Apr 5, 2022

Suzerain - hopppi

Citizens of Sordland!

The fourth month of the year is already upon us, and with that comes the change of season and the beginning of spring!

Our team has made massive developments in all disciplines involved in our unannounced project prototype. We have closed most of the technical challenges and have moved to improve the existing codebase.

Content creation has peaked recently and we have finished a significant amount of the gameplay content we want to display. Now we are splitting our resources in two: improving the quality of what we added and creating the remaining content.

There is a particular push to make the technical flow work which has increased in complexity to what we are used to from Suzerain. Our visual pipelines have seen massive improvements and our locations for the sprint have been completed.

In this pipeline, we are moving forward to polishing what we have and adding some further eye candy.

Audio has finished its major technical challenges and moved on to adding music and sounds to the experience to finalise. In April we will be working on finishing the content of our gameplay mechanic and finalising the rest of the prototype.

We are excited for the future where we will feel confident to share more.

In other news, we are happy to have finalised the mobile port of Suzerain. A big thank you to Özgun Kilit, Daniel Emig and Juan Franco Lagar for all of the final efforts that were put into this.

The entire Suzerain experience functions well on both smartphones and tablets. The playtesting rounds have been fruitful and led us to discover a few issues which we are currently polishing and fixing to ensure a quality experience.

Thanks to our amazing community, we were able to find out about these rare issues sooner rather than later. More news on this soon

Here are some examples of how our mobile build is looking:

After delaying our initial launch, we have a new official launch date for our merch store: the 7th of April.

An email will be sent out to everyone subscribed to the newsletter on the day of the launch. We are excited for you to finally get your hands on these exclusive items.

A reminder of the items that will be available will be:
-Stickers
-Map of Sordland
-Flag of Sordland
-Torpor Games mug
-Suzerain art poster

Join our newsletter if you would like to be notified on the day of the launch.

In media news, we were featured in a video interview by the local initiative supporting Berlin indie developers games:net.

Watch the interview below:

We are really happy to welcome a new team member.

Ioannis Petridis has joined the team as a 3D Artist and will work closely with our other 3D artist Stijn. Ioannis comes from a background of architectural design. Before working at Torpor Games he studied architecture in Thessaloniki, while developing a great interest in design, modelling and animation.

Welcome Ioannis!

Social activities for the month included us donating €250 to the Ukrainian Red Cross, as well planting trees in the National Park Sierra de la Macarena in Colombia via the https://gamesforest.club/blog/torpor-games-is-planting-trees-in-the-national-park-sierra-de-la-macarena-in-colombia/.

We hope you have a good month in April, see you again in a month. Vectern sis da!

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Soundcloud and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

Vectern sis da!

Feb 2, 2022

January Broadcast

Suzerain - hopppi

Citizens of Sordland!

We hope you have all started the year well. Our team was able to enjoy a short winter break and we are now back with new energy.

First things first: One of the projects we have been busy with has been finalised and is ready to be launched. You can read about it here.

On the other hand, work on the unannounced project progressed side by side with the mobile from September until the present, but now that the majority of the work has been completed all of our studio resources are focusing on it at full capacity. Here we have made massive strides in finalizing the art direction, starting the character pipeline, adding animations, spatial audio, narrative design updates as well as other design developments in gameplay. We are currently in a very fast-paced development environment focused on developing a core product.

On other news, we finally have an official launch date for our merch store, the 24th of February. The items available at launch will be:
- Stickers
- Map of Sordland
- Flag of Sordland
- Torpor Games mug
- Suzerain art poster

Join our newsletter if you would like to be notified on the day of the launch.

We would also like to congratulate The 167th Yes Voter for winning the anthem contest. The Dawn March has been chosen to go along the new anthem of Sordland.

Our nation's official linguist Pyry Paavola is currently working on the Sordish translation and musical arrangement for the anthem, which will be shown to the world upon completion in the upcoming weeks.

The overall quality of the submissions is astounding and these anthems deserve special recognition: on 2nd, 3rd and 4th position we have O Sord, The Velchord March and Light of Sordland respectively, as they received the highest amount of votes on Discord, where all of the lyrics have been listed.

Here's a snippet of the winning anthem:

At the end of 2021, Making Games magazine issued an article about Torpor Games, Suzerain and the indie gamedev journey, you can find the article online here.

Finally, on the 16th of February at 17:00 CET, Ata will be talking about the development of Suzerain and running an indie games studio with games:net Berlin Europe, more info here.

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Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

Vectern sis da!

Feb 2, 2022

Suzerain is coming to mobile 2022

Suzerain - hopppi

Citizens of Sordland! Suzerain is coming to mobile, in the first half of 2022. An official release date will be announced in the upcoming weeks.

Our mobile project started in late June 2021 and we have reached completion in January 2022. Lots of effort went into making the game more optimized for the mobile platforms including smartphones and tablets both in performance and user experience. Towards the end of the development we entered a quick iteration process, polishing as much as we could to make the experience feel close to native to the devices as well as fixing dozens of bugs. We are glad to be at the end of the process. Special thanks to Daniel and Juan who focused the most on the mobile project so far.

For this, we are looking for people who can help us playtest. If you are interested, join our Discord and follow the instructions in the News channel.

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

Vectern sis da!

Dec 30, 2021

Patch 1.1.8 Released!

Suzerain - Mr. Nowak

Dear Citizens of Sordland,

We wish you all a happy new year! First of thanks to everyone who submitted those amazing anthems for the contest. The team is very impressed by the selection. In other news we are releasing a minor patch with a few bug fixes and some extra polish to address all the bug reports since September.

[CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT]
[FOR YOUR EYES ONLY - CONTAINS SPOILERS]

Patch 1.1.8 (30/12/2021)

The patch applies to new games.

Bug Fixes and Polishing

Fixed a case in Leaked Scandals where impeachment content wasn't delivered as intended
Fixed some news and codex updates that wouldn't happen in Leaked Scandals scene
Reduced debt tolerance beyond -7 to avoid narrative mismatch where player fully recovered too late
Fıxed wrong response referring to ATO instead of CSP at the Kyrute intervıew
Fixed missing response of Nia Resignation in the single resignations path
Adjusted Nia resignation conditions slightly for better tolerance
Adjusted some summary screen values and made some fixes
Petr no longer introduces you at the Anrica rally after being resigned or dead
Fixed two wrong conditions leading to double responses in the Franc University choice scene
Changed conditions regarding Curtan Leste appeareance in Anrica Rally scene to avoid a rare case
Fixed a wrong news article misquoting Rayne from the first interview
Fixed wrong conditions assuming Petr was gone in the Final Supper scene
Improved Lileas reaction to relevations during her dinner scene
Improved some lore inconsistencies related to Camp Strongarm and Holsord
Acasia is now Arcasia in two scenes
Condition fix for Kibener so he is not mentioned in recruitment article if dead
Slight edit to create distinction for Walker's comment on the secretary spy scandal
Added missing condition for Iosefs comment on bad military equipment during Parade scene
Narbel codex entry typo littleto no no resources was fixed and the entry was improved
Fixed wrong situation description mentioning ATO for Contanan Military Support
Fixed a other few typos in codex, reports and news
Fixed some more typos in scenes

Known issues

Lack of Assembly impeachment content
Country Reports have small typo in Ministry of of Foreign Affairs at the second smaller line below
Queen Beatrice can lose dialogue text colour randomly displaying <=color=>
Hyperlinks randomly break and highlight articles or change codex article text

We are super excited to share news with you in early February on what we have been working on. Take a look at our Discord or Twitter! If you liked Suzerain drop a positive review and spread the word.

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Thank you for all your support. You made our 2021 and we are very hyped to share more about our work in the upcoming year!

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Dec 4, 2021

November Broadcast

Suzerain - hopppi

Citizens of Sordland!

Your President is addressing you today on this special date. It is an honour to celebrate with all of you the first anniversary of the release of Suzerain. Here is a list of highlights of the last 12 months:

December 2020
- Suzerain launches on Steam, GOG and Humble on Dec 4, 2020 and is immediately widely acclaimed by fans and press.
- First reviews come in giving Suzerain a Metacritic score of 81 and is praised by prestigious press outlets such as Vice, Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer and Spiegel.
- Received angel investment, as well government grant to port Suzerain.

January 2021
- End Game Summary screen and customisable Anton are added.
- Publisher initial investment recouped.

February
- Suzerain breaks its previous record and reaches 460+ concurrent players on Steam.
- Largest patch 1.1 released.

March and April
- Suzerain wins Best Expert Game at the German Game Awards.
- Torpor Games runs it's first fanart contest, picking 3 winners: @Pyrde's Sordish language website http://sordish.org/, @Dy's illustration of the 4 Presidents and @IngsocDmnt's Wikipedia page of Sordland.
- Irene Preuss joins the Torpor Games team as Marketing Manager.
- Suzerain participates in the most important festival for narrative games LudoNarraCon.

May
- Suzerain reaches 2,000 reviews on Steam.
- Suzerain launches on the Epic Store.

June
- The Fateful Hour Bundle is launched on Steam, together with The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante and Yes, Your Grace.
- Daniel Emig joins the Torpor Games team as Programmer.

July
- Suzerain wins The People's Choice Award at the Games for Change Awards.
- Juan Franco Lagar joins the Torpor Games team as Programming and QA Intern.
- Held a successful Hearts of Iron IV Community event with the dev team.

August
- Second largest patch to date 1.1.6 is released. Patch 1.1.7 launches shortly after.
- The We Live in a Society Bundle launches on Steam, together with Death and Taxes, Orwell, Beholder, Do Not Feed the Monkeys, Not For Broadcast and Mind Scanners.
- Torpor Games team gets a dedicated office.

September
- Steam Rich Presence is enabled.
- Suzerain launches on the Nintendo Switch and receives immediate praise from the press.
- Tokyo Game Show selects Suzerain for their Indie Exhibit.
- Kamila Shirinova joins the team as Art and Programming Intern.

October
- Stijn Verstraete joins the Torpor Games team as 3D Artist.
- Achievements added to GOG.

November
- Suzerain is nominated in 3 categories in the German Developer Awards (Best Game, Best Design and Best Story), as well as in 2 categories in the GermanDevDays Indie Awards (Best Game and Best Story)
- We reach 3,000 reviews on Steam.

We want to thank everyone who has purchased the game in any platform, left reviews, shared on social media, press and partners. A special shoutout to our mods Kay, Naro, Aysar Siddiqi and PAB, our amazing community, and as well as the whole team at Fellow Traveller. None of this would have been possible without you! Danki!

To celebrate the anniversary our office is holding a contest to look for the lyrics of the new anthem of the state of Sordland. We look forward to recieve your lyrics (in English or Sordish).

Submissions will open next week Friday Dec 10th, on our Discord. We will post rules and details during the upcoming week.

We ran another AMA last week, this time on the r/NintendoSwitch subreddit. You can check it out here.

Finally, we can officially confirm that we've started setting up our merch shop and we hope to have it up in the upcoming weeks. Here are some teasers of what we're working on.

Stay healthy! We'll have some important news to share with you at the beginning of next year.

Check out our Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord and our newsletter to get the latest breaking news for Suzerain.

Vectern sis da!