Hey everyone,

Today I felt like writing a bit more of an informative post of what we have been up to over the last month or so, where that brought us, and what’s ahead. Even though I could talk all day about what we are doing, it was necessary to have a bit of radio silence in order to make strides in progress. Let’s go over some of the events that transpired over the last month or so and I’ll provide some context with each of these events.

Wednesday, May 20th, 2015 – Partnership with ICO Partners

We believe it is important for the success of our game to create media awareness about what we are making. To that extent, we have formed a partnership with ICO partners who help us with setting up and executing a marketing strategy.

Through this, we realised that Develop: Brighton was a game development conference that we definitely had to attend in order to raise more awareness around Fragments of Him. Luckily, there was an indie showcase that we could sign up for. At this point in time, the media that we had online of Fragments of Him was very dated and not representative of where we are at with the game. New material of Fragments of Him was in development but not quite ready for showing yet.

Fortunately, we have a lot of internal development videos of the current state of development which makes it easy to show where we are at to privy eyes. We figured that one of these videos would do the trick to convince the people in charge at Develop that Fragments of Him was not to be missed in their line-up for the conference

Thursday, June 25, 2015 – Selected for the Indie Showcase Top 10

On this day IGN posted an article titled ’10 indie games to put on your radar in 2015′. This was a publication accompanied by the 10 games that were selected for the Develop: Brighton Indie Showcase. Obviously, we were thrilled until we noticed that the internal development video was included with this announcement. Of course, the announcement of being selected on IGN was awesome but the premature leaking of footage was not what we were expecting. This was a mistake on our part but thanks to our partners at ICO, this was resolved pretty soon.

This was the link to the article on IGN but for some reason it’s no longer available: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/25/10-indie-games-to-put-on-your-radar-in-2015. I’m sure it was just the video that was taken down and not the article. ^^

Wednesday, July 1st, 2015

This day marked the deadline for the internship positions that we had available for the positions of Game Designer and Generalist Game Developer. We count ourselves very fortunate to have received somewhere around 14 applications for these positions. In the weeks that followed we conducted interviews and are now moving forward with 2 talented individuals that we intend to put in the spotlight when they begin in September. Thanks to everyone for submitting your applications and I hope our roads will cross once more in the future.

Monday, July 13th, 2015

This was a big day for us as it marked the biggest announcement of Fragments of Him in nearly a year’s time. This was the moment where we went public with the announcement that we are also releasing Fragments of Him on Xbox One.

The announcement was paired with an announcement trailer, an updated website, new screenshots, and a press release. Together with our partners we think that this went pretty well with articles on Polygon and Kill Screen. A week later, the view counter on the trailer surpassed 15.000 views which is more than we expected.

Tuesday – Thursday, July 14th – July 16th, 2015

Immediately the day after our big announcement, we went to Brighton for the Develop conference to showcase the prologue of Fragments of Him. This segment shows roughly 5 minutes of gameplay where the player gets introduced to the story and mechanics.

 

The most common reactions were, ‘I’ve never played anything like this before’ and ‘we need more games like this’. Those two phrases were said to us dozens of times in the two days we were showing the prologue to the full experience. – http://games.matazone.co.uk/?p=190

The event itself was great with interesting talks (such as Rami’s talk about customer expectations), wonderful industry people, and awesome opportunities to connect with others.

Today, July 23rd, 2015

After the high of all the media attention and loving responses, where are we now? Continued development is of utmost importance to us, and we figured it was wise to delegate the tasks and split responsibilities. Despite this, past events still caused quite an impact on our best guess as to how long we think development will still take. The future may hold more of these unexpected surprises or great ideas for things that we didn’t anticipate ahead of time. This, for us, is the reality of working in a creative industry.

 

The Future, July 23rd – December, 2015

Next month we will travel to Gamescom in Cologne to showcase the prologue of Fragments of Him once more. Compared to last year, we have started planning appointments with journalists and platform holders in advance. Thanks to the support from ICO, the schedule is looking rather packed.

After Gamescom, we will kick-off a new internship period with a few new brilliant minds in September. From thereon forward it will be a matter of working closer towards a release ready experience and explore the future opportunities for Fragments of Him and SassyBot Studio.

If you have any questions about anything whatsoever, send me a message on Twitter to @Tinovdk. Hopefully everyone is up to date on what happened, where we are at, and what we expect is still to come.

🙂