On Friday, 12th July 2013, Arcade Badgers Limited released Germies! upon the world.
Only a week late! Must be a record for me; though it’s not quite that impressive if you take a look through it’s history.

Back in December 2010, for Ludum Dare 19, I was attempting a big project.
This failed disastrously, but in true Stuckie-style, I would not be beat. In the remaining ten hours of the Jam I literally threw together a little puzzle game. It was horrific, had nasty controls, ear bleedingly painful sounds, and almost no clue as to what to do. However, it had something in it that showed some promise. You can see this abomination over here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/12/20/germies/ and even with Claire and another artist friend throwing new art at it, it still didn’t save it.

So, it was put on the back burner. It was looked at a few times as a possible project, but it wasn’t until January 2013 when we had another serious look at it. We used it as our first ( and till this point only ) One Game A Month submission! You can have a gander at it here: http://www.arcadebadgers.co.uk/projects/1gam/january/ and I’m sure you’ll agree it’s already looking better. This time, the premise of the game was more visible, so we started pulling it apart to it’s core concept and building from there.

Arcade Badgers Limited was officially incorporated on April 30th 2013. It officially began trading on 5th July 2013, and our first game was released on 12th July 2013. Not too bad, eh?

So yes, the new version of Germies! What’s this one got?
It’s got Clay.io integration, so it has a Leaderboard, and 20 Achievements to test your skills with.
It’s still very much an Arcade Puzzle game, with a strong emphasis on Arcade as it’s not easy! Though once you learn the rules, you get the hang of it and can start doing some of the harder Achievements.

Interestingly, our 7 year old daughter loves it. To the point that the tablet is almost dead from her playing it all morning and she won’t give me it back! Her highest score? 4,107. Not too shabby for an Arcade Puzzle game that’s firmly rooted in the old-school ways of eating your money! However, from watching her play it, I can see a few more improvements that we can do to it, so the adventure of Germies! is not over yet!
That, and we’ve got to get it on more platforms, as it’s currently a mobile/desktop HTML5 web game. And we don’t quite have the distribution network for it yet, so the more platforms we can release on, the better footing we will get for future products.