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.

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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