Cutscenes, Playtesting, and Big News!

It’s been a while since our last update, and we’re thrilled to share some major milestones, exciting progress, and a big announcement about Theropods! Let’s dive in.

We Have a Publisher!

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve partnered with Dionous Games as our publisher! You might know them for their work on Watch Over Christmas, and we couldn’t be happier to have their support.

When we started this journey, we funded Theropods through your amazing Kickstarter support and our personal savings. Thanks to Dionous, we can now work on the game full-time.

This means the project has clear milestones and (gasp!) a rough deadline in sight. While we’re not sharing the release date just yet (but it's most likely within 2025), this partnership brings us closer than ever to delivering the game we’ve dreamed of to all of you.

Cutscenes: Storytelling Without Words

Since our last update, we’ve storyboarded every single cutscene for the game and started bringing them to life. It’s been a challenging but fun process.

Cutscenes play a critical role in our game, especially because Theropods relies entirely on non-verbal storytelling. Without dialogue, we had to tackle practical problems like:

• How do the Spaceman and Amazon communicate if they don’t speak the same language?

• How can we ensure players understand what’s being communicated through visual, emotive language?

• How do we deliver necessary expositional information important to understanding the stakes of the story?

Despite these challenges, we believe the cutscenes have added empathy, heart, and depth to our characters. They elevate the story in ways we’re really proud of, and we can’t wait for you to experience them.

Take a peek at our creative process! Here are some snapshots of our rough storyboards, from notebook sketches to Photoshop compositions.

Playtesting & Refining

We’ve also started playtesting! We’ve been sending the game to a select group of testers, recording their playthroughs, and analysing their experiences. This has been invaluable for adjusting puzzle hints and fine-tuning the difficulty.

As game designers, we are terrible playtesters of our own games, since we already know the solution to the puzzles we pose. Therefore, when we playtest ourselves, we tend to go straight for the correct solution of the puzzle, go through the motions and when we solve it, think the job is done.

STORYTIME!

Years ago, I (Kostas) worked on a beat-em-up game called Armed Prophet.

I playtested the game myself like crazy and decided that at times, the game was too easy. As I breezed through enemies and bosses, I nudged our programmer to have 2 game difficulties, easy and hard. Reduce the life bar, give players healing packs sparingly, etc.

When the game was released, I watched people playing and, to my surprise, noticed the game was insanely difficult for them, even on easy mode. They kept dying constantly!

That’s when it hit me: of course I thought the game was easy, I spent tons of hours on it! I was an expert on my own game. Poor players just got their hands on it. Being challenging was one thing, being stupidly difficult was another. It may seem an obvious lesson to you reading this now, but for me, it clearly wasn’t until I saw it happening.

THE OLDER BROTHER

Tim Schafer, the legendary game dev behind Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, talks about helping players solve a puzzle, you as a developer need to have the role of an