Hey all!

So… it’s been almost a year since the last devlog update. Yes, I failed badly in keeping you posted and I’m very sorry.

A lot has happened since then. After releasing the post-jam version, Ana (the artist) and I decided to pause development for a while, since both of us had other tasks to do.

During this period, I self-published a crowdfunded programming book in Brazilian Portuguese and joined my friends Douglas and Ed from BEHEMUTT and started working on Mana Spark as a collaborator. We are friends for many years, worked together in another game company in the past and I always followed their work, so I was/am very happy to help them. If you played an older version of Mana Spark, you may have noticed that Mana’s main character appears in Animation 101 (one of the many references we added in the game). If you haven’t played Mana Spark yet, check it out! :)

What should have been a short pause in development, well… it turned out to be a little bit longer. But even though Animation 101 didn’t change much since the first post-jam release, it managed to enter a few events in Brazil! The game was a ‘Best Serious Game’ finalist in SBGames 2016 (the biggest gamedev and academic event in the country), was selected to participate in SlatJogos (though I couldn’t attend the event), Super Beta Test 2, O Festival Surto, and last week the game had its own booth at BIG Festival 2017 (probably the biggest indie games event in Latin America), where I had the chance to meet David and Yaprak, the fine couple who runs GameJolt!

BEHEMUTT, Kishimoto Studios, SpaceGiraff3 S2 GameJolt. Picture taken from https://twitter.com/gamejolt/status/880597232961163264

I’m very surprised we got this far since #AdvJam2016 (see, good things can come from game jams!)

New version (1.0.4)

There is a v1.0.4 ‘BIG Festival version’ of the game available to download. This fixes a crash when changing languages in ‘I am…’ selection screen, adds a play preview button in the ‘order animation’ activity and the game starts in Brazilian Portuguese instead of English (due to the festival).

So, what’s next?

Well, with Mana Spark and other projects queued in my task list, I won’t be able to work on Animation 101 for at least another year. I know this sucks, especially for those who want the game to have more content and who are waiting the new storyline. I really appreciate all your support, feedback (got tons here and in those events as well), let’s play videos and kind words.

But, who knows? If I have any news regarding Animation 101, I’ll definitely write here in the devlog.

Until then.

Best regards and keep playing,
André Kishimoto