Hi, this is Jamie, the other artist on Little Bug. Bela is busy working on festival submissions (but most likely procrastinating by messing around in Unity) but I want to share some news with y’all on how the game is going.

FOLLOW US
First things first, we launched our studio website and social media profiles to make it easier to follow us:

@buddysystemla on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr

http://buddysystem.la is our new website

[email protected] e-mail us

DEMO UPDATES
Thanks to everyone who has played Little Bug so far! Between Itch.io and Gamejolt, we have reached a little over 10k downloads and we are so grateful to everyone has played, left comments and recorded Let’s Plays. Bela uploaded a new build last Sunday with a number of cosmetic and gameplay fixes, and as the summer goes on, he’ll likely add more builds with slight tweaks as we continue to get feedback at fests.

NEW TEAM MEMBERS AND THE FULL GAME
We’d also like to announce our story/writing collaborators, Bayana Davis and Iman Sylvain. Iman provided a lot of story direction for our demo, and much of the main character was inspired by Iman and her personal experiences as a rockstar-scientist-bio-researcher (our main character was first conceptualized as a tiny scientist, collecting specimens and samples for her jar).

Bayana Davis has joined the team as well, and recently completed writing the full story that the rest of the game will be built upon. As far as the full build goes, we are in the midst of concepting the remaining chapters for Little Bug and aiming for a late 2017 release. We’re working on getting funding, considering console and platform distribution, and planning on a 1 year production window. So, if you have level design ideas, story forecasts or any other suggestions for the full game, now’s the time to share with us: comment below or email us at [email protected] - seriously, we’d love to hear your thoughts, and you might see your ideas come to life in the full game, along with a credit next to the rest of our team.

You can follow our writers at their Twitter handles @imansylvain and @yana_hallows and also at Bayana’s awesome blog blackgirlsnerdout.com.

AWARDS AND PAX PRIME
We are really excited to share that we recently won two awards!

Best Overall Game - Intel Developer Forum 2016, San Francisco
Best Platformer - Intel Level Up 2016, Seattle

On that note, Buddy System will be on the floor at PAX 2016 on Friday September 2nd at the Intel booth, from 10am to 2pm. Stop by and say hi, we’ll be wearing fairy wings and have some goodies to give away.

LITTLE BUG ARCADE CABINET?!
Bela’s going to use our prize from IDF (an Intel NUC) to build a custom arcade cabinet using two arcade joysticks to control the characters and a foot pedal for the telekinetic beam. We hope to show it at IndieCade this October, so stay tuned for that!