Hello world!

You might have played a small indie title by the name of Totemori this year. 

It's a physics based arena game in which boulders fall from the sky and you compete with other to build the highest towers out of them. And by compete I mean you break or steal their stuff as much as you can. 

It was my first release on Steam (and also here on itch.io), my first time to work on a game with a team. It was a lot of fun to make.  We gave away the game for free (and I mean really free, no monetization to speak of), so it's kinda hard to gauge it's commercial success. Based on player feedback we did good and that was enough.

So it looks like it's gonna have a sequel.  And this time, I'm doing it using all the sweet cutting edge technology the 90' has to offer!

Why the heck would you re-develop a game in 2D that you have already built in 3D you might ask? Basically for the heck of it, it kinda started out as a joke.

By far the most common criticism we got for the original Totemori, was the lack of online multiplayer. It seems a pretty obvious feature that would benefit the game and people were puzzled why we were leaving it out. There are  a number of reasons for that.

• Writing netcode for rapid gameplay in a physics based game is really hard.
• Especially if you have no idea what you are doing because your are a noob.
• Servers would cost money.
• But the game doesn't make any because it's free.

From the reasons above, the first two are the ones really crash the party. So I kept thinking how to solve this problem, and it dawned on me, that if we decided from the beginning to make an online multiplayer game, I would have done a lot of things differently. Would have made the game a lot more streamlined, would not use physics as the main driver of interactions, etc. If the problem is too hard for me to solve, I guess I could just make the problem simpler.

So I began to brush up on my pixel art skillz and bashed together a prototype to see if the game's concept would work in 2D.

And it does. So here we come.  :D