Crashlands 2 News

Oh hey there, youngster!

People say that time moves faster and faster as you age. My last Ballyhoo marked 4 weeks to the Crashlands 2 launch, and I was so excited about how close that was. The blink of an eye! But 4 weeks was still an eternity for the youths, who only rolled their eyes and yelled, "That might as well be next century, old man!" as they vaped off into the sunset.

But now we're only 2 weeks away, which is truly Soon™ no matter how old you are! I think?

As the launch approaches, I've been feeling rather nostalgic about the original Crashlands and how far we've come with Crashlands 2. So this issue of the Ballyhoo is a little journey down memory lane.



[h2]Crashlands 1[/h2]

Back in 2016 my two brothers and I launched the original Crashlands. It was our first game that paid any bills and is still the game we're best known for all these years later. It's been played by literally millions of people, which is both amazing and terrifying. Making Crashlands was a harrowing experience (there's a whole documentary about it), and honestly I'm still amazed we pulled it off!

(If you never played the original, or just want a refresher, someone did a delightfully-narrated 100% playthrough video edited down to a mere 2 hours!)

The success of Crashlands gave us all kinds of cool opportunities. From giving talks at the Game Developers Conference, to getting a tour of the Nintendo of America HQ, to being nominated for GOTY awards alongside juggernauts like Pokemon Go and Clash Royale.

[h2]Crashlands 2[/h2]

We were super proud of what we'd made with the original game, but we were also quite aware that it wasn't the game we wished we could make. We'd only been making games for a couple of years when we started working on Crashlands, and we frankly didn't have the experience to make the game we imagined.

So we spent a few years retooling our studio, skilling up, expanding our team, and learning through launching another game (Levelhead). And then it was time to tackle Crashlands again, this time to make exactly the game we'd always wanted Crashlands to be. It still took a few years of research & development to become possible, and then another few years to finish the thing, but we did it!

You can get a sense of just how far we've come between the original and the sequel from some of the videos we put together over the past year:

- The release date announcement trailer shows off the benefits of changing from a procedural world to a hand-built one.
- Base-building probably has the most dramatic upgrade in Crashlands 2. Walls are tall! And buildings have roofs!
- Combat got the biggest experience upgrade. We made sure there's room for more casual play (my own preference) but the ceiling for just how interesting things can get is now a lot higher!
- Pets got more interesting, too!

[h2]Fin[/h2]

Crashlands 2 is almost here, and the best thing you can do to support the game right now is to wishlist it ahead of time on your favorite platforms to let the stores know that they should be featuring it!

That's it for this Ballyhoo! As always, you can stay up to date with how things are going by listening to our podcast and hanging out in our Discord.

💖,

Adam Coster
Webslinger @Butterscotch Getoffmylawnigans

Crashlands 2 comes out on April 10, which is merely 4 weeks away. I want to take a moment from the million wrap-up tasks we have left to give you an update. The most important update is that we're on track for our release date and don't expect any delays!

[h2] 🧪 Beta Test Wrapped[/h2]

We'd filtered 900 applicants down to 100 testers, and gave them three weeks to play as much as they could. Three weeks isn't very long for a game of this size but our intrepid testers put in an impressive effort, and a surprising number made it all the way to the end!

We got so much great feedback, and we used it to make *tons* of fixes and improvements. Some fun stats from the beta:

• 100 testers
  
• 360 Pets Hatched
  
• 470 Pet Embiggenings
  
• 3,900 Player "Deaths"
  
• 45,600 Consumables Consumed
  
• 86,800 Items Crafted
  
  
• 2,045 Total hours played
  
  • 20 Hour Average Playtime
    
  • 95 Hour Top Playtime (that's 30 hours per week!)
• How far did people get? (Note that these times are biased towards the fastest players)
  • 50% Completed Act 1, taking a median of 14 hours (ranging 8-40 hours)
    
  • 30% Completed Act 2, taking a median of 31 hours (ranging 20-62 hours)
    
  • 20% Completed the game, taking a median of 41 hours (ranging 28-88 hours)
    
• How well did it go on each platform?
  • People beat the game on PC, Steam Deck, Android, and iOS!
    
  • We had a lot of testing time on every platform
    
  • Rumpus worked perfectly to sync people's saves across devices and platforms
    
  • We had a lot of performance issues on mobile at the start of the beta, but by the end the game was playing well on nearly everyone's mobile devices
    

[h2] 🔤 Translation Nearly Complete[/h2]

We're now at the "String Lock" phase of development, which is the fancy gamedev way of saying, "The text (a.k.a. strings) are not allowed to change anymore."

This is a super important milestone for a game, because translation always lags behind the text. Games always have to go into String Lock a fair bit before launch to make sure translators have enough time. And Crashlands 2 has 148,500 words (!) so there's a lot to translate!

[h2] So... what's left?[/h2]

While the game is now "done" except for those last bits of translation, there's still a lot of other stuff to do.

On the game side, most of our time is going into performance boosts, minor bugfixes, and small quality of life improvements. We won't make any major changes because everything in the game interacts with everything else, so each change we make requires a LOT of testing. So that's the other thing we'll be doing until launch: an absolutely bonkers amount of testing!

But game launches require a lot more than just having a complete game. We have to coordinate all kinds of marketing activities, shore up all of our store pages, make plans with business partners, and take care of a billion odds and ends.

[h2] Fin[/h2]

And with that I'll leave you until launch, unless I can squeeze in another Ballyhoo in a couple of weeks. I'm SO EXCITED to get this game into your hands after these looooong 4.5 years of development! As always, you can stay up to date with how things are going by listening to our podcast and hanging out in our Discord.

💖,

Adam Coster
Webslinger @Buticanfeelit Shenaningintheairtonight

Crashlands 2 is a sci-fi game that takes place on an alien planet, where every character except for Flux (the main character) is an alien or a robot. So the names of nearly everything are fully made up and have no direct translations. And pretty much every piece of text in Crashlands is a joke of some kind, usually a pun, which almost never translates easily across languages.

Take that complexity and multiply it by the 150,000 words in Crashlands 2 and, well, translation is a VERY difficult (and expensive) problem!

Given our limited time and budget we could only manage a few languages for the initial release, with the hope that the game does well enough that we can add more later. We chose the languages we thought would be most popular among people interested in Crashlands 2, but since the original Crashlands had so few languages we couldn't base that on past interest. Ultimately, we just had to guess.

As we've gotten closer to launch we've seen more and more people asking whether or not the game would be in their language. Fortunately, our guesses about player interest were mostly good: we were able to say ""Yep 😄"" more often than ""Nope 😔"". The big exception to that was Russian; it was the most-commonly asked for language that we weren't supporting at launch.

Whoops!

So that brings us to the big news: we'll now be supporting Russian at launch!

Our translation team has a LOT of work to do to get it all done before the April 10 release. So it'll be a close thing, but we're confident we can make it happen.

As players of games ourselves, we're big fans of Steam Deck over here at Bscotch. We wanted to make sure that Crashlands 2 played great on it at launch, because we wanted to play it on Steam Deck ourselves!



We made sure that a few people on our QA team have had Steam Decks since they first came out, and have included the platform in our test suites ever since. Our internal testing has included hundreds of hours of testing just on Steam Deck, and we've been continually improving performance of Crashlands 2 so that it plays like a dream.

While Steam Deck has the advantage of being a standardized platform, there's always the possibility that our QA team missed something. So we made sure that our pre-launch beta (just wrapped up this week) included regular players who wanted to give it a go on Steam Deck. That added another 160 hours of testing time to the platform, and all signs are pointing to it running great when we launch.

Once Crashlands 2 goes live on April 10, we hope you have a blast playing it on the go (or on the couch) on your Steam Deck 💖

We finally did it! Crashlands 2 has a release date: April 10 at 10AM PT / 5PM UTC

And that means it's time for some REVEALS, via a shiny new trailer. We've kept stuff super secret during the past, uh, 4.5 years of development, since everything was changing all the time. But NO MORE! Gaze upon our secrets!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

One last thing: we'll be running a closed beta test to catch any final issues shortly before launch. If you want to join our limited pool of beta testers, throw your hat in the ring by filling out this form.

Okay, now off we go to do the ONE TRILLION remaining things to get this game wrapped up!

💖 Gettin' Those Packages Delivered,

The Bscotch Team