Scott Christian’s Post

Quick lil LG + Hilltop update: - Lil' Guardsman is on sale for 30% off right now as part of the #SteamSummerSale! It's cool to watch folks who have the game wishlisted pick it up, and it's fascinating to see the dynamics of steam events and sales in real time. Where launch for a triple-A, or even a triple-I game is everything, the success of small to medium sized indie titles like ours seem unfold, and be determined on a much longer time horizon. - Rafa Gallardo and Bruno Ishihira (pictured below!) the art team for Lil' Guardsman, had a blast repping our game at gamescom latam and the #BIGFest. Huge thanks for pounding the pavement for the team gentlemen. Seeing photos and videos of folks playing the game at the event is such a cool thing! Wish I could have been there with you guys. - We're in the thick of working on a prototype for our next thing! It builds on the learnings from LG, but goes in a VERY different, interesting direction. It's fun to be back in the sandbox in the early stages with a project - everything is possible, but early choices made can define the next two years! Excited to share more about this one soon. Happy belated Canada Day, and early fourth of July!

Excited and proud that Lil' Guardsman is at @Gamescom #BIGFest this week. A friend of the studio's sent this photo of our game ready to be enjoyed on the event floor. We are nominated for awards in two categories: Best Narrative & Best Sound, against a bunch of absolutely phenomenal games (https://lnkd.in/gQpCzyRw). Like I've said before, the team has often referred to LG as "the little game that could", and these nominations feel like a milestone - a sign that despite our scale, the game is cutting through the noise and finding its audience! There were so many upsides to working with a remote, global team on the project, and we are reaping one of the rewards this week, as Rafa Gallardo and Bruno Ishihira are based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. They'll be repping Hilltop Studios at the event, so if you're down there and spot two handsome dudes in Hilltop tee-shirts say hi! Do cross your fingers for us with the awards!

We are doing a giveaway of five Steam keys to celebrate the five-month anniversary of Lil' Guardsman's release (https://lnkd.in/gTp6Sfyk). Which has me thinking about the lifecycle of the enduring indie games that I love. There has been some great writing recently about the evergreen nature of Indies by comparison to Triple-A's. Whereas I can think of tons of indie titles made with love, that find their niche that seem to age like wine; I can think of as many 'middle of the pack' triple-A titles that age like milk. I've watched folks continue to find Lil' Guardsman in bursts over the last five months, generally around events and sales, but also connected to the numerous small and medium streamers and content creators. Word of mouth is a powerful thing for a game like ours! Personally, I pick up 'new-to-me' indie games that I fall in love with on the regular, and I'm paying all that much attention to the fact that they are from 15, 10, 5 years ago. My dream for LG is that the ball keeps rolling and people keep discovering it, and keep evangelizing it to their friends as that weird, funny, fantasy, puzzle-y, cartoon game. It's the coolest feeling to watch people shouting out our game with variations on 'OMG you've got to try this hidden gem'!

Sharing this big news for Hilltop, Artiom and myself (check out his post below) Bittersweet is the perfect world: wrapping this version of our partnership after 20 years of friendship is hard. But I’m excited about the amazing things that he’ll do next, and I’m excited about this next chapter for Hilltop and being able to share what we’ve got cooking in the next few months! If you’re not already connected to Artiom, reach out because I’ve watched him to amazing things for teams and companies. Why not yours?

Going fully-voiced with Lil' Guardsman was one of the best bets we made in its production. The writing team (including myself) knows each other from working on theatre and comedy projects here in Toronto, and from the very beginning we knew we had a huge resource in our network of great, funny, local actors. But it WAS a question - the performers we engaged were ACTRA (the actors' union in Canada), and the game's word count was quickly becoming. So full voice acting would not be an insignificant piece of the game's budget. We went back and forth and considered a number of scenarios: initial/key lines only, and then if the player dug deeper it would switch to text only, or 'barks'. Even a non-voiced version, just for consistency. But since we were setting out to create a playable Saturday morning cartoon with Lil' Guardsman, we knew that much of magic in bringing the game to life was in the characters, and more specifically their voices. We ALSO knew going in that comedy is hard in games, and our chances of the humour landing and resonating would go way up if we had funny actors delivering the jokes VS. the player just reading them. Hours of the recording sessions in my home studio with Matt Bernard directing the actors, and me at the computer listening and making sure things sounded good PLUS the hundreds more hours cutting the audio, and then inputting into Yarn and Unity probably took a year off of my life (apologies to my wife for a summer of having to be VERY QUIET during these sessions!). But it was DEFINITELY worth it. It has been so clear from fans, streamers, reviewers, and even the small handful of awards we've been nominated for that this bet paid of big time. As an archive of this process, we chatted with each of the 14 actors after their final sessions, and I'm finally getting around to posting these interviews over at the Hilltop Studios youtube channel. I just posted the Q&A with PHATT al, who brings a number of my favourite characters to life in the game, and there are already a few available to check out. Subscribe to our youtube, as I will be posting a new one every week! https://lnkd.in/g9EwaFgd

Have you checked out the award-winning Lil' Guardsman soundtrack yet? The perfect mix to admit, deny or jail your co-workers or loved ones to! Like everyone who works on indie games, I had the opportunity to wear NUMEROUS hats working on LG (it's even a joke in the credits). Before moving into games, my background was in music, and in a funny way it feels like composing its soundtrack was the smallest thing I did on the production. But it's something I'm very proud of. Check it out wherever you stream your music - it's a really diverse mix that blends medieval/orchestral with synthesizers and beats... I worked hard to encapsulate the game's design principal of '70 percent medieval meets 30 percent retro tech'! Hopefully how much fun I had making this music comes across when you listen! Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gH2VXG9h Apple Music: https://lnkd.in/gHzuiVys