

Adam Coster
Webslinger @Butterscotch Getoffmylawnigans

Crashlands 2[www.bscotch.net] comes out on April 10, which is merely 3 weeks away. I want to take a moment from the million wrap-up tasks we have left to give you an update. The most important update is that we're on track for our release date and don't expect any delays!


We'd filtered 900 applicants down to 100 testers, and gave them three weeks to play as much as they could. Three weeks isn't very long for a game of this size but our intrepid testers put in an impressive effort, and a surprising number made it all the way to the end!

We got so much great feedback, and we used it to make tons of fixes and improvements. Some fun stats from the beta:

• 100 testers
  
• 360 Pets Hatched
  
• 470 Pet Embiggenings
  
• 3,900 Player "Deaths"
  
• 45,600 Consumables Consumed
  
• 86,800 Items Crafted
  
  
• 2,045 Total hours played
  
  • 20 Hour Average Playtime
    
  • 95 Hour Top Playtime (that's 30 hours per week!)
• How far did people get? (Note that these times are biased towards the fastest players)
  
  • 50% Completed Act 1, taking a median of 14 hours (ranging 8-40 hours)
    
  • 30% Completed Act 2, taking a median of 31 hours (ranging 20-62 hours)
    
  • 20% Completed the game, taking a median of 41 hours (ranging 28-88 hours)
• How well did it go on each platform?
  • People beat the game on PC, Steam Deck, Android, and iOS!
    
  • We had a lot of testing time on every platform
    
  • Rumpus worked perfectly to sync people's saves across devices and platforms
    
  • We had a lot of performance issues on mobile at the start of the beta, but by the end the game was playing well on nearly everyone's mobile devices

We're now at the "String Lock" phase of development, which is the fancy gamedev way of saying, "The text (a.k.a. strings) are not allowed to change anymore."

This is a super important milestone for a game, because translation always lags behind the text. Games always have to go into String Lock a fair bit before launch to make sure translators have enough time. And Crashlands 2 has 148,500 words (!) so there's a lot to translate!


While the game is now "done" except for those last bits of translation, there's still a lot of other stuff to do.

On the game side, most of our time is going into performance boosts, minor bugfixes, and small quality of life improvements. We won't make any major changes because everything in the game interacts with everything else, so each change we make requires a LOT of testing. So that's the other thing we'll be doing until launch: an absolutely bonkers amount of testing!

But game launches require a lot more than just having a complete game. We have to coordinate all kinds of marketing activities, shore up all of our store pages, make plans with business partners, and take care of a billion odds and ends.


And with that I'll leave you until launch, unless I can squeeze in another Ballyhoo in a couple of weeks. I'm SO EXCITED to get this game into your hands after these looooong 4.5 years of development! As always, you can stay up to date with how things are going by listening to our podcast [podcast.bscotch.net]and hanging out in our Discord[discord.com].

💖,

Adam Coster
Webslinger @Buticanfeelit Shenaningintheairtonight