Awkward 2: The Party Game of Savage Secrets News

We're thrilled to announce that Awkward 2: The Party Game of Savage Secrets has been selected for the Games Lab line-up at Aesthetica Short Film Festival! Aesthetica is a prestigious BAFTA-Qualifying event that takes place in York, England. The Games Lab is a new part of the festival this year, featuring 50 games that show off some of the best innovation and creativity, where bold stories are told differently.

There are a number of other exciting titles that will be shown off alongside Awkward 2, including Desta: The Memories Between from ustwo, and Polygon Treehouse's Mythwrecked. As well as showcasing some of the best and most groundbreaking upcoming games, Aesthetica’s Game Lab will be celebrating game culture, design, and production, enhanced by a number of panels and talks from industry experts.

As a part of the official selection for Aesthetica, Awkward 2 is also eligible for their Best Game Award. We’re honoured to join a line-up of incredible games made by some fantastic talent, and we can’t wait to find out if we’ll be taking home the trophy for Best Game at the Awards Ceremony in November.

This will be the first event where we’re exhibiting Awkward 2 and we’re so excited for its debut! You can come along and play it for yourself at Spark, York between the 8th and the 12th of November.



To find out more, visit the Aesthetica Short Film Festival website here: https://www.asff.co.uk/

- Martijn and the team at Snap Finger Click

As the title suggests, Awkward 2 isn’t the first game in the Awkward series. Awkward 2 is the sequel to our small indie title we released back in 2018. At the time, Snap Finger Click was a tiny studio with just five of us on the development team. Shortly after founding the studio, we made ACT IT OUT! and we wanted to follow it up with another small game which became the original Awkward.

The first Awkward game is about difficult and controversial questions. Starting out with tame but still polarising questions like “Does pineapple belong on pizza?” and “Should ketchup be stored in the fridge?”, eventually the game ramps up the difficulty, asking about topics including difficult moral dilemmas (“If you could only choose one, would you save the life of a 1-year-old or an 18-year-old?”) and your parents’ sex life (“Who has the best sex life, you or your mother?”).

The idea for Awkward spawned from conversations with our friends. Approaching our thirties and some of us and those in our friend circle had been married or in longterm relationships for many years. We discussed missing those early days of dating when you’re learning so much about each other, telling stories and revealing secrets. It’s exciting and fresh, and when you’re with a longterm partner, although you still have fun and love each other very much, many of us longed for that ‘new relationship’ feeling where you find out something surprising about your loved one.

One of our approaches to game design at Snap Finger Click is to take a real-world experience that’s fun and see if there’s a way to turn it into a game. If you can capture that same feeling of fun from something you already know feels great, it’s almost like your very first prototype! As we experimented, we found that posing difficult questions naturally led players to explain why they had chosen certain answers, and in turn would reveal tidbits of information about their lives they’d never revealed before.

The goal with the first Awkward game was to try and spark conversation and debate, getting one of the players to reveal a new fact about themselves, that no matter how well you know the person you’re playing with, you’ll still find out at least one new thing you didn’t know before.

We originally envisioned Awkward as a game for couples, answering questions about each other and their relationship. But as we playtested together, we discovered that playing with friends and family was fun too - actually more fun, because you tend to find out more intimate secrets from your friends than you do from a romantic partner.

We always felt the first Awkward game could’ve been much bigger than it was. Back then, we didn’t have the team size or budget to do it full justice. In Awkward 2, we have a game that’s much bigger and closer to our original vision. There are six different rounds, each round has its own gameplay, there are 3D visuals, and a voiceover. We spent longer perfecting the questions and trying to cut down on the tamer topics from the original game so that everything is even more Awkward.

After the release of the first game we spent a long time reading reviews and other player feedback, in order to make sure this sequel is a significant step forward. We want to keep growing the franchise and we even released a boardgame of Awkward recently after a successful Kickstarter campaign. We can’t wait to share Awkward 2 with the world!

What are you most looking forward to in Awkward 2?

- Martijn and the Snap Finger Click team

🚀 For people that have access to the special Awkward 2 Preview Edition, we've just rolled out a new update: version 1.1.30758!

This is our largest update yet, we've added a brand new round to play with your friends called 'Says Who?'!

In Says Who?, all players get the chance to have their say. In the first half of the round, all players are answering questions in secret with their own personal answers. But it all changes in the second half of the round where players have to guess who gave which answers to the questions.

Will anyone agree with you or do you have any controversial opinions? Find out in this fun new round in Awkward 2!

When you start playing, Says Who? will be the 2nd round in the Preview Edition.

Check your title screen to verify you're playing the latest version, here's what else we've been working on:

⚡ Various tweaks and improvements to the visuals; reworked lighting, improved camera positioning, various UI tweaks.
⚡ Steamdeck support 😍, take the game to your friend's house!
⚡ Increased robustness for late-joining players, as well as players that might have dropped out (e.g. if their phone went to sleep).
⚡ New Twitch chatbot.
⚡ Clarified emoji instructions on desktop browsers.
⚡ Increased detail on the emoji in the Gut Reaction round.
⚡ Fixed a bug where changing the game resolution wasn't always possible.
⚡ Plus, numerous other fixes and improvements. Too many to list 😅.

Special thanks to everyone in our community who has helped testing this new update!

🚀 For people that have access to the special Awkward 2 Preview Edition, we've just rolled out a new update: version 1.1.30297!

Check your title screen to verify you're playing the latest version, here's what has been improved:

⚡ Various tweaks and improvements to the visuals; reworked lighting, improved camera positioning, various UI tweaks.
⚡ Reworked the code that deals with players skipping sequences. This will be much more reliable now.
⚡ The game will now let more late joining players in.
⚡ If players drop out due to networking issues, closing their browser (etc) it will be more reliable to re-join.
⚡ Fix for stuttering Snap Finger Click splash video at boot when game is set to 30fps.
⚡ Twitch chatbot can now mention player names.
⚡ Fixed target framerate being overwritten at boot.
⚡ Additional defences inside the avatar popups if players drop out.
⚡ Plus, numerous other minor fixes and improvements.

🚀 For people that have access to the special Awkward 2 Preview Edition, we've just rolled out a new update: version 1.1.30060!

Check your title screen to verify you're playing the latest version, here's what has been improved:

⚡ Fixed issue where some people were getting the game to boot to a black screen.
⚡ Improved movement of Twitch names when answering in the chat.
⚡ Round order changed to improve first time user experience.
⚡ Updated Quit Menu.
⚡ Plus, numerous other minor fixes and improvements.