Hey, for the first time ever, I can see my art in the big box on the Newgrounds frontpage.
Thanks Tom!
Not sure if many of you will recognize Lucky Tower, but we started out as a simple flash-game on here in 2010:
We made another in 2012:
And now the third part is a fully-fledged title, available on Steam / Epic / Nintendo Switch!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/17...
https://store.epicgames.com/de/p/luck...
Nintendo Switch NOA:
https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/...
Nintendo Switch EUROPE:
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/pro...
Join the community!
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In case you are interested in the full story of how we evolved over the years, I'm going into more detail here:
The story of Lucky Tower and Studio Seufz
In 2009, shortly after finishing school, my buddy Benedikt Hummel aka molkman and I started making a little flash game called Lucky Tower. We both became interns at Studio Film Bilder, where we worked on German children TV (our first jobs). In the evenings and on the weekends, we were allowed to work on the game. Bene already knew a voice actor from the USA called EJ aka dragamex, which he met online via Newgrounds (the place to be). He was unknown, but we realized his voice was perfect for the main protagonist of our game, a brave but clumsy medieval knight. We had read the German saga of the Nibelungenlied in school and the archetype of Siegfried, the golden locked hero knight, was still ingrained in my mind. The game was finished in 2010. It was our first collaboration with Bene coding, me doing graphics, us both doing game design and EJ voicing all characters. It became our most successful game, with around 10 million plays on sites like Newgrounds, Kongregate and ArmorGames. We did not have sponsoring or any kind of marketing, we just uploaded it to Newgrounds and thanks to Tom Fulp and the community there, we got a frontpage spot. I always wanted to pursue animation and games as a profession, but this success was vital for our motivation to keep at it.
After some years of work, we started studying animation/interactive-media at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg which took up most of our time. However, we did manage to make a second entry in the Lucky Tower series in 2012 in our holidays and evenings. This time with sponsorship of ArmorGames, which was helpful to earn some money as poor students that we were. The game was equally successful, although it was an unconventional sequel that changed the genre from a simple Choose-your-own-adventure type game that was the first part, to a more or less full-fledged 2D-action-RPG with an inventory system. After that, the university projects took over completely (you can watch some of them on my profile). We still managed to do another game on the side, Murder in 2014, which was a surprise hit and became our most successful game in terms of popularity. But our secret goal was to become a "real" studio after finishing our studies. This plan of course included a third and ultimate part of Lucky Tower, since we still liked the character and setting very much. The plan also included making an animated series called Fields Of Rape (for which I made a pilot episode, you can watch it here). And I had a little idea about a game with waiting as a core mechanic, called The Longing, as my personal side project.
Things turned out differently, and not everything went as planned, in good and bad ways. We met our friend and producer Stefan Michel in 2014 and together with Bene we founded Studio Seufz in 2016 with the shared goal of making unique games and animations. The first project was my game The Longing, which was supposed to be largely a one-man-show and take a year to complete as I had already started it as my diploma project and had made a lot of concepts and a first prototype.
What actually happened: It took until 2020 to finish The Longing, 3+ years longer than expected. It was a tough time, to finance myself I freelanced and worked for Studio Film Bilder. As a studio, we had client projects which were sometimes quite fun to do, although I'd have preferred to get the game finished. However, the release of The Longing was more than what I could hoped for. What was thought to be a personal project and anti-game became an indie success and was ported to Switch and mobile. This was quite overwhelming and I continued to work on the project for over a year, doing support and answering almost every bug report personally.
Fields Of Rape had finished its festival run and I uploaded the pilot to Youtube (on Film Bilder's channel) and Newgrounds. It garnered some views, but I realized that pursuing this as a true series would be extremely difficult and time-consuming. In contrast to games, you need distributors and funding partners and be part of a rather complex system in order to produce a series in a professional setting. The other possibility would have been to stay independent and produce it slow but steady and just upload it all online, but after a long and exhausting personal project, that future seemed dire. I never abandoned the idea of an animated series, but making games just seems so much easier and more rewarding right now.
We already started planning Lucky Tower 3 before the release of The Longing since that was always supposed to be the big studio project, so we jumped in immediately. We hired our first employees, Josua and Thilo who did the coding while Bene and me focused solely on art, game design and writing. The game was supposed to come out in 2024, but as you can already tell from this post, we missed that mark neatly by circa 2 years. I dare to say it's the most complex project we ever did, taking over 5 years while we followed the principle of "you really should be able to do that in the game" (sometimes called feature creep). I am quite proud of the result, since I really wanted to make a game that could surprise myself. You don't get that from classic linear games as a dev, where playing it yourself can become quite boring over time. That's why we, once again, chose to switch genres and make a roguelite. To me, the genre was lacking a game that focused primarily on humour and had colourful characters with voice acting that transcended the limitations of old-school arcade games. I wanted to make a game that would not feel so much like a game, rather like being part of an interactive comic book but without linear storytelling. You be the judge of our success, but I think we came quite close to this vision.
I might do more posts here in the coming weeks, talking more in-depth about the game mechanics and character designs of Lucky Tower Ultimate.
So long, cheers!
