Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Day Two: The Hype

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

Oh man...
We never thought it could go this far. It's been only twelve hours since the news was spread on the Internet, and still... everyone's already talking about it. My own mother mailed me about it, can you believe it? That's pretty much impressive and frightening too.

Impressive, because a vast majority of people seems to enjoy what we did. So far, we already received more than two hundred emails and a huge number of comments on each website that relayed the news. We already have propositions for spanish, finnish and russian translations, a dozens of mirrors and a few interviews in sight. Of course, there is also people that seem to dislike what we did and how we did it, without having seen anything yet. That's not really important for us, we loved what we did during these eight months, and we'll release it even if the entire planet is against us =) (or maybe Valve can stop us?)

Then, it's frightening because it gain much more popularity than we thought it would in a really short amount of time. Now we have way too much pressure on our shoulders and would like to clarify things a bit :

• We're a team of three guys that worked on this game during eight months as a past time. No, we're not professionnals at all and no, we're not trying to compete with Valve.
• No, this is not simply a mappack. There's a story, there's new dialogues, there's developer commentaries and there's challenges and advanced maps. Basically, it's a copy of Portal, for those who thought Portal was too short. But you should not be waiting for something as strong as the original Portal. Portal was awesome in a great number of ways, we can't compete with it.
• Yes, we know the song from the trailer isn't free of use, but believe us, we're making absolutely zero money off of this. You won't even see ads on this website. In fact, we're even loosing money since january. On the 38 tracks of the soundtrack, there's only 3 of them that are not free of use.
• We can't really offer more footage for the moment, there's already a lot of things to watch, see and listen. Gameplay footage would be worse, it would ruin the surprise and could even spoil the puzzles.
• I'm trying to reply to every message I receive, but believe me, it's a hard task. I'm an IT employee in the real life, and I can only reply between 7pm and midnight.
• I (Nicolas) know that my english is not perfect, but I try as hard as I can to write correct english. But believe me, it takes time. A lot of time.

For the moment, we're waiting for the fury to cool down a bit. And we'll try to keep this "buzzblog" updated on a regular basis.
See you tomorrow.