Hey Everyone,

Yesterday we met our funding objective, and the entire team has been absolutely ecstatic! A huge THANK YOU to all our backers: You make all our hard work worthwhile. We now have a lot of preorders to look forward to, and some new enemies and weapons we have to design. It’s an honour to involve you in our creative process. The best part is there are still 11 days left on our Kickstarter. That means you can still get a last minute reward and help us get to our next big goal: ports for Xbox and PSN.

It’s been a really exciting weekend! The team has been putting the finishing touches on our press demo which will be going out today. We hope this will bring a slew of previews for you to read about. Everyone on the team has been doing amazing work, and as a project lead it brings me great joy to see both the game and the team coming together. We may have been working on Party of Sin for 3 years, but the real work now begins as we put the finishing touches and make it as fun as possible for you.

As a reward for meeting our funding objective, I’d like to highlight some of the amazing music our composer Blake Allen has been cooking up. Everyone who ordered the digital soundtrack: you have something awesome to look forward to. In the last two months I have seen Blake bring his creative focus to this project and he’s producing some truly inspired work. His most recent tracks will be featured in Purgatory, the second world of the game. Here they are:

This is only a preview of what you will hear in the final soundtrack when it will be released. I must say I’m very excited about it.

There’s also been some tremendous progress in the art. Here are some screenshots from hell3 and hell4. Both these levels are later in hell. The first has you in a cave solving a bunch of puzzles and the second riding a turtle through a huge lava river. We’re really excited to be showing these at Gaming in Public!

I’d like to highlight some of the great work Liz has been doing with animations. We recently posted on reddit and got some constructive feedback from the community there about our animations. It turns out we had a silly bug causing some animation “popping”, especially when the sins turn to face a different direction. This was corrected, and a new transition system was put in place. Needless to say everything is smooth as silk now (you will see it in our next video!).

Finally Vincent, the man responsible for 99% of the puzzles in Party of Sin, has been churning out some beautiful stuff for Purgatory. One level has the players going through a factory (operated by souls paying penance). Vince has made a bunch of really impressive machines using our physics engine and it gives these levels a truly unique feel.

That’s all for now. We’ll update you again soon! Once again, a huge thank you to everyone that has backed the project. You are all awesome!

Dan

We’ve put together a video that “is similar to the presentation we made to IGDA. It runs through the first level of the game and explains all the key concepts.” – Dan Menard, Project Lead

Enjoy the first exclusively gameplay video we’ve published and please let us know what you think!

Also, there are less than 20 days left to go for our Kickstarter fund and only $2,300 to go! Valentine’s Day love to everyone who’s contributed!

Cheers!
The Party of Sins

First, thank you so much to everyone who has donated on our Kickstarter page. You make our little developer hearts go pitter-pat! To those who have yet to donate: we’ve added a NEW REWARD at $55 in case you aren’t interested in being a beta-tester and would like a T-Shirt instead.

Blake’s ready to hit us with some great new tracks he’s produced along with a lil’ insight into his musical mind. Enjoy!

Lust:

Lust by Blake Allen

Insight From Blake:

For Lust I was thinking 70′s “porno” style, funky and a bit trashy. Somehow I managed to get my girlfriend to do the vocals, and I have to say, she outdid any expectations I had for this. In the end, I think it gives the lustful feeling and most of all leaves the listener… “Wanting.”

Greed:

Greed by Blake Allen

Insight From Blake:

For Greed, I thought of the outlandish pop music that is made purely for profit. Somehow I realized I was lacking Hip-hop sounds as well for this game and since hip-hop/rap is so often tied in with how much money the artist is making, I couldn’t think of a better genre to attach to the Sin. With the addition of some reverb drenched coins and the sound of a register opening, the feeling of the Midas Touch was conveyed.

Insight from Dan:

MAGFest was a real test of our game design. We had numerous people try the game without any prior experience and see how they did. Hell1, the first level in the game, served as a tutorial. We realized pretty quickly that our tutorial wasn’t serving its function. Players weren’t getting enough time with each Sin to really grasp the concept. Also, the tutorial wasn’t very much fun, with most players giving up without having finished it. There was nothing to keep the players engaged through the onslaught of puzzles. The players that did make it through got to experience Hell2, which got a hugely positive response. It was clear we had to change Hell1.

First, we expanded all the sin areas so players could get a better feel for each character. We gave Wrath a lot more to destroy before he discovers Pride, then we created a whole new Pride section where players could get used to executing those tricky Pride jumps. Second, we tackled the fun problem by adding more enemies to the level. Players would get an introduction to combat before the big battle at the end and it would break up the string of puzzles. Last, we refined many of the puzzles to make them less tedious. Where we could, we added an incremental puzzle so players wouldn’t be immediately faced with something too difficult.

Vince was the main designer on Hell1, and he now states it’s his favorite level in the game, so we’ve got a solid improvement here! We’re looking forward to getting the latest Hell1 in front of players and collecting more feedback.

Finally, our programmers have dallied in a little art in the creation of some fancy new clouds. We hope these give you a nice flashback to your Super Mario platforming days:

Envy skips across Vince's fancy new clouds.

To everyone in Montreal and the surrounding area: our dev team will be presenting Party of Sin at IGDA-Montreal next Tuesday (Jan. 31st) at 7:30pm (19:30) EST. Admittance is $5 for non-IGDA members, free for members. Other games to be presented include Fez and Mass Effect 3, both Montreal born-and-raised.

See you there!
The Party of Sins

Mortals,

Party of Sin is a project fueled by a love of gaming, a drive to create a fun and original gaming experience, long development hours put in on precious weekends instead of bar-hopping with friends, and, as much as we hate to admit it, money. Yup, in case the WordPress-theme website and blog-based Public Relations department didn’t clue you in, we’re part of the Indie games movement. And that means that we don’t have a multi-million dollar budget to dole out to team members or to purchase primo slots at development conferences; everyone on the team is a volunteer to the project and the money to attend conferences comes out of our day-job paychecks. But that can only last so long, especially with a project that’s grown as much as Party of Sin has. Costs of software and hardware can really mount up, not to mention how much we need our development team to put in a constantly increasing amount of time as the project gets closer to release. So, (to justify this bawdy rant) we’ve launched a Kickstarter for Party of Sin. You can check it out here:

We have rewards for donors including a pre-order of Party of Sin + PoS wallpaper for $15 (how much the game will cost) and a $25 donation which comes with the pre-order, wallpaper, and the full soundtrack to the game including all sin theme-songs and world music. All donors will be mentioned on our credit roll; donations above $50 will get you a mention as an Angel Donor. The rewards keep going for increments up to $5,000 after which point we’ll happily provide any favors you’d like, decent or otherwise. If you have any questions or concerns about the process, feel free to contact us at alfred@crankshaftgames.com or dan@crankshaftgames.com

Thanks for the support!
The Party of Sins