Hank: Drowning On Dry Land News

[h2]Hey hey hey, there's a new pirate on this ship![/h2]

My name is Mateusz and for two months now I've been helping Kuba and Witek with their social media. Who am I exactly, how would I describe working with the My Next Games team and what are our plans for the future?



I have been running my YouTube channel for quite some time now and my content is mainly about Cyberpunk 2077 from CD Projekt RED. Making videos has been my hobby since I remember and I can hardly imagine anything else that gives me the same amount of joy. Besides that I'm also a self-taught Photoshop editor. I learned that skill because I couldn't stand my awful thumbnails on YouTube anymore, haha. But seriously, a couple years ago I had to choose: do I want to become an IT specialist or a graphic designer. I picked the first one and as time runs I think that I could've picked the second option.



But hey, humans learn their whole lives, right? And after a consideration it's not even that bad, because now if I would like to have my own website, thanks to my IT skills from school I can make one by myself, while the rest of my graphic design skills I learned on my own. I consider this as an absolute win!



My other hobby is Video Games. That's why I decided to team-up with Kuba and Witek from My Next Games. The goal was simple - they make fun games and I use my experience to help them with the recognition of their series on the internet. We started very simply - they showed me their games, which by the way I really liked, especially the Hank one, and then I proceeded to think about new content for social media. At first on our Facebook, TikTok, Instagram etc. you could see just usual posts about our games. Nothing special. Then we extended our content to include articles and now we’ve just started with full YouTube videos.



And here we are today. We just released our first video, which you can find on our YouTube channel. It’s a summary of all upcoming Indie Games that were presented at this year’s The Game Awards. We invite you to check it out and to tell us in the comments what you like the most about this video and maybe what you don’t like about it. We’ll be very grateful.

Be with us on this journey and help us make better and better content for you. See you around!

Hey everybody!

Each of us has some fears hidden deep inside. We all try to lock them out and to prevent anyone from using them against us. However, sometimes a single thought is enough to set off an endless spiral of anxiety. The antagonist of our game titled “Hank: Drowning On Dry Land”, is well aware of this. I’m Kuba from MyNextGames and today I’ll talk a bit about Hank’s nemesis, the Unraveler.


A perfectionist, a mastermind, the composer of chaos - yup, all these terms perfectly describe the Unraveler. He’s able to consider even the most unpredictable scenarios just to not let anyone ruin his performance. The Unraveler wants to see the world descending into total chaos by his single push, creating a frightening domino effect.


By the virtue of overrunning Metro City Asylum, he’s willing to negotiate before he starts killing the hostages but on one condition. He will only speak to one person - Hank, his captor. He loathes Hank who thus far has been the only one who managed to put a stop to a plan that's already been set in motion. Ever since that moment, he is obsessed with figuring out how Hank managed to pull such a stunt.


With the power of illusion and trickery the Unraveler tries to get inside his opponents’ heads and subjugate them to his will. He’s using their fears as a weapon against them and proudly watches the show. Will Hank be able to tame the villain, or will it be the Unraveler who emerges victorious from this clash?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2277670/Hank_Straightjacket

If you want to meet the Unraveler and have a chance to talk to him, I suggest you try our short game “Hank: Straightjacket”. You will see his sociopathic nature combined with the arrogance and artistic flair that make this character so unique. You can check this narrative experience on Steam.

We have so much more to show you, but that’s all for today. Be sure to follow us for future news about the universe of Hank. Cya Around
Kuba

So… another Steam Next fest is upon us. Although we are not participating this time, our good friend Matthew is showing his game - Yolk Heroes. I’ve been helping him test it for the last couple of weeks and believe me - it’s something special.

Do yourself a favor and go check out the newly released free demo.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2417850/Yolk_Heroes_A_Long_Tamago/

Hey, everybody! Kuba from My Next Games here.

Ufffff…. It took me longer than I anticipated but I finally got our new game out into the world! It’s called Tales From The Arcade: Starship Murder and it’s an experimental murder mystery roguelite in which the killer changes every time you play. You can now get it for free via Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2541360/Tales_From_The_Arcade_Starship_Murder/

or if you prefer web browser visit Newgrounds:



With this little announcement out of the way, let’s move on to this month’s update. Today I thought I would tell you the story of Starship Murder’s development. I decided to do so not only to show you the process behind a curtain but also as a record of how this thing came to be.

As I mentioned in a previous update, it all started with Hank: Straightjacket - a tiny little adventure game we made at the end of last year. We came out of that side project with high spirit. It was a lot of fun to quickly create something small that everyone can enjoy. As soon as Hank: Straightjacket was released, in our spare time, we started brainstorming ideas for another little game we could make. After a month we took a vote to decide which one we’re gonna pursue.



The vote landed on the picture above. The concept was simple: you click different points of the space station to repair it. After a few more discussions we added in the murder mystery angle. Expecting the people to follow a real time dialog while they keep an eye on the station sounded risky. It could have ended up overwhelming a player. We decided to go with it anyway :P. After all, we were making a tiny free indie game. The goal was to create something unique and learn from the experience.

With all that out of the way it was time for a dummy screenshot. It’s a method I use to better visualize the game to everyone on the team. As my art skills are pretty limited (I’m a programmer) what I usually do is mash tougher whatever I can find on the internet until it resembles what I’m trying to convey :D This is also where we moved away from the idea of the space station in favor of a starship. The journey that is implied with a spacecraft was a natural way of telling the player when the game would end and at the same time it maintained the atmosphere of isolation we were trying to invoke.


Then, finally came the day when we started the development. Initially we set ourselves a two week deadline for finishing the project. We started working and… we failed :(. This is how the game looked at that point.


There were two main problems that we were facing. First, was that the game didn’t feel like you were playing as an AI (It was more like: you're just a human looking at a couple of panels) Second, was that the location window which was de facto the main view of the game was too small and cramped up. Even though we passed the deadline we decided to continue with the development.

With every day passing I started to become more and more angry with myself and the project. It was supposed to be done quickly and now who knows how much time it will take us to solve the problems we encounter. It also didn't help that at this point all of our personal lives suddenly became much less stable (housing situation, costs of living you know the staff). We needed to finish this thing ASAP!


The soundtrack came through on the last day. Witek(Artis) introduced me to his brother - Rafał. He has been making music for years and besides the tracks he released on the internet he also had hundreds of unpublished ones. He sent me this album - Vintage Dust - that's been sitting in his drawer for a while. I unzipped the package, added the tracks to my playlist and launched the game to see if what I’ve received fits the mood. A few moments later I knew we had hit the jackpot.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2573120/Tales_From_The_Arcade_Starship_Murder_Soundtrack/

The game was almost finished. There were still issues of balance and dialogues though. Unfortunately we needed to stop - our lives became too erratic to continue… I hated everything about Starship Murder at that point…


Two months later things started to stabilize again. I don’t like to leave things unfinished so I reached out to Matthew(Writer) to resume our efforts on the game. We sat down and spent another week working on it. He was writing and I was tweaking the overall pacing. As I was going through the game I realized that the break we took refreshed my perspective. This thing wasn’t even close to being that bad as I remembered it to be…

Fast forward to today, I’m actually quite happy with how Starship Murder came out at the end.

Cya Around,

Kuba

P.S Overall, if you sum up all the time we spend on development it would be around 6 weeks.

Hey, everybody! Kuba from My Next Games here.

Not sure how this summer looks in your part of the world but for us here in Poland it’s hot. The temperatures are so high that most of the days everyone is just trying to hide from the sun. Maybe it’s just me spending too much time with our game's time manipulation mechanics but it seems like everything is happening in slow motion. Nevertheless I enjoy this change of pace. Between Digital Dragons and Summer Steam Next Fest, the last few months have been extremely busy. Now I can finally sit down and focus on making Hank: Drowning on Dry Land…


This unfortunately means that, besides solving some coding problems, there is not much to talk about this month. Don't worry, I won’t be boring you with some programming details. Instead I’d like to share with you some glimpses of what we’ve been planning for the upcoming month.



Right now our main focus is Hank. Although working on an ambitious time traveling game like that is fulfilling, it is also very exhausting. Who would have thought that making everything perfectly rewindable would take that much effort ;P What is the most discouraging is the fact that sometimes one day’s progress is so small that you feel like you haven’t moved at all.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2277670/Hank_Straightjacket/

Hank: Straightjacket, a free little game we made a few months back as part of the grand form CRPK, reminded us how refreshing it is to create something playable in two weeks. The game was very short and from the programming point of view it was held tougher with spit and duct tape… Making it was a lot of fun though. The whole experience was so invigorating that we decided that in the future whenever we feel burned out we will repeat this exercise.


In the weeks between Digital Dragos and Steam Next Fest once more we felt exhausted…

And so… we took a break and created this:


It’s called Starship Murder and we’re planning on launching it next month as a free game. If you want to know what it is and how you play it - stay tuned! I will be talking about it more as we get closer to the release.

Cya Around,
Kuba