Stream News interviewed the Crashlands devs about their game, Twitch and other stuff.

SN: Let's start talking about your new hit game, Crashlands. How did you guys come up with the premise of the game? Did the game stay true to your original idea or is it almost entirely different?

Samuel: Crashlands came out of a pretty dark place for us. I got diagnosed with stage 4b cancer shortly after we had our first successful game launched and had a bit of a MELT DOWN (as tends to happen). We were at the stage in our studio where we could make the choice of creating "another" game similar to what was already on the mobile market or strike out and build something wild and huge. Getting my mortality checked at that time helped us make the right decision, to go big, and also brought Adam into the fold once he finished his PhD in molecular biology. His addition to the team was like putting a jet engine on the jalopy that was Seth and I. With the three of us on the project we transformed it from being a sort of bland mishmash of a bunch of our favorite titles (Terraria, Pokémon, Diablo) into something truly unique. And it helped all 3 of us get through all that cancer nonsense, which is nice.

 

SN: Wow, that's truly inspiring. It's pretty amazing how developing this game created a way to escape that and stay positive. You can tell right away that you guys put your heart and soul into the game with how polished it is.

Seth: To add to that, our concept for the game really did change a lot over time. At the beginning, it wasn't even really a game... it was just a weird place you ran around in, pretty much aimlessly. After Sam came out of his first round of treatments, we kinda stepped back and looked at what we made, and we decided that wasn't good enough, and we worked to turn it into a more RPG-style game. The story elements weren't even begun until about 3 months before beta testing started. So yeah, it grew and changed a lot over its dev cycle!

Thnaks Eye.

From the Hip Toss interviewed Sam Coster about Crashlands.

Crashlands harkens back to a time in video games where unhinged joy and curiosity were central, and discovery and wonder were the norm. Were you aware that you might elicit this reaction from others?

Sam: Nailing that joy, awe, and sense of wonder is exactly what we were aiming for, though interestingly it’s not something we felt we had direct control over. The overall structure of the design is meant to firmly root the player in an exploratory mode, and all of the design choices flow congruently into that.

Art and sound wise, we just did what we do! I don’t think it counts as an art style if it’s the only one you can execute. It’s just what we do — make goofy, fun stuff that makes you go “WHAAAAAAT IS THAT!?”

The creatures — they're full of personality. What was your process for creating Crashlands’ wildlife? Were you specifically inspired or were Wompits and Glidopi lingering in your heads all along?

Sam: Most people are kind of shocked to find out that we completely lack a concepting/build-up workflow for the art and story. It’s generally built out of necessity. With the Wompits as a good example, they were the first creature in the game and we knew we needed a simple attack mechanic so they wouldn’t overwhelm new players.

With that, the requirement was “We need a creature that does a circular attack pattern every so often.” Then, I went away for 4 hours or so and made this one-legged cow hippo, and that was that! All of the creatures are driven from mechanical necessity, and then we retcon their story/lore afterward.

Thanks Eye.

PC Gamer has reviewed Crashlands:

Crashlands feels like a case study in the pros and cons of designing a game for both PC and mobile. It’s easy to assume that any decision made with mobile in mind will hurt the overall game on PC, but that’s really not true, and Crashlands proves it. Simple controls and a clean UI are good news for a game on any platform. Unfortunately, Crashlands also lends some ammo to the other side of the argument.

Crashlands is a top-down action RPG with lots of exploration and crafting. You play as Flux, an intergalactic delivery truck driver who has crash landed on an alien planet, and must find a way off so she can finish her deliveries. At first glance, it seems very similar to Klei's whimsical survive-'em-up Don’t Starve, but Crashlands isn’t trying to be a survival game. Instead of hunger and thirst bars, developer Butterscotch Shenanigans puts the focus on combat and quests. I spent most of my time doing missions for the grotesque but charming denizens of the world, helping them kill beasts, undermine demigods, or just go fishing.

[...]

Crashlands is definitely a fun game—mostly thanks to its combat—but it feels torn between PC and mobile. Had the item progression and crafting been paced to allow for more player choice and more satisfying long play sessions, I would likely call Crashlands one of my favorite action/crafting games in a while. But with things the way the are, Crashlands started out very fun before becoming repetitive and predictable. It’s a good game on PC, but probably one better suited to your phone.

Score: 73/100

The action RPG Crashlands has been released on Steam:

Craft, battle, and quest your way through Crashlands, a story-driven Crafting ARPG overflowing with sass!

Become Flux Dabes, a galactic trucker whose latest shipment gets derailed by a chin-strapped alien menace named Hewgodooko, leaving you stranded on an alien planet. As you hustle to retrieve your packages you’ll become enmeshed in a nefarious plot of world domination, which will require all of your wits and both of your glutes to overcome. Learn recipes from the local sentient life, make new friends, uncover ancient secrets and deadly bosses, tame everything and build yourself a home-away-from-home as you learn to thrive on planet Woanope.

Key Features

Expansive Crafting System
Unlock over 500 craftable items as you explore the world and learn its secrets!

Self-managing, Infinite Inventory
In Crashlands, your inventory is infinite, manages itself, and retrieves your tools when you need them, so you can focus on adventuring, questing, and building. You'll never have dig through your bag or return to your base to free up inventory space!

RPG-Style Character Progression
Become more powerful through creating ever-more-amazing items! As you grow in power, you can venture to new regions of the world, meet strange characters, discover new stories, and encounter new and interesting enemies.

Skill-Based Combat
Learn the attacks of the enemies you encounter, and use your skill, agility, and wits to defeat them! You can even augment your fighting prowess with the power of the dozens of gadgets you can craft. Set your enemies on fire, stun them, slow down time, and more!

Intuitive Base Building
Building a base in Crashlands is so simple it feels like fingerpainting. You can create beautiful, sprawling bases in minutes!

Tameable Creatures
Every creature in Crashlands can become a trusty combat sidekick. Find an egg, incubate it, and hatch your very own adorable or hideous bundle of joy. You can even craft special items to grow and empower them!

Huge World... with Huge Problems
Four sentient races, three continents, an epic bid for the future of the planet, and you - trapped in the middle, trying to deliver your freakin' packages. Take your time to dive into the sidestories of the characters you meet or just rush headlong into making that special delivery. With hundreds upon hundreds of quests, there's a lot to do and discover on planet Woanope!

Crossplatforminess
Don't want the fun to stop? Crashlands is also available on mobile - the exact same game, with your cloud-synced progress - so you never have to stop!

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The release date for Crashlands is set to be released on January 21 according to this twitter message, which also shows a Star Wars like poster.

Thanks Eye.

Crashlands is mostly done, but it needs some more fine tuning:

Why isn't Crashlands out yet?

"When is Crashlands coming out?" This is pretty much the only question we get asked these days. It's frustrating for us, because the answer is "we don't know, but soon!"

But hey, that's our fault, because we've now passed our original "summer/fall" release date, which was when we thought the game would be out. Oh, and we've also passed our June 2014 release date, which was also when we (hilariously) thought the game would be out.

So what happened? Why didn't Crashlands come out this past summer like our trailer said it would? Why didn't the beta start two months ago like we planned?

The answer is a simple one: inexperience. We're pretty dang new to the game dev scene. We have never done a project of the size and scope of Crashlands. Before Crashlands, we had never made a crafting game, and we had never made a game with a more than a superficial story. Crashlands has both crafting and story, plus a ton of other things that we'd never done before (cross-platform save syncing, an infinite and reproducible procedural world, story creation via the Crashlands Creator, etc). So our ability to estimate how long each component would take has been consistently wrong!

At the end of development, a game looks complete even though it still has a long list of needed tweaks and improvements. The larger and more complex the game, the longer is that strange period of looks-complete-but-actually-isn't. We've been there for months now. For the entirety of that period, we always thought that the end was just two weeks away. (We still think we're just two weeks away!)

Indeed, if you were to play Crashlands right now, you would think it was done. Because it basically is. All of the content is in and all of the systems work -- mostly. But you would also notice some rough edges: confusing UI elements, some weird creature behaviors, some balance issues (things getting too hard or too easy as the game progresses), graphical errors during the game's nighttime, the occasional crash, etc. All of those things need to be fixed before we can call the game done. Fortunately, it is way easier and less time-consuming to fix those little issues than it was to build the content and systems for the game.

BUT! Even when the game itself is truly done (very, very soon) we can't launch it immediately. We still have to run a bunch of players through the game for beta testing, to figure out what devices it works on and find any bugs we missed. We'll then have to get approval from the various app stores, so we can then find a launch date where we won't be competing with other highly-anticipated games for feature spots, so that we can make the announcement and have enough time to get the marketing/PR/hype train rolling.

So, all that said, when is Crashlands coming out?

We don't know! It's nearly November already, and we still have to do all those things listed above. We have no doubt that the game will be done by the end of the year, but it's looking less likely that we'll be able to launch it by the end of the year. It'll be a close thing.

We'll of course continue to be transparent about development progress, so stay on top of the forums and our podcast to find out how things with Crashlands are going!

A new development update for Crashlands does not go unnoticed by our watchful Eye. Neither did this one, which informs us that beta is getting closer.

WHEW. Been a little longer than I intended since the last update. OOPS.

This weekend we're doing a Game Jam to clear our minds from Crashlands, but things have been going just spectacularly. We'll of course be right back to work when the weekend is over, and have been working nonstop since the last update, SO DON'T FRET.

1. Sam finished the art for EVERY. SINGLE. BOSS. That means there are only a few hours of random art assets left to make, so we can just call the art DONE.

2. Seth finished programming all of the Bawg Bosses. Three more left for the Tundra (a few days of work)!

3. I rewrote most of the mainline Bawg story, and then spent some time making the Quest Editor part of the Crashlands Creator wayyyyyy more efficient. Now Sam is filling out some epic Bawg sidequests, including the Bossfight storylines.

4. I did a lot of general Bawg playtesting and fed all my notes to Seth, and he's fixed nearly everything. I didn't find anything super difficult to fix, so THAT'S GOOD.

5. Seth and I got the Crashlands Creations Beta system up and fully functional. This will allow us (and you!) to add co-authors and testers to Creations. If you are an Author or Tester on a Creation, when you make a new save you'll have the option to choose whether it will be in he Beta or Release channel. These are published separately, so that you can perfect the next version of your Creation before pushing it to all your rabid fans! We'll be using this exact system for our own beta test and future updates.

So what's left? Seth will have the remaining bossfights done next week. Sam and I will have the Bawg story done sometime next week and will move on to the Tundra story. Seth will then wrap up the short list of big problems and the medium list of tiny problems, and then we'll be ready for beta.

In an update for Crashlands information is provided on their own playthrough of the Savanna.

While I was in Colorado, Adam and Sam did some TRULY MASSIVE playthroughs of the Savanna, the first of the three biomes. It's the region of the world you can see in the background image of THIS VERY FORUM! That playthrough yielded some pretty intense notes on things to change. Here's the general gist of it.

• The game feels REALLY GOOD. There are a lot of things that need some final tweaks, but even without them, it's in a good place.
• Some of the quests are unclear as to what is happening, or why it's happening. Also, many of the main story quests didn't do a lot to reinforce the main story.
• Some things are out of balance (a little).
• Combat in the game requires a lot of moment-to-moment tactics, but not as much preparation or strategy as we'd like.
• The world map is pretty slow on mobile, which sucks.
• Characters and creatures have too high of a tendency to get stuck when trying to navigate complicated terrain or bases.

The update also provides information on what they plan to do about these issues.

Thanks Eye.

The upcoming Action Adventure Crafting RPG Crashlands has been green-lit on Steam and will be released later this summer.

Trailer:

Crashlands is an Action Crafting RPG with skill-based combat, intuitive base building, absurd stories and a HUMONGOUS world to explore.

Overview:
Play as Flux Dabes, a galactic delivery truck driver whose latest shipment gets interrupted by a megalomaniacal alien named "Q" who tears her ship to pieces looking for useful tech. Crashlanded on Woanope, you must fight, tame, craft, quest, bossfight, and adventure your way to domination of all the things so that you and JuiceBox, your trusty sidekick/supervisor/robotic cargo palette, can send a message to the Bureau of Shipping and get those damn packages delivered!

Story:
Never again suffer from such existential crises as "Who am I?" or "What am I doing here?" Crashlands is an adventure-crafting RPG driven by an epic story arc. From the moment gameplay begins you'll be thrust PELVIS-FIRST into an insane tale complete with a cast of personality-bloated characters. And what good would those characters be if they could do things for themselves? The Crashlands cast is totally helpless, thus providing you with endless questing opportunities!

Crafting:
Make tools and stations to break down the resources of the planet, discover new recipes in the process, and then BUILD ALL THE THINGS as you explore the world. Craftables get ever more elaborate and ridiculous, and include HARVEST BOMBS and LASER CLOTHESLINES!
And you know what crafting means: INVENTORY MANAGEMENT! OH YEAH! Easily everyone's favorite part of crafting games: spending countless hours organizing countless chests each filled with countless and mostly-useless items. WHAT FUN! If you were looking for yet another inventory management game... TOO BAD FOR YOU. There is NO inventory management in Crashlands. Inventory is handled contextually: you’ll have the things you want when you want them.

Combat:
Sure, you can create armor and weaponry. DUH. Is there a crafting game that DOESN'T have that? But you can also ENHANCE your bad-assery with a host of gadgets that shoot fire, pull lightning from the aether, poison the crap out of everything, make you fly, and even MODIFY THE VERY FLOW OF SPACETIME.
How fast can you click your mouse/tap your finger to DEFEAT YOUR ENEMIES? Turns out it doesn't matter. It's about skill, not speed. Every creature in Crashlands has a unique attack combo you'll need to learn so that you can defeat it in battle. Do the ol’ Crashlands DANCE OF DEATH to win battles and get those hard-won creature-parts for your crafting.

Tame:
Not only can you turn full-grown creatures into crafts, you can also find creature eggs. Take that egg back to your base, give it some time to incubate, and hatch your very own baby pet/death machine. Use your new pet as arm candy, a sidekick in battle, or even as a crafting station!

Explore:
Crashlands consists of three infinitely-large, procedurely-generated biomes: the Savannah, Bawg, and Tundra. Each has its own cast of creatures, resources, and sentient beings for you to dominate. Okay, we lied about it being infinite. But seriously, Crashlands is really, really big. It would take decades to fully explore.

Build:
You’ll obviously want an epic base to hold your massive collection of tamed beasts, crafting stations, and decorative pillows. AW YEAH, BASEBUILDING, where you slowly plod around, repeatedly open-and-close and dig through your enormous inventory, and ever-so-painstakingly assemble your masterpiece. OH WAIT. Base-building in Crashlands doesn’t suck. It's more like finger painting. Just pop open Build Mode, enjoy the soothing muzak, and INSTANTLY build your living quarters!

Features:
WHAT? A CRAFTING GAME WITH NO INVENTORY, A FUN BUILDMODE, AN ACTUAL STORY, TAMEABLE PETS, AND RIDICULOUSLY FUN COMBAT ISN'T ENOUGH FOR YOU? Then cram these other features down your pipe hole!

• A modding tool that lets you create your own stories, use mutators to change the game, and generally take what we've made and do horrible, wonderful things to it
• Platform agnosticism! Crashlands is just as fun on mobile -- go on a road trip with your phone and pick up right where you left off!
• Bean bag chairs in at least three amazing colors.
• So many hours of content you’ll have to abandon your family to enjoy it all.
• A classic heartwarming tale of a space traveling delivery woman who overcomes the handicap of having no elbows or knees.
• Fishing that’s slightly less boring than real fishing.
• Over 462 crafting recipes (and we're not even done yet).
• Throw an anger omelet at a one-legged bouncing cow hippo to make it GO CRAZY!
• Epic boss fights that'll make you clench your butt so tight that BUTT DIAMONDS will po(o)p out
• Seriously this list could go on for pages. Just give us your thumbs and move on!
• And more!
• And also other things!

More Info:
Crashlands has been in development for about 10 months. It started as a cathartic escape for the three brothers behind Butterscotch Shenanigans after Sam, the artist and Abe Lincoln-alike, got diagnosed with cancer in November 2013. He's still undergoing treatment for the heinous illness, and Crashlands is his big fat legacy.
We’re in the midst of getting the story integrated, adding boss fights, and polishing up the game in preparation for BETA TESTING. If you want the chance to be involved with Beta testing, grab your BscotchID and watch out for announcements on our Forums and Blog. We’re pretty sure the game will be out by the end of Summer, 2015. Trust us, we totally know what we’re doing.