WELCOME!

Hey all!

Welcome to the first official blog post on Grandberry's Grandblog! This website has been in the works for a while already, and even though it took a while I’m still really glad we’ve finally get it up and running! Here, we’ll be able to show you what our teams have been working, some fun behind-the-scenes stuff on many of our projects, some interviews with some of the creative minds in the studio—and so much more! Since this post is the first, it’s going to be a rather short one—mostly because I’ve hardly had the time to just sit down and write one post. Next post, however, will have a good handful of stuff regarding Project Branching Paths—specifically some early concept art of some characters and bosses. But for now, I think it’s fair to focus on the website for this one post—why it took so long to create, what’s the purpose of it and what you can expect to see from us on here in the future. Without further ado, let’s get straight into it!

WHAT TOOK SO LONG?

Truth be told, the reason why creating this website took as long as it did was because it was initially an in-house experiment for the team. We wanted to explore HTML/CSS to how it works and if there was anything creative—besides the obvious, of which being making a website—we could do with it. It was a project being manned by two people: me and Zach, our programming director for all of our projects thus far. It unfortunately had to all fall on him eventually, because I was assigned as director for our next project that will consume a lot of time and resources—of which being Starshine.

While a lot of us worked on the game, Zach was still creating the website, reaching out to experts to help him with the work. Then, almost 3 years later when production of Starshine started to wrap up, I was finally able to pick up the responsibility of the website… or so I thought! Zach had pretty much got the website in shape within that time, so there was little left for me to do then to help give second opinions on the work he’s done. I’m really proud of him and how the website came out—I feel like it’s very representative of the company and who we are. Big props to Zach for his hard work—he deserves a lot of credit for holding this project on his back for much longer than he should’ve.

WHAT CAN WE EXPECT?

A lot! I know that’s a pretty short and, quite honestly, lame answer—but it’s the truth! We have a lot of plans for the website in the future. Firstly, this website will be where you can find news and updates straight from us. We’ve been wanting to be more interactive and transparent with our fans, so we felt creating this website would be the best step forward. It’ll be a bit barebones and primitive at first seeing as we don’t have a proper commenting system in place for these blog posts and that will be something we plan on working on once Project Branching Paths leaves Alpha and can secure funding—so please bear with us!

We’ll also be sharing a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff about our projects! We thought it would be really fun to give our fans a taste of what happens during the creation of our games from its initial inception to finalization. Thankfully I’m a maniac and love to keep all of my concept art—maniac because anytime I look back at it I cringe at how awful it is and thankful we have an amazing team of artists who know everything about character, background and UI design… but it’s always fun and a relieving feeling to see where the project started and how it ended it.

We’ll also be sharing some fun DEMOS!! That’s right—we’re bringing small-bite sized projects directly to YOU for the low, low price of FREE!

...With the only caveat being that we ask that you would please let us know how you feel about our projects. We're all working real hard to bring memorable experiences to all of you, and would definitely appreciate feedback from our players.

The point of doing this is to get our fans involved in the testing phases of a game as well as receiving feedback from them about the project—whether if they liked it or not, what they think should be added or removed, enhanced or toned-down. The only people testing our games in the studio are… well, us—and that already felt limiting in terms of feedback. We figured that having more eyes on a project while it is still in its early phases would, therefore, provide a more diverse array of feedback we could use to push our project into a direction our players would be happy with. Even though a lot of us are hard at work with Project Branching Paths, we’re all still so excited to have all of you look at what else we have in store!

Alright, I think that should do it for the first post. Thank you for reading this far! Next post will be a fun one, I promise!

Until then!

- Josh