Happy new run!

Greetings,

Some people are still waiting for their packages from China - may the force be with you!

Due to massive demand, WaterMelon won't wait and has decided to produce another run of their instant hit Mega Drive/Genesis RPG Pier Solar and the Great Architects. It's named ”reprint edition" and here is everything you need to know about it:

*The game is exactly the same as the original versions. Languages included are: English, French and German.
*The box is a original clamshell case similar to those used back in the day. The design is an homage to the "black grid" layout.
*The manual, in English, comes in b/w and is shaped in the pure 16-bit tradition.
*An awesome sticker sheet is included, so you may have the chance to win our contest if you order quickly (please see on our homepage: http://www.piersolar.com/).
*The price is US$45, including shipping and handling to anywhere in the world! You can buy it now. Payment is made with PayPal only. We shall be able to start shipping this ”reprint edition" within next 45 days!

Side note: No disc? Yes, the game won't include the Enhanced Soundtrack Disc but will be compatible with it. Here is the download link to burn your own disc if you want to use it with the game:

Enhanced CD Download topic

Happy new year!

/WaterMelon team

Pier Solar is shipped

Hello friends!

After 6 years in the making, endless improvements and nameless efforts by all members of this project, it finally happened!

It wasn't without much sweat, days, nights and holidays spent. Countless discussions some arguments and for sure absolutely lots of passion that it was possible.

Many thanks to all people involved! And even more thanks to all customers who pre-ordered this game since 2 years ago, putting your faith on our team, I have not enough words to thank you.

Keep tuned on our website (www.piersolar.com) for news on this project. The game has shipped but the story has just begun.

Best regards,
-Tulio Adriano

Did someone say something about a release date?

Well as you may have seen over on our FaceBook page something is indeed stirring!

It seems Pier Solar won't have an "official" release date; instead it'll be left to one of you folk to shout up and spread the joyous news when you receive your copy in the post...

When will shipping actually start? This is still surrounded in mystery but it'll be soon I know that much!

I guess this new entry answers all the emails I keep receiving that ask "When is the release date?"

Ta Ta for Now!
Matt Bennion (Public type advisor person / Web Master) of the WaterMelon team :-)

A one off to get you in the mood

Hi Folks,
It's been some considerable time since I posted anything on the blog! As most of you will know by now the game has reached the Packing stage.

I just wanted to wet your appetite a bit and leak a PCM track that i've had on my computer for a while :-) I'm not even entirely sure this is the final mix... but hey it'll get you in the mood :D

Fonz will slap my wrists later no doubt ;-)



TTFN,
Matt (Public type advisor person / Web Master) of the WaterMelon team :-)

And You Think You've Waited Long for Pier Solar...

Sometimes, we at Watermelon Development get a little knackered on all the praise you guys give us and convince ourselves that we're doing something wholly unique. After all, who else would release a full fledged RPG on long dead hardware? Who else would spend this many years crafting a full fledged retro adventure to deliver unto the masses?

Well, these guys would. And they have caught us with mouths agape.

Newcomer is a PC style RPG, finished after over twenty years of development, and released for the ... drumroll ... Commodore 64.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you people who are actually more bat shit crazy than we are. And that's awesome.

Here's what awaits you after unboxing this massive indie RPG:

- 70-280 gaming hours for the 1st play-through
- 180'000+ words of in-game text
- 180+ character portrait GFX
- 130+ inventory item and gadget GFX
- 100+ cutscene GFX
- 50+ game areas
- 30+ level GFX sets
- Animated Intro and Outro
- Total game size of 2 MB

So, head on over to their website for more information or check out this cool post at Play This Thing.

And to the next person who complains about Pier Solar's development time: I promise I will beat you to death with a copy of this game.

WaterMelon @ Retro Gathering

The day before yesterday was a great day. For the fifth year, Retro Gathering, a Swedish old school video and computer game event, was held. It was the second year I attended it, and the first year I had a table of my own.



That table was pretty much only booked to present Pier Solar to other attenders. I received a few weeks old prototype cartridge from Tulio earlier last week, including the soundtrack disc, which were both playing for eight hours on an old CRT TV with RGB output. Many attenders came to test the game, talk to me about the development and eat watermelon candy. People were very impressed with the graphics, and also the fact that we're making a NEW Mega Drive game and releasing it on cartridge.



I'd like to send some blast processing hails to the following:

Nissling
Gaming Grannar
The Retro Gathering Crew
My brother Zimon
Instinqt
Jan
The guy who pre-ordered the game "three years ago"
Retro.se, my nice table neighbours
The friendly guy who helped me carry my stuff after the event was over
Anyone who feels like he was forgotten

We had no news to bring with this event, but later this month some good ones are coming for you. Stay tuned!

Regards,

/Zebbe of the WaterMelon team

September update

Hello friends of Pier Solar,

We must clarify the unfortunate news about the Japanese version a bit and apologize again for the inconvenience. We could never find anyone to proof-read the Japanese script and our last hopes for it bursted a few weeks ago. For that reason, we had decided to remove the Japanese language from the game for obvious reasons (Japanese readers may understand).

The Japanese packaging version will still contain English. And we added Spanish and French.
Minor notes: The menues are still available in Japanese if choosen. And the packaging remains Japanese style, of course.

If you wanted to play the game in Japanese and cannot stand playing in English, French or Spanish, please contact us and we will try to find a solution for you.

-----------------------

Bug extermination is going greatly. Thanks to all new testers, we are still testing all languages! As we said last time, the main focus is on tuning the difficulty, which means making the game harder! Not "grind-like-crazy-up-to-level-17-to-be-able-to-kill-the-first-boss"-hard, but more like "challenging hard".

And now for the part we really WANT you to read. We will need some hardware testers for the rarer Sega Mega Drive/Genesis hardware revisions. If you have any of the WonderMega, MegaJet, MegaLD and/or Tera Drive revisions and without doubt have time and dedication to test the game, please contact us.

Have a great time, everyone!

/Zebbe, Fonzie and the WaterMelon team

PS. Going to Retro Gathering in Stockholm 2nd-3rd October? Great. You can test Pier Solar then, if you feel unsure about buying it beforehand. See you there! DS.

August update

Hello friends of Pier Solar,

Another great month of lots of progress has passed! Thanks to our last call for testers, a lot of helpful people heeded it and managed to pass through our hard approval demands to join us. More effective, versatile and dedicated than ever, the testers have in just a few weeks found a lot of new bugs and helped refining the game. Our programmers have fixed most bugs reported thus far, and the last focus is to tune the difficulty to make it "just right" (which is a very hard process, since everyone has a different opinion on it).

A tremendous effort of translation input has also been done, and as of now all the other languages are now in the game. Some of our testers are testing them, but we still welcome more applicants for this task (can't ask for more testers enough times!). If you are native to any of the languages featured in Pier Solar (German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Brazilian Portoguese) and want to help out testing and proofreading the in-game texts, please contact Fonzie via PM on the forum.

Also, with the last Japanese copy having been fetched this last month, Pier Solar is now completely SOLD OUT! We are holding some additional copies for warranty purposes. When all pre-ordered copies are shipped and received, these additional copies will be unleashed. More news on this will only come at that time.

Thank you for your continued patience and support!

/Zebbe and the WaterMelon team

July update

Hello all,

We have worked like crazy for the last month. With our focus on tweaking monster and fight statistics and killing bugs, we are confident to say the bugs are all dead, except for the "hidden" ones. We need help in finding them. If you are up to it, please see this link:

http://www.piersolar.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=788

Regards,

/Zebbe and the WaterMelon team

June update

Greetings!

Are you tired of all these updates that says the game is "nearly finished", but not enough to give you a release date? Good, stop reading now.

A few months ago, there was doubt in me that the game would never be finished. Not so now. It is only a question on whether the game will be "near perfect" or "perfect", when it IS released. Testing the fully implented battle system a few days ago, I realize its excitement and clever, innovative features are the last proof to me, as the epic script, beautiful music and state-of-the-art Mega Drive/Genesis graphics have all already wowed me again and again - it's only the last bit of polishing and adjustments left to do. Moving into the next phase of beta testing, we are feeling warm breath of the release in our Quasimodo backs. Powered by more testers and an even more intense working schedule, our state of the mind are feeling the same excitement as during an epic RPG final boss battle!

Also, since you guys have nothing better to do than just lurk at this site waiting, you might as well start writing a poem. Why? Because it is a contest, stupid! See the general section at the board.

Good luck! And remember: one will win, the rest will fail.

/Zebbe and the WaterMelon team

May update

Hello, friends of Pier Solar!

Sorry about the lack of an update last month - we were busy working on the game! In fact, we still are every day, but as it stands now the game is completed and our focus is put on debuging (fixing glitches, which are nearing extinction and calibrating battles/items and levels) beta testing and translation input.

However, we are still in need of Japanese experts for the corresponding translation input and proof-reading. If you, or a friend of yours, know Japanese and wish to help out, please contact us immediately.

Last but not least, the game is under testing on different Sega endorsed hardware such as the JVC X'Eye, to assure 100% compatibility.

For smaller updates, please check out our Twitter account at: http://twitter.com/watermelongames

Until next time!

Regards,

/Zebbe and the WaterMelon team

March update

Heya,

Things are progressing...!

We are now done with the map checking and have moved on to the monster calibrations.

Tulio is scripting the sidequests. In my opinion, a great RPG can lack them, but a fantastic RPG needs them.

A lot of bugs have also been fixed, but don't worry, we'll save some for the final beta testing ;).

Until next time!

/Zebbe and the Water Melon team

February update

Good day,

The beta enrollment is a big success and many talented, excited and helpful people (it seems) have contacted us for the final quality assurance of the game. We have already contacted some of you for some critical tasks, but since there are so many who applied and the fact that the very final beta testing hasn't begun yet, we will contact several more soon. Don't be sad if you haven't been contacted, we are very grateful to everyone who wished to help us with the game, but obviously it is not possible to have everybody who applied as beta testers in the final development phase.

In January, the US version got sold out. The only version left is the Japanese version, which indeed works on your Genesis and PAL Mega Drive. As we've said before, we won't produce more copies of this run, but Pier Solar will be available in the future. In what way or form will be decided when we are done and have released this Mega Drive/Genesis version.

The constant progress with the game is going smoothly. I am almost done with checking the game maps (and Fonzie done with doing the updates), thus they will all be perfect very soon. Lots of other stuff has been made, but let's not get into details.

Until next time!

/Zebbe, WaterMelon team

Beta Test Enrolment Form now Live!

Hi Folks,
It's been a while hasn't it? Well in regards to me writing a post to you all it has!

With great pleasure I'd like to announce our Beta Testing Enrolment Form is now live!

The form will give some of you the opportunity to join in with the final Testing phase of Pier Solar.

Oh but wait, I haven't told you where the form is... well that's for you to hunt down!

Chow for now,

Matteus and the Water Melon team

January 2010 update

Hello,

Hope you had a nice holiday and a great start of the new year :).

People on the forums are starting to beg.. hrmm ASK!.. for updates again, so I have no other choice but to get Tulio's permission to write an update. He gives me access to this blog and here I go. Although we are at the same development state, things have progressed a lot.

Finally, the soundtrack is 100% complete. The Mega-CD soundtrack tunes were composed and mixed a long time ago, but the conversions to FM/PSG (Mega Drive sound) had yet to be done. The last of them (which total to about 50) are now made by Tulio. He has also enhanced some of the older tunes.

Graphics are almost done now too, with the last battle backgrounds drawn and inserted into the game a few days ago. They look fabulous, very detailed and colourful. The demo backgrounds can't hold a candle to them. What's left to do are mostly tweaks and polishing.

What we are doing now is inserting everything into the game that hasn't been inserted yet. It's pretty much only battle stuff and the translations left. All battle code is written since long, we just have to do the parameters, the curve of EXP, enemy statistics (character statistics are done since long) etc. I will do this personally with Fonzie.

My current task is playing through the game, checking through the maps. Bugs are pretty much non-existent, but there are some background priority issues here and there that requires me to play the game to see them. After that, it's the battle parameters and some testing, and a final look at the script. There are also some other minor things left, but it isn't much, we are really getting there.

So to the million dollar question... when are we done? Sorry to say it, we don't know. We are still talking about months. But rest assured that we are putting many hours every day to make sure the game is out as we want it and you expect it ASAP. Apart from Christmas, there has been no rest days since long before the pre-orders began. For me, a week of vacation is now ahead. A week of no work, but a bloody lot more of Pier Solar!

Take care people, and play the English translation of Barver Battle Saga while you are waiting (http://www.romhacking.net/trans/1467) :).

/Zebbe, Water Melon team