[Project] Out now! "Wrestling With Emotions"!
It's with much happiness that I'm making this announcement;
"Wrestling with Emotions", that latest dating sim from Team Lazerbeam, has just come out!
Download the hottest pro-wrestling dating-sim of all time, right here!
Wrestling With Emotions is humorous speed-dating sim where you play as a lonely wrestler, hunting for the perfect match.
WWE was born at a mini-jam in January and @Jaysong, @Merrik and I are incredible excited to be able to share it with the community today.
How do you like your pro wrestlers? Whether you like them big and hairy, mysterious and deadly, oiled-up and angry or friendly and hideously-mutated, we've got the man for you!
In Wrestling With Emotions you'll take on the role of a lonely young wrestler, entering a new league and searching for the perfect match. Create a new persona using Team Lazerbeam's brand new "Look Out Lovers" (or LOL) character creation system! Then prepare to meet the man of your dreams as you speed-date your way through 8 unique hunks! Who will you choose to join you in a steamy embrace? Only you can decide!
Key features!
Explore 400 unique possibilities as you use LOL to build your ultimate alter-ego!
Speed-date your way through 8 sweaty studs!
Advanced arousal system that secretly keeps track of how other wrestlers feel about you.
10 mega-excellent songs!
Tons of state-of-the-art-punk graphics!
Plus! Heaps of the kind of hilarious (and sometimes bewildering) writing and radical mechanics that have made Team Lazerbeam a household name!
We hope you'll enjoy this game, the latest from Team Lazerbeam; the dorks that brought you Snow Cones and Pizza Quest!
Wrestling With Emotions will return in 2017 with "WWE2: Summer of Sweat"!
Comments
We got a total of 391 views on the page (with 6 links coming from this MGSA post! Woo!). That generated 78 free downloads and 4 purchases of the game. This is, by quite far, the most interest we've had in a Team Lazerbeam game on launch day.
Support from our friends, and positive reactions from strangers were really encouraging. It was great to see the awesome Devolver Digital tweeting about it! We were especially happy to see the game featured by Chris Priestman on the excellent Warp Door. We were also super stoked to have 3 different youtubers doing let's plays of the game. You can view them here!
We've still got a bunch of people we'd like to mail about the game, and I'm already itching to work on it a bit more, (particularly on the different endings players can get).
Really looking forward to seeing how the game is received by new players as we go forward. Will check in once in a while to post updates should anything cool happen!
*High Five!*
Would it be possible to add some persistence data for who you've made a perfect match with previously? Maybe some Polaroid pics stuck to the mirror.
Does it matter what costume I'm wearing for a match? I see to be able to be The Regular Average Man and make a match with anyone.
I love your suggestion of the polaroids on the mirror! Will chat to the boys and see if we can work something like that in. Would be such an awesome touch.
Currently, your costume doesn't affect your potential to match with anyone, that's purely decided based on how you respond to their greeting, question and farewell.
We're planning an majorly updated "Ultimate Edition". Many of the improvements will center around providing more feedback for the character you made. One of these is that the game will have a "turn ons and turn offs" system. This will mean you score bonus points (or potentially loose points) with wrestlers depending on your character build.
In WWE's current form, what appearance does influence is the farewells you receive after each date. There's a neutral farewell that you'll get if you didn't make much of an impression (or if you're "The Regular Average Man"). If you made a good or bad impression, your date will give you a corresponding farewell, based on one physical attribute. So, making a bad impression on Radical Ray as a "Dad" character, he'll say "Rads and Dad's Don't Mix Stupid!". If you manage to charm him as a Dad he's say "Rad and Dad?! What a combo!".
In short, we were blown away by the positive response that the game received. I can best relay the surprise and gratitude that we felt by sharing the "thank you" blog post that I originally put up on my blog after the game was out for three weeks I'll sticking that in below, but first up I thought I'd share some more up to date numbers, as these may be of interest to some of you.
Itch.io
Views: 11 005
Downloads: 2 439
Purchases: 35
We've enjoyed some great success on itch, and the release of WWE firmly cemented it's position as our favourite platform to release our games on. It messes with my head, thinking that so many people downloaded our game via this portal. Community response was also really encouraging, and we're building up a great group of people following our future releases.
Gamejolt
Views: 3 400 (approx)
Downloads: 988
We were unsure of putting the game on gamejolt, as we didn't find the platform very helpful in the past. In the long run, I'm very glad that we also put the game up on gamejolt, as it brought us a good spike of downloads, and exposed a lot of new people to the game. This spike came directly as a result of gamejolt featuring the game, and making posts on it. Prior to that we had almost no activity on the page, and following that, there was a very sudden drop off of traffic to the page (outside of a few views generated by descriptions in new let's play videos). I'm not sure if it has something to do with their algorithms, or simply that we don't make games appealing to most people who frequent the site, but it just seems like our work mostly slips under the radar on this site. Going forward, we'll still be sharing games on the platform; it'll be interesting to see if this trend continues for us.
Okay, here's the promised "thank you" post. It's rather out of date now, numbers have changed, but it still does a good job of highlighting how awesome the launch was, and how grateful we were for it!
***
Three weeks back, my punk game band Team Lazerbeam released our latest game-baby. Wrestling With Emotions, like most things we seem to make, started out as a joke. We began turning this joke into a game at a little jam in January. We soon became pretty excited about the project, feeling like, despite it's silly origins, it really had something to say. Taking a sledgehammer to the faux-macho exterior of TV wrestling, and smashing it away to it's real homoerotic core, we found ourselves working in a space that not only made us laugh, but left us stoked about the message we'd be getting out there. Fast forward 4 and a half months, and we were, understandably, incredibly excited to launch WWE and get that message out there.
By "launch the game" I mean I drew a poster, and we sent messages about the release to the handful of lovely youtubers who had previously released playthroughs of our last dating simulator - Snow Cones. With no expectations, we stuck the game up on itch.io, did a tweet about it, and left it at that.
In the world of video game launches, our efforts were tiny, but for the three of us this was something of a big deal. In the past, our games landed up online, half-baked, falling apart and tacked together with digital tape. We made no big deal about the fact that Bionic Bliss, Snow Cones or Pizza Quest were out there; these games were primarily made for our own amusement. Honestly, who would give a damn about the release of a game that offers two minutes of gameplay, and three different endings that involve shoving pizza into your face? To our great surprise, those past games did resonate with people. Encouraged by the support we received, and further fueled by our enthusiasm for how WWE was coming together, we set a release date for the game, made the poster, then frantically spent the next few days "finishing" the game off.
What followed were 2 of the most awesome weeks I've experienced in my brief career as a game developer. On the day of it's release, WWE choke-slammed our (admittedly modest) expectations through the floor and just kept going, day after day. Here are some of the lovely, unexpected things that happened in the last three weeks:
Killscreen (easily Team Lazerbeam's favourite video game site) wrote a great article about WWE
The game was featured on the awesome experimental game platform, Warp Door
It landed up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Best Free Games Of The Week list.
Our existing youtube friends were amazing! People like RadiCarl rushed home and played the game on the day of it's release.
CinnamonToastKen's let's play amassed more than 67 000 views and directed 244 users to the game's page
In total, more than 50 different youtubers released playthroughways of the game.
Free Game Planet wrote an insightful piece on the it
Thanks to Free Lives and Devolver Digital, the game was played on the main Twitch channel, in the hour leading up to E3. At it's peak this meant that more than 21 000 people were watching Ruan playing WWE. Reactions were as varies as you'd expect from 21 000 different game fans.
South African creative showcase between 10and5 covered the game.
WWE landed up on the front pages of both itch.io and gamejolt
1288 people downloaded the game from itch
813 got it on Gamejolt
25 people chose to pay for the game on itch! To date it's raked in a staggering $77!
All in, the launch of Wrestling With Emotions was like something out of a dream. We're dumbstruck that the game has been downloaded more than 2000 times, and watched by thousands. We landed up being featured on our favourite sites, totally without any effort from our side. We got to see some awesome youtubers return to The Lazerbeam Universe, and others experience it for the very first time. On the flip side, some new ones discovered us through WWE and even started delving back into our older titles.
Rich, Jay and I are insanely grateful for the support people have shown us. While the game understandably weirded-out and confused some, the amazing thing has been to see how many people totally get what we're doing. Silly and absurd as it is, this game resonated with people and that means The World to us. It's left us really inspired to work on the game further, and have plans to release an expanded "Ultimate Edition" later this year. Past that, we're just ultra-stoked to continue on our Lazerbeam adventure together.
Our hugest thanks to every single person who's been a part of this amazing launch, we can't wait to bring your more!
This coupled with more than 1300 downloads via gamejolt mean WWE's landed up on way more computers than we ever thought it would.
We'll be showing off a first build of an updated version subtitled "Romance Rumble Edition" at A MAZE this week. Wish us luck!