FEBRUARY 2023 BROADCAST

Citizens of Sordland, welcome to the February broadcast covering the latest developments from the Torpor Games team and some teases about the future. We will start with a more serious subject, though.

After the tragic earthquake incident in Turkey and Syria, Torpor Games donated to help the rescue efforts. We shared donation links in our socials to drive further support to the earthquake-struck regions.

If you want to support the survivors as well, here are some trusted sources to donate to:

Thank you for your solidarity and empathy.

In February, Suzerain got viral in Japan, which led to a collection of tweets reaching 1.4 million+ impressions, coverage at a top digital news site, and now several let's play streams and videos. We are super happy and welcome the new community members! いらっしゃいませ

Coincidentally, our merch store sticker sheet includes a Japanese version of the company logo. You can check out the merch item here.

A player was spotted on social media with a feline cabinet advisor called Tommy. We are happy that the animal kingdom is also intrigued by the politics of Sordland.

February was very focused on increasing the development pace of Project Amendment and Toras. The development team has made substantial progress in the art department, completing several core asset tasks. Most of the base UI and UX work has reached the final stage, with only a handful of core tasks remaining. A technical sprint for highlighting, selection, and 3D animations was concluded successfully.

There were a lot of narrative design meetings and developments, with several new elements established to improve the experience of both Amendment and Toras. Audio work also has seen solid progress and is on track with the overall production requirements of both projects. A significant scene and camera blocker were removed after extensive design discussions on how to find the best implementation.

Project Toras reached the prototype stage, slowly reflecting content production in the internal test builds. We are happy with the early results, even though most of the added content is at the draft stage. Next up is the experimental work regarding a new feature. The team will create a paper prototype first before attempting a technical test. The team also started improving debugging, updating the data structure for a feature and working on the game flow.

Two of our team members got accepted to a game dev camp in Brandenburg in March. Here are the selected devs who are going. One of our freelancers will be coming from Thessaloniki, Greece, to attend the program. We will give you an update on how it went next time!

Torpor Games has a specially close relationship with the community, and the company's strategy is often informed through the feedback and comments of the player base. Therefore, we wanted to engage with the community again to understand where players stand on specific subjects. As developers, we will always make the decisions we are comfortable with, given the resources and our creative vision.

Still, our choices are always so much better with the input of the community included. This balanced collaboration between developer independence and community feedback is something special we want to continue building and fostering.

Therefore, we have prepared two surveys for you to fill out.

Content Interest Survey

Localization Interest Survey

Thank you, as always, for your constant dedication and interest in our journey. Without you, this universe wouldn't be growing. Each time we see your passion, it fuels our drive to keep pushing the quality of what we can achieve to give you extraordinary game experiences.

We'll be waiting for you in the next broadcast in early April.

Vectern sis da!

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

JANUARY 2023 BROADCAST

Citizens of Sordland! We have started the new year very strong and we hope that you have too. These are the latest news from the Torpor team:

It's been just over 6 weeks since we launched Suzerain on Android and iOS and we couldn't be more proud of how the results are looking with currently over 220,000 installs on both platforms combined.

4,29/5* with 1,690 reviews on Google Play
4,3/5* with 551 reviews on the App Store

Get SUZERAIN on ANDROID

GET SUZERAIN ON iOS

We have also just released the 1.0.3 patch for mobile, which adds achievements, location-based pricing displayed before billing section, and fixed some bugs such as an issue with the close button for the newspaper tab or adding a missing Bergia Special Zone Presidential decree, among other things.

Aside from the mobile launch, we have been working hard at progressing on Project Amendment and Project Toras for Suzerain, the two secret projects we revealed during the State of Torpor Games Livestream. Production has been in full swing and new content is being delivered weekly across several disciplines. We recently concluded our first internal early builds and looked forward to the next ones.

We have analyzed and identified where to develop content in the last months. Currently we are moving forward to address several issues we have always wanted to address, such as missing context, story, and revisions to existing content in Suzerain. There have also been some lore revisions as some of what exists in Suzerain feels inconsistent with the initial design intentions of our worldbuilding.

Our new art pipelines have delivered significant assets to visualize and make our game experience more beautiful. We are looking at innovative ways to increase the impact of the setting and story on the player. More work has gone into the existing assets with re-models and completely new additions. Our goal is to significantly increase the visual quality.

New audio work, such as music and sounds, continues to be created. New dynamic music systems and a new start-up music sequence are being experimented on. We will expand more on this in the upcoming months.

We are also proud that the announcement of The Conformist was recently picked by renowned press such as Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

On some other great news, we have surpassed 6.5k Presidents on the r/suzerain subreddit. Come join us.

Last month we revealed the 1954 extended map of the Antacean. You can now purchase it on our merch store, as well as the 1836 map which was revealed a few months ago. Note that these map prints are larger in size than the original Sordland map. Use the code ANTACEAN at checkout for a 10% discount until February 10th. This code is valid for all items in the merch store.

Finally, with Valentine's Day around the corner, we wanted to make sure you all had a way to let your favourite humans know how much you care, which is why we have also added these postcards to our merch store.
With love, your Torpor Games team.