Blog – Pewter Games Studios

PAX South 2016

By pewtergamesThe Little AcreOne Comment

People kept referring to PAX South as ‘small’, but I guess it’s relative! We’re buried in there, somewhere under the giant pink unicorn. But let’s take it back to the beginning…

Having to travel so far meant that we were on a tight budget, and were unable to afford the convenience of having our booth furnished for us. To remedy this, we paid a visit to a nearby Walmart Supercentre. On our shopping list, we had 2 tables, a big comfy chair and TV for the Xbox One build, stools and a monitor for the PC version, table cloths, hand sanitizers, and string for hanging banners. We ended up having to go to Best Buy for the monitor however. Grand total came to around $450, which is a pretty good deal! We later sold the TV to a cop for $50 after the show (true story), so around $400 all in all.

With that out of the way, we went straight to the Henry B. Gonzalez convention centre and began setting up our booth!

Some time later…

Matching outfits optional.

PAX began on the Friday, and we had a steady flow of traffic from the start. Seats were never empty, usually filled by the person who had been looking over a shoulder. Once we hit Saturday though, things got really crazy. We brought a bunch of badges (buttons/pins for you US folk), with the intention of only giving them to people who completed the whole demo, thinking most people would play a few minutes tops. Like, we had a bag of them! By early Sunday they were all gone.

It was hard to get a good picture of the booth at its busiest because we couldn’t fit! People ended up sitting on the carpet to watch others play. I would say we should get more chairs in future, but with a 10 x 10 foot booth, there’s not much room for it. Here’s hoping to being able to justify a bigger one in the future!

So, when Brian (AKA Terroriser) arranged a fan meet-up at our booth, things got even crazier.

A queue started to form, and just kept getting longer. Eventually, the enforcers started placing tape on the ground to keep an orderly line which wrapped around several other booths (sorry guys!). After a while the enforcers stopped more people from joining the line.

For us, one of the best highlights of the event was the live-streamed panel from the Twitch stage. We were given a 15 minute slot where we got to talk about the game, what we do, and potatoes.

Things are getting busier and busier as we approach the release day of The Little Acre, so we’re back in the office frantically trying to get everything finished. There’s nothing more motivating than hundreds of people playing a demo and telling you they want more though, so to all those people – THANK YOU!!

5 February 2016

Love4

Update Time!

By pewtergamesGaming, The Little AcreNo Comments

We’re just over half-way through the year, so what better time for us to give you a Pewter Games update?

In our last post, we teased a then up-coming announcement which turned out to be our confirmation that The Little Acre will be coming to Xbox One, in addition to Steam. During GDC in March, Xbox posted our first trailer which gave people around the world a look at our little adventure. Following that, we released our second trailer for E3!

As well as posting our second trailer, Xbox did a wonderful thing and issued double-sided cards at E3 with artwork from The Little Acre on one side, and QR codes to our website on the other:

Since then, we’ve had some other lovely tidbits of news, including the announcement that The Gaming Terroriser was confirmed as the voice of The Little Acre’s Aidan, which we’re really chuffed with!

As well as that, the core development team has been growing! Here’s a picture of us in the wild. But seriously, we’re running out of space in here. Please, send desks.

We recently brought a short demo of The Little Acre to ArcadeCon, and the response was fantastic! If you were one of the many people who played it, thank you so much!

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We’ll be heading to Dublin Comic Con next month, so if you’re planning on going, please stop by and give The Little Acre a whirl! There may be a sticker in it for you. We’re looking forward to meeting everyone!

Until next time!

15 July 2015

Love2

2015 IS A GO

By pewtergamesGaming, The Little AcreOne Comment

Hi everyone!

We thought it would be nice to start 2015 by coming up for air and telling everyone about what we’ve been up to, so let me quickly bring you up to speed. 2014 was great. The first half of it was spent on finishing a fully playable portion of the game and showing as many people as possible, and we did pretty well there. We went to GDC, we got Greenlit on Steam, and we got funded just enough for us to work on this full-time.

The latter half of 2014 was then spent on making the game even better. In the process of doing so, we’ve made a lot of changes. Almost every aspect of the game that we showed to people almost a year ago has now been replaced – artwork, animations, code, writing – even the story has changed a little to suit a change in game-play mechanics (that probably deserves a blog post of its own). The simple reasoning behind this is that we looked at what we had, and knew that we could do better. It probably comes down to experience – this is our first major title (even though it’s relatively little), and we’ve already learned tons.

The Pewter Games team has also expanded from four to six, yay! In case you didn’t know, traditional animation is hard. It’s also time consuming, which is why a full half of the team is devoted to exactly that. Even at that, it’s a lot of work for three people, so if anyone knows a good hand masseuse our animation team would appreciate it. Despite this, it looks beautiful, and we think it’s worth it.

Going back to the plethora of updates we’ve made to the game – we felt we should mention that we plan to update the various screenshots, videos, and all other things Little Acre currently online, such as our Steam Greenlight page, IndieDB, etc, which no longer accurately represent the game. We’ll be timing this with the release of a new video which will demonstrate those changes in a comparative way, and hopefully people will agree that it’s been worth the wait. If you’ve liked us on Facebook, you might have already caught a few glimpses of The Little Acre during one of our livestreams.

We’ve got an exciting announcement to make soon, but until then, have a gif. hope ur not looking at dis on ur phne internet

Lily and Dougal

6 January 2015

Love13