![]() This week is filled with announcements!Dant RamboPosted on Wednesday, February 3, 2016 - 11:01am |
Hey everyone! Although we’ve been pretty proactive about announcing all our upcoming stuff on Twitter and Facebook, I thought it might be a good idea to write everything up in a blog post. There’s just too much going on right now and having it all in one place seems like a good idea. Let’s start with Tharsis. Many of you have been asking us when the “Missions” mode would be coming. A fair question, to be sure, and I’m excited to say that it’s coming to Steam this Friday! There will be five missions at first, with the plan to add more as time goes on. We hope you like it! And then there’s Shutshimi, a game that could not be any more different from Tharsis. It’s been out on PS4, Vita and Steam since August, and now it’s making its way to Wii U! Better yet, it’s arriving there tomorrow (2/4)! If you didn’t know, Shutshimi was developed by an awesome studio called Neon Deity Games. They make really great games (as evidenced by Shutshimi) and we’re honored they let us publish one of them! We have another announcement to make, but unfortunately it will have to wait until tomorrow! I’ll say this about it, though: it’s something people have been asking us about for a long time. Stay tuned!
|
![]() Make a funny image about Tharsis and (maybe) win a physical mission patch!Dant RamboPosted on Thursday, January 21, 2016 - 3:42pm |
Hey folks! The launch of Tharsis has been a really crazy time for us, and I mean that in the best way possible. While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, the people who enjoy it seem to really enjoy it. This enjoyment has led to:
We’d love to talk about all of these things (if only to stroke our own egos), but we’re going to just talk about that last bullet point for now. It’s been amazing to see all of the goofy pictures people have made about Tharsis, and we’d love to see even more of them. Although we could just politely ask for them on Twitter, we thought we’d do something a little more fun for everyone. That’s why we’ve gone ahead and devised a contest, which is maybe going to be the most lax contest ever held. The rules are as follows:
That’s it. That’s all there is to it. A select batch of people will receive a rad patch (which cannot be purchased anywhere), and everyone who enters will have their image shared on our site. There aren’t any guidelines in terms of structure or content. If you want to make it meme-like, you can totally do that. If you’d rather do something different, that’s fine as well. The sky’s the limit! Here are some examples to get you started: For some reason people who watch Tharsis streams think Allison deserves to be cannibalized Good luck! |
![]() Tharsis: Developing a StrategyAlex NeusePosted on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 - 5:11pm |
The unforgiving nature and unpredictability of space, the frailty of human emotion, dwindling resources, and the fragility of a spaceship that has been dealt a death blow by an unfortunate accident; this is what you have to overcome in Tharsis. Your only resources are your wits and a handful of six-sided dice. On the surface, Tharsis might look like space-Yahtzee (which by the way, sounds amazing), but once you get past the knee-jerk assumption that because there're dice involved, Tharsis is just a game of chance, you'll discover deep strategies that will assist you on your mysterious trip to the Red Planet. Since I wasn't directly involved on the development side of Tharsis, I thought I'd share some of the strategies that I've developed as a player, which have helped me to excel at the game. Be warned, every decision you make in Tharsis has massive repercussions, and you often have to be planning several turns ahead. Tharsis is a game about how well you manage resources that are out of your control. When your dice settle, that's what you have to work with, so think carefully before you commit to a plan--if things go south, what options will you have? How you use your resources, and which risks you choose to take, is entirely up to you; developing a solid strategy will ensure your success at the mission. Kind of like real life, really, if you want to get all existential... So, here are five tips utilizing strategies that I've developed which have helped to keep me in the game...
I'm sure you'll develop strategies of your own as well. The above list is just the tip of the iceberg, and are strategies that work for me. So remember, Tharsis is a game about respecting and managing the luck of the dice, not succumbing to it. Once you accept luck, the real strategy begins. I kind of look at Tharsis as a parallel to the pinball-is-a-game-of-chance debate of the early-mid 1900s so wonderfully explored in the Special When Lit documentary. Tharsis, like pinball, is only a game of chance if you're unwilling to learn its strategies. |