DECEMBER 2022 BROADCAST

Citizens of Sordland! The last weeks have been really exciting and we feel grateful to close off another fantastic year. Here is an overview of all the updates we have from the past few weeks.

On December 8th, one week ago, we launched Suzerain for Android and iOS! You can watch the official launch trailer here:

We are overwhelmed by the response so far, with great reviews on the app stores, by the press and on social media:

Over 30,000 downloads.
Review score of 4.72 stars on the Google Play Store.
Review score of 4.1 stars on the App Store, #82 in the strategy and #87 in the role-playing rankings.
Suzerain was featured by the iOS AppStore during the weekend.
It was also picked by Pocket Gamer as Game of the Week.

We are currently looking at the bug reports and we are working on a patch that should be available next week. If you encounter any issues during your mobile run, you can report them on our Discord (#game-bug-reports) or through the contact form. Make sure to let us know which device, operating system and OS version you are using.

As we have mentioned previously, this is the first time Torpor Games self-publishes a game. This applies only to the mobile version, so a significant portion of the proceeds will come directly to us directly. For this reason, purchasing the game on mobile will be a great way to support us. Additionally, if you can leave a review so that we can continue moving up in rank in the app stores! Danki!

Get SUZERAIN on ANDROID

GET SUZERAIN ON iOS

During the mobile launch, we also held the State of Torpor Games address, where we revealed some important news and highlights. Here is an overview:

State of Torpor Games 2022 milestone report released on the website detailing monthly highlights of the studio and projects, check it out here.
Announcement of "Project Toras" and "Project Amendment" for the Suzerain product, following high demand from the community for more content. More on this soon.
Suzerain Nintendo Switch Physical partnership announcement with Serenity Forge to bring authentic items into the hands of our fans. We will reveal further details in the coming months.
Suzerain has surpassed 4,000 reviews on Steam, with a 93% Very Positive review score.
We revealed the new Suzerain Universe 1954 Map of the Antacean depicting our expanding universe outside the borders of Sordland.
Announced new Merch Store items of Map of the Antacean 1836 and 1954 maps coming in the following month.

During the livestream, we answered more than twenty questions and communicated thoroughly about our affairs with our most crucial company pillar, our community. Thank you all for following our journey. You can watch the video of the livestream here.

On another topic, we are very proud that The Conformist has received the highest funding amount by medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the Berlin Media funding institution, an outstanding achievement for Torpor Games! This is a huge step towards making The Conformist happen!
A morgna wes core!

To wrap up, here is an update on what the team has been working on. The development has been intensifying across the finish line of 2022 as we advance on several aspects of our products. A significant effort went into ensuring the last release check on our mobile version to alleviate the most critical bugs and analyze the remaining issues to address post-launch to avoid jeopardizing overall stability at launch. We are happy to have deployed an app on iOS and Google devices for the first time in our company's history and with success.

Significant progress has been made on the UI and UX front of Project Amendment, with multiple improvements in how the players experience the game. We have also addressed the sections where overall communication regarding the experience was missing, and have acted to develop new elements to immerse and inform our players. Efforts also went into assessing where we can make the most impact with additions to the game. A significant data structure update has been completed, with data conversions and setup renewals remaining on Articy and Unity. A 3D optimization pass was made to improve the frame rates on lower-end devices. Plenty of advancements were made in the 3D pipelines with asset creation and with new visualization work, increasing the visual quality of the scene.

Project Toras, meanwhile, went through significant iterations in the narrative design and story work. A few massive diagrams were completed to outline narrative design elements for internal and external affairs. We have detailed several lore elements where the detail was missing and have consolidated the story setup and focus. Currently, we are developing our designed new storylines with more nuanced content. Additionally, a new experimental feature for Project Toras has entered the concept and design phase. We are looking to create a prototype of it soon. Multiple new music tracks and sounds were added to the project that we are pleased about. The first few painted art pieces have also been worked on. Overall, we are full steam ahead with Project Toras work and are excited about the steps ahead in 2023.

Finally, we celebrated the 2nd year anniversary of Suzerain on December 4th. For this reason, Suzerain is currently -60% off on Steam for the very first time! Let your friends and family who haven't played the game know. The discount will run until the 21st of this month.

This is it for now! We will be back with the next broadcast at the end of January.

In the meantime, Colonel Soll wishes you all happy holidays, a good end to 2022 and a great start into the new year.

OCTOBER 2022 BROADCAST

Hello, Citizens of Sordland, this week our broadcast has some exciting updates which we are very pleased to share with you.

Firstly, it is with great excitement that we announce the official launch date for the mobile version of Suzerain will be the 8th December. You can watch the mobile trailer below.

Get your small screens ready!

WATCH THE TRAILER HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYhurOhFaR4

We are also very proud to announce this will be the first time Torpor Games self-publishes a game. This applies only to the mobile version of the game. We worked really hard to make this happen, which means that compared to other platforms, a significant portion of the revenue will come directly to us. For this reason, purchasing the game on mobile will be a great way to support us. Danki!

In other news, last week Paradox released Victoria 3, and to celebrate, we released the 1836 version of the extended Suzerain universe map.

Our universe is growing, and the 1954 version of the same map will be released during our anniversary State of Torpor Games live stream Q&A on the 8th of December on Twitch, as part of the Suzerain anniversary celebrations. Save the date.

To move on to another special announcement, we have recently revealed our next project to some of the most dedicated members of our community:

The Conformist is a narrative role-playing game in which the player guides Orwin – a propagandist working for the government of Sordland – in an attempt to survive the harsh political environment after a civil war, and discover his own path in the capital.

https://www.theconformistgame.com/

Here are the first screenshots that we can share with you and we will be sharing more details about the new project soon.

Also, we would like to extend our biggest thanks to everyone who participated in the ARG and solved the suitcase puzzle, as well as sent letters to all the different factions. We have now contacted everyone who got selected so please check your emails or Discord handles. We will come back soon with next steps.

Now to move on to this month's development updates.

The month of October had some environment progress in the vertical slice of The Conformist, with certain locations of the initial game experience reaching a higher standard of visual quality to improve the production case of how the entire game will look closer to completion. Our concepts of the new districts have progressed to the greybox stage in addition to this. Placeholder UI sounds were added to make the interactions smoother. We also fixed a major vertical slice error that was breaking our scene transition.

Internally, we have been working on planning, conceptual development and pre-production on two new projects since June. In September, we took the first steps in narrative design work on this and fully began development in October. We are excited to share that we are beginning feature and content production, but won’t be able to share any further details at this point in time.

Last but not least, we are happy to announce that we have a new team member!

Anett Jenichen was born in Chile and is living in Germany. She is joining the team as a Graphic Design & QA Intern and is currently studying Game Design at the University of Applied Sciences Berlin. Before that she did an apprenticeship as a Graphic Designer and enjoys illustrating and sculpting in her free time. Welcome Anett!

Remember that on the 8th of December we will be celebrating the two year anniversary of Torpor Games with the Suzerain mobile launch and the State of Torpor Games live stream Q&A on Twitch. Save the date!

That’s all for this month, stay tuned for more important updates next month.

SEPTEMBER 2022 BROADCAST

Good day citizens of Sordland. Welcome to the monthly broadcast for September.

As we close off the last of summer, our development of the vertical slice of the new project is kicking off. We have begun writing our first dialogues and reviewing the implementations to improve the narrative flow. This project has many new challenges that we want to address early enough in the vertical slice to prove the executability of production. Our recent camera system experimentation and iterations have paid off in the usability of smaller environments from different angles. This gave us a lot of freedom but also pushed us to increase the visual quality of all perspectives of our vertical slice location.

There has been solid progress on the first few character introductions. Some characters and quests show great potential for exciting expression and choice. Still, there are a lot of steps, like quest logic and game design elements to be implemented and layered on the content in the next two months to realise the entire vertical slice goals. Additionally, we have begun greyboxing a new area. This way, we will be one step closer to displaying the whole unfinished vision of the project versus what we have in the experience we are building now.

Several historical events and some characters had narrative design passes. In October, one of the core narrative pillars that serves as the emotional cornerstone is beginning production.

AUGUST 2022 BROADCAST

Hello fellow citizens, and welcome to the monthly broadcast for August. Let's take a look at what updates we have for you.

August was a critical transition period for our new project, in which we re-targeted our production plans. Most of the design elements reached structural completion in August, except for the iterations of a few features. Currently, we are gearing up to produce the written and other gameplay content.

That being said, we have exciting new developments. The team added lore articles about three key locations, and two new characters have been drawn and added. The art team is focusing on realising essential sections within these locations. We also settled on our first branching quest design!

Our narrative design and content design have progressed very well. As September kicks off, we are getting ready to get writing again. We aim to make a compelling branching narrative that is easy to enter but hard to circumnavigate, just as it usually is with Torpor Games content.

The goal is to produce a Vertical Slice of the experience and test all of our ideas in execution. The VS will represent a small part of the game and, as intended, will be incomplete in many areas. We aim to be technically and conceptually complete for the designed slice of the game in a few months.

We are very excited about the next steps, and thank you for your support!

We are also happy to officially announce that the mobile version will be coming out in a few months to celebrate the original Suzerain launch anniversary. As soon as we have a final date we will share it with all of you!

Want to brush up on your Sordish language skills? One of our superfans, Pyry Paavola has gone above and beyond and added sordish.org’s dictionary file on Github as a public repository, meaning the raw data for the dictionary is available for use and access. Take a look here.

We would also like to thank our beloved SKTheCrusader for another amazing and heart-felt review on YouTube! You can watch it here:

Ata had the great privilege of being part of a very unique panel about foreign policy dissemination through games at the Gamescom congress with the prestigious organizations of Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office) Germany, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Goethe-Institut e.V..

Thank you to Cigdem Uzunoglu from Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur and G amescom for organising the exchange.

With the project “Auswärtigesspiel”, the Federal Foreign Office together with the Digital Games Culture Foundation wants to use the popularity and potential of digital games to convey basic foreign policy knowledge and to make the dilemmas of foreign and security policy decisions understandable.

Another highlight at Gamescom was seeing our friends from Paintbucket Games present their new game, “The Darkest Files ." We have been long-term admirers of their game “Through the Darkest of Times ," a political narrative game about the Nazi resistance in Berlin, and are very excited about this new project.

Finally, there is someone willing to meet you in Downtown Holsord. Head there to receive further instructions. Those who seize the power justly will be honoured with authority. Those who don’t will be regarded as fabricators of the truth.

That's all for this month, we will be back next month with some more exciting updates.

JULY 2022 BROADCAST

Hello dear community,

The month of July brought about some major iterations of our core systems for our next project, and we have concluded a significant portion of the necessary core elements. We are currently working on deepening our key unique features to create a consistent design that encompasses the game while feeding other systems and receiving inputs effectively.

Further developments have led to a significant visual overhaul which has brought us closer to the art direction we set at the beginning of the project. Our artistic team have been doing a great job with realising the vision and we have now seen the first sections of this universe come alive. There is still plenty to do, but the train is on the move and gradually gaining more steam!

We will conclude the remaining design in August and begin building our vertical slice. What this means is directing a total focus on creating the final narrative design for the beginning of the experience.

In addition, the narrative work will be followed by a lot of writing and producing the flow both technically and content-wise. The process of implementing all of our new designs and our narrative design revisions will take several months. Our team believes this is for the betterment of the final product you will experience in the end.

We can't wait to share more about this in the next couple of months.

In this broadcast, we also wanted to bring some clarity to the timeline of our Suzerain mobile launch. Due to some business developments, we had to prolong the initially intended launch date. We wanted to communicate why this happened since our community is one of the most essential elements of Torpor Games.

Initially, we wanted to launch our mobile version in Q1 2022. However, we were inclined to hold the launch due to a significant business proposition. We are still a small company, and this deal was substantial enough for us to hold back until we got a definitive yes or no. This caused us to delay our launch and in the process, led to us not being able to uphold our initial promises about the mobile launch.

The discussions are still ongoing but we have received the green light to be able to release the mobile app. Therefore, we have decided to set the launch date for Q4 2022, regardless of the outcome of the deal.

We are excited for Suzerain to reach new audiences, and our team is excited to let everyone in the community and beyond enjoy the game on an easily accessible platform.

From a technical perspective, the development of the mobile version of Suzerain for smartphones and tablets is fully complete. Below is a gameplay video where you can see some examples of how the gameplay will appear on mobile devices, along with some images of the mobile display.

While the game is ready to be launched on both iOS and Android platforms, we are still preparing our marketing and launch plan so that the mobile version will be able to reach more audiences effectively.

Our marketing team are working on getting the ball rolling so that everyone can easily enjoy the Suzerain experience on smartphones and tablets, wherever you want.

Stay tuned.

Watch this video to see how the mobile version of Suzerain will appear on smartphones and tablets.

We are really happy to see more political games such as "Papers, Please" (one of our inspirations), arrive on the mobile platform. Congrats to Lucas Pope for bringing this masterpiece to the small screen so that we can explore this game in another format.

In other news, we have made some updates on our website that you should check out.

We have added a couple of things, including the Suzerain Universe codex. This will serve as your official central information source for all information that is available in the Suzerain codex and more. You can read about different characters, countries and timelines. Consider it your Suzerain encyclopaedia.

Access the Suzerain Universal Codex here

We are very pleased to announce that the Suzerain Switch Patch 1.1.0 is here! The update includes enabling changing map layers, fixing some minor bugs and typos, fixing display issues and updating the game database.

A lovely highlight of the month was that our whole team was able to connect for the first time in Berlin! We felt that this rare moment was due for a celebration and took the opportunity to get to know each other more outside of the office.

We began floating down the Berlin river with a barbecue lunch, we played an Escape Room and then we went up to the famous Berlin TV tower where we enjoyed 360 degrees of the city and dinner together. It was certainly a day to remember!

Finally, we would like to give a big thank you to u/boukhalistan for creating their incredible Suzerain fan art project which included wikipedia entries of different Suzerain countries and factions.

Take a look at the reddit thread here.

That's all for this month, we will be back with some important news next month.

JUNE 2022 BROADCAST

Citizens of Sordland!

Welcome to the broadcast for June, here is an overview of the most exciting things we have been working on this month.

Our team has been working on a small patch and updating Suzerain on all platforms and stores. We hope to maintain a high-quality experience for existing and new players.

The Suzerain 1.1.9 patch is out on Windows and Mac for you to enjoy. It has some minor content as well!

Our Nintendo Switch version will also have some updates in the future.

MAY 2022 BROADCAST

Citizens of Sordland!

May was a month that went by very quickly on our side of things. Since the prototyping and mobile efforts at the beginning of the year, we rested a bit and are now back with the full team again.

A few weeks ago we attended A MAZE Berlin, an independent games festival in Berlin.

It was very inspiring to see old friends who visited from all over Europe and to explore the current experimental games landscape.

On the development side of things, we have been busy with different evaluations and iteration processes on top of the prototype.

These advances in game development are why we don't feel comfortable sharing details about what we are working on too early. We want to reach a certain quality standard for you all before taking further steps.

One of our key focus points was iterating on the core design elements of the prototype and fulfilling the vision, and reaching market standards and higher quality. Several iterations are happening simultaneously, and some will take longer than others.

We have also undergone a massive narrative design overhaul to craft a holistic, coherent and exciting experience. The keywords have been focus, consolidation and calculated iteration.

Suzerain is a straightforward game with a clear outline, and our aim is to reach the same level of clarity for any future projects.

Compared to where Torpor Games started, we are now attracting the top companies in the industry to the table. There is a lot to do still, but the progress has been excellent, and we can't wait to take you through the journey in more detail.

Until then, keep a close eye on things!

Finally, we love to see the flag of Sordland waving at the Templin Institute Headquarters East.

A morgna her coren!

The flag and other items are available on our merch store.

There will be more news soon on the mobile update and other exciting developments, until then, stay tuned...

Vectern sis da!

APRIL 2022 BROADCAST

Citizens of Sordland!

Welcome to the broadcast for this month.

We got some good news from the development team. Our unannounced project prototype has reached completion! The team in Berlin also had some fun doing some Sordish voice over recordings for environmental dialogues to display the richness of what we are building. It increased the quality of the prototype and was a nice break from the desk for those involved.

Torpor Games successfully established several new pipelines, iterated on them to achieve higher quality, and expanded the studio's vision further. We are now preparing our design documentation and other delivery documents to seek new partners for the future.

Since we are attempting a more ambitious product, we will need established partners to raise enough funds to make more of an impact. After the work-intense months of February, March and April, we will slow down after our deliveries in early May to rest and relax.

In May we will begin transitioning to the production of our vertical slice, in which we are going to establish several new game mechanics and further expand on what we achieved in the prototype.

In other news, we are happy to announce that the mobile version of Suzerain is finished!

For reasons beyond our control we can't share an official launch date yet, but we can confirm that the next release target will be the summer of 2022.

Watch this space for further news on this.

Thank you to everyone who has supported our merch store so far! It has been a big success so far and we are really happy with the initial results.

We love seeing the merch pics from the community, keep them coming.

A reminder that you can purchase Suzerain merchandise on our website.

An exciting reminder that LudoNarraCon (LNC) will be taking place from May 5th-9th. Be sure to tune in to the segment 'Trials of Narrative Gameplay Design' to see Torpor Games founder and Suzerain developer, Ata Sergey Nowak featured on the panel.

The panel will discuss pushing the boundaries in narrative design and finding fun and challenging gameplay in narrative-focused games.

We are looking forward to it.

Finally, we'd like to welcome our new Marketing Manager Clare Goodwin.

Originally from Brisbane, Australia, she studied a Bachelor of Entertainment Industries, majoring in Communication and Music. As a curious thinker, she loves to travel and lived in London before moving to Berlin about three and a half years ago.

Clare is passionate about storytelling and while this is her first role in the gaming industry, Suzerain was a game that intrigued her due to its in-depth pseudo-political nature. Her favourite games as a kid were The Sims, Age of Empires and Crash Bandicoot.

Welcome Clare!

We hope you have a good month in May, until next time.

Vectern sis da!

MARCH 2022 BROADCAST

Citizens of Sordland!

The fourth month of the year is already upon us, and with that comes the change of season and the beginning of spring!

Our team has made massive developments in all disciplines involved in our unannounced project prototype. We have closed most of the technical challenges and have moved to improve the existing codebase.

Content creation has peaked recently and we have finished a significant amount of the gameplay content we want to display. Now we are splitting our resources in two: improving the quality of what we added and creating the remaining content.

There is a particular push to make the technical flow work which has increased in complexity to what we are used to from Suzerain. Our visual pipelines have seen massive improvements and our locations for the sprint have been completed.

In this pipeline, we are moving forward to polishing what we have and adding some further eye candy.

Audio has finished its major technical challenges and moved on to adding music and sounds to the experience to finalise. In April we will be working on finishing the content of our gameplay mechanic and finalising the rest of the prototype.

We are excited for the future where we will feel confident to share more.

In other news, we are happy to have finalised the mobile port of Suzerain. A big thank you to Özgun Kilit, Daniel Emig and Juan Franco Lagar for all of the final efforts that were put into this.

The entire Suzerain experience functions well on both smartphones and tablets. The playtesting rounds have been fruitful and led us to discover a few issues which we are currently polishing and fixing to ensure a quality experience.

Thanks to our amazing community, we were able to find out about these rare issues sooner rather than later. More news on this soon

Here are some examples of how our mobile build is looking:

After delaying our initial launch, we have a new official launch date for our merch store: the 7th of April.

An email will be sent out to everyone subscribed to the newsletter on the day of the launch. We are excited for you to finally get your hands on these exclusive items.

A reminder of the items that will be available will be:
-Stickers
-Map of Sordland
-Flag of Sordland
-Torpor Games mug
-Suzerain art poster

Join our newsletter if you would like to be notified on the day of the launch.

In media news, we were featured in a video interview by the local initiative supporting Berlin indie developers games:net.

Watch the interview below:

We are really happy to welcome a new team member.

Ioannis Petridis has joined the team as a 3D Artist and will work closely with our other 3D artist Stijn. Ioannis comes from a background of architectural design. Before working at Torpor Games he studied architecture in Thessaloniki, while developing a great interest in design, modelling and animation.

Welcome Ioannis!

Social activities for the month included us donating €250 to the Ukrainian Red Cross, as well planting trees in the National Park Sierra de la Macarena in Colombia via the non-profit initiative gamesforest.club.

We hope you have a good month in April, see you again in a month. Vectern sis da!

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

Vectern sis da!

JANUARY 2022 BROADCAST

Citizens of Sordland!

We hope you have all started the year well. Our team was able to enjoy a short winter break and we are now back with new energy.

First things first: One of the projects we have been busy with has been finalised and is ready to be launched:

Suzerain is coming to mobile. An official release date will be announced in the upcoming weeks.

Our mobile project started in late June 2021 and we have reached completion in January 2022. Lots of effort went into making the game more optimized for the mobile platforms including smartphones and tablets both in performance and user experience. Towards the end of the development, we entered a quick iteration process, polishing as much as we could to make the experience feel close to native to the devices as well as fixing dozens of bugs. We are glad to be at the end of the process. Special thanks to Daniel and Juan who focused the most on the mobile project so far.

For this, we are looking for people who can help us playtest. If you are interested, join our Discord and follow the instructions in the news channel to volunteer as a candidate to be a tester.

On the other hand, work on the unannounced project progressed side by side with the mobile from September until the present, but now that the majority of the work has been completed all of our studio resources are focusing on it at full capacity. Here we have made massive strides in finalizing the art direction, starting the character pipeline, adding animations, spatial audio, narrative design updates as well as other design developments in gameplay. We are currently in a very fast-paced development environment focused on developing a core product.

In other news, we finally have an official launch date for our merch store, the 24th of February. The items available at launch will be:
- Stickers
- Map of Sordland
- Flag of Sordland
- Torpor Games mug
- Suzerain art poster

Join our newsletter if you would like to be notified on the day of the launch.

We would also like to congratulate The 167th Yes Voter for winning the anthem contest. The Dawn March has been chosen to go along with the new anthem of Sordland.

Our nation's official linguist Pyry Paavola is currently working on the Sordish translation and musical arrangement for the anthem, which will be shown to the world upon completion in the upcoming weeks.

The overall quality of the submissions is astounding and these anthems deserve special recognition: on 2nd, 3rd and 4th position we have O Sord, The Velchord March and Light of Sordland respectively, as they received the highest amount of votes on Discord, where all of the lyrics have been listed.

Here is a snippet of the winning anthem:

At the end of 2021, Making Games magazine issued an article about Torpor Games, Suzerain and the indie gamedev journey, you can find the article online here.

Finally, on the 16th of February at 17:00 CET, Ata will be talking about the development of Suzerain and running an indie games studio with games:net Berlin Europe, more info here.