Video Game

Fruitbat Revelations

/ Ozhan Sen / 3 Comments

Since our last update we’ve been hard at work on the preparations for 99 Spirits’ release , especially the IndieGoGo pledge rewards. All art assets are ready for printing aside a few that we are waiting for the final versions from TORaIKI. When those arrive, everything will go to print and we’ll start shipping the goods other than those waiting for the physical copy of the game, that is to say the Collectors Edition.

Speaking of the Collectors Edition,  the promised special boxes are now made, and I’ve been painting them. Without the prints on their faces, which will be applied at the last stage,  they don’t look much yet, but we thought some might be interested to see their “making of” photos. So here we go, enjoy the very first look into the 99 spirits Collectors Edition boxes:

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On other news; War of the Human Tanks, our first release that got picked as the 4th best indie strategy game last year, is now featured in the Indie Royale. Alongside some great titles like Waveform, Avadon: The Black Fortress, Zafehouse: Diaries, Derrick the Deathfin and Tidalis. If your collection is missing any of these games, don’t miss this chance to grab them for a nice price.

99 Progress Reports

/ Fruitbat Factory / Leave a comment

This weekend our first crowd funding venture, 99 Spirits IndieGoGo campaign ended with great success. It gathered 252% of the funds we set as our goal and even reached to the stretch goal to release the 99 Spirits Fan Disc.

99 Spirits - Indiegogo Blog Banner

We can’t thank enough to everyone who helped us along the way to making this a reality.

Currently we are working hard to release the 99 Spirits as soon as possible while preparing the pledge rewards for all the contributors.

You can follow our progress on this by checking our forum. We just started a thread there detailing every step of the process. Check it out by following this link.

99 Spirits - screenshot 06OH NO! The fourth wall!

99 Spirits in Dual Audio

/ Jakke Elonen / 2 Comments

The great reception has been great for 99 Spirits on IndieGoGo and there’s much to write home about.

Currently at 134% with 5 days to go, we are striving towards the stretch goal which would allow us to also localize the 99 Spirits Fan Disc released in Japan this winter.

This is a sizable addition, and it will be added to all pledges that include a copy of the game for free!

It’s a shame that this kind of extras seldom make it outside Japan, and we hope we’ll get the opportunity to release the fan disc, which is a visual novel format side story for 99 Spirits.

Big thanks to everyone who’s helped us get this far!

Thank you for helping 99 Spirits reach its goal

And in other happy news:

After considering feedback from the audience, we have decided to add dual audio to the game. You heard right.

We will always keep the original Japanese audio in our releases, but we’re not unsympathetic to those who prefer playing with an English dub either. What’s most important to us is that all players can enjoy the game.

In our release of 99 Spirits players will be able to toggle between Japanese and English audio at will, giving everyone the best of both worlds.

For the English version, we have the pleasure to announce that Amy Ann Burke will be narrating the opening and voicing Hanabusa in combat. She has previously done acting work for the BBC and is currently voicing in the animated webseries “JRPG Parody” (the irony of which we’re not blind to).

We hope this addition will prove useful to many players.

Brewing Spirits

/ Ozhan Sen / Leave a comment

We have been preparing something big for 99 Spirits. You can look forward to an announcement within a week or two. Meanwhile, here’s a new screenshot from a little further into the game:99 Spirits - screenshot 04

We are presently also working on adding a feature some of our players have requested to War of the Human Tanks, and making good progress with that.

In other news, we have added some more distributors to our list of partners; here is the current list of them:

Amasson Amazon
Bandcamp
Desura
GamersGate
Green Man Gaming
Indievania
J-Box
Nyu Media
Shiny Loot

We are still working on getting War of the Human Tanks onto Steam, but we need more help on that front. You can lends us a hand by dropping a YES vote to War of the Human Tanks’ Greenlight entry.

It gives us great joy to see the ongoing, overwhelmingly positive response from people who have tried the game. We are still small profile, so if you like our work please tell your friends about us also.

2012 Reflections

/ Jakke Elonen / Leave a comment

With the year 2012 drawing to a close, we’re looking back at the year that has passed and evaluating what we have accomplished.

Fruitbat Factory came to be in early 2012. The missive we set to ourselves when we started was to bring unique and interesting Japanese games to English-speaking audiences worldwide.

Our first localization – strategy game War of the Human Tanks developed by Yakiniku Banzai, was announced in May and released September 14th 2012. It was met with a by and large positive reception, though it’s obviously not a game for everyone. War of the Human Tanks is still struggling on fiercely in Steam Greenlight.

Our second localization, the Puzzle RPG 99 Spirits by TORaIKI was announced in October, shortly after the game’s release in Japan in August. Just last week we wrote about winning the Eclectic Indie Dev Grant competition with it. 99 Spirits is planned for an early 2013 release.

Following the release of War of the Human Tanks, we have taken advantage of two bundles – Bundle in a Box and IndieFort (which right now is still running) to spread awareness of our work. It’s been great to see new people commenting on the game and taking an interest.

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Now let’s review some stats (everyone loves stats, right?):

War of the Human Tanks and its soundtrack, Sound of the Human Tanks;

available from 8 digital distributors,
over 7600 copies distributed,
made it to top10 sellers on Green Man Gaming, and rank 6 on GamersGate,
29,255 unique visitors on Desura,
21,316 unique visitors on Steam Greenlight.C

And our company Fruitbat Factory;

40,089 video views on YouTube,
25,548 unique visitors visiting our homepages 34,560 times,
5,611 visitors on this blog.

It’s hard to say how they compare, but those are some nice numbers overall. We hope things will only get better from here.

99 Spirits of X-Mas

/ Ozhan Sen / Leave a comment

Good news everyone! Yesterday Bundle in a Box that our first release War of the Human Tanks partook ended with great success and our next release 99 Spirits won the Eclectic Indie Dev Grant.

6322 people who bought Bundle in a Box – Eclectic Delights were given the chance to vote for the game they liked the most amongst the 22 candidates. After two weeks of voting, our 99 Spirits won the Eclectic Indie Dev Grant. We take this as a sign that we are doing something right and can hope for a favorable reception for 99 Spirits once it is released, so it is a tremendous vote of confidence.

Thank you!

To celebrate, we decided to publish the opening sequence of 99 Spirits, which we recently edited to English. This video will show up when you start a new game. It’s very brief and not a trailer, so it won’t show you any gameplay, you have to wait a little more for that. But this is not all! While we still have a couple of months until 99 Spirits‘ release, we have something big planned for next month already, so keep your eyes peeled!

For the duration of the next six days, our War of the Human Tanks is being featured in the GamersGate’s IndieFort Bundle alongside Will Fight for Food, Zafehouse: Diaries and Zombie Shooter 2. Don’t miss this chance to grab all of them at the incredible price of $4 and save $36!

Last but not least, Merry X-Mas everyone! We prettied our sites in the spirit of X-Mas if you noticed, hopefully they’ll be easier and more fun to navigate now. We also have some nice discounts coming for the holiday period, to give you a chance to buy our products at very affordable prices to gift them to your loved ones. We hope you’ll enjoy our Christmas presents, and share in our excitement for the coming year.