The Penguin Journal

We're proud to announce our participation in the Extra Life fundraiser this year! Shands Childrens hospital has a NICU for newborns, like the Egg Penguin. This November we're going to have a 24-hour gaming marathon (spread out across a few days) to raise money for University of Florida's Shands Children's Hospital. ALL proceeds from the fundraiser go DIRECTLY to the hospital! Of course, you don't HAVE to wait until the marathon, if you want to donate to Shands Children's Hospital, you can do it here right now. During the marathon we're going to play card games, board games, computer games, and console games! As indie game developers we'll focus on some of our favorite indies and, of course, we'll also be playing Penguin SLAP! Keep an eye out in November for details on when we're doing the live-steam marathon!

There are currently nine Penguin Personas scheduled to be in the final game. From time to time, we're going to spotlight one and do a write up on how we came up with the idea for it and it's journey from inception to completion! Our first spotlight is the Emperor Penguin! (This is the part where you go to facebook and share out post.) When coming up with the Penguin Personas the initial idea was to use the various species of existing penguins. (Emperor, Rockhopper, Little Blue, Galapagos, Adelie, etc.) In the planning stages, the first drafts of the Emperor penguin were of exaggerated Emperor penguins. But they felt a bit bland and predictable. Everyone expects a guy with a larger-than-life personality to be larger-than-life. ...so we made him tiny. Instead of being an Emperor penguin (the largest species of penguin on earth) we made him a little blue penguin (the smallest.) From first draft to final Something about a bossy one-foot-tall penguin seemed absolutely ridiculous and...

Dr. Strangepenguin or: I Should Not Have Access to Photoshop. We wanted to kickstart in October. Kickstarting in early October means the kickstarter ends early November, which means we get our funds before November ends, which means if we order the shipments immediately people can get the game in time for Christmas or whatever winter holiday they may celebrate. Ho, ho, ho, in time for Christmas! That was the plan, but printing a game is expensive ...and shipping is slow. In order to print the game affordably we need to sell quite a few more copies of the game than originally planned. That's workable, but we'll need to scramble to advertise and get the word out. Then the shipping hit the fan. Card printing companies print in China. China is far away. Shipping from China takes about two weeks. We want to make sure the card print quality is good, so we're printing test decks from several large-scale (Chinese) printing companies. (We even found some American ones! ...that pri...

This weekend we received our first test prints! We ordered two decks. Complete with quick rules cards! Penguin Personas and fish cards! The artwork is getting really close to final! We'll be taking these to board game cafes and to meetups to promote the game! 

So this labor day weekend we printed out a card sheet of our latest art. It's crazy to see how far the game has come! The upper temp art has been replaced with much cleaner final art. (The new prints have some black holdout edges around them) Look at all that detail! Below are some of the Penguin Personas we've been working on. It's been a while since our first test print, so since then I've had to scribble rule changes and updates onto the old cards. I still want to do some color balancing to make the penguins pop off the background more and some of the artwork is still in-progress, but the cards are just about there for the promotional print. We plan on doing a give away for a free copy of the promotional edition of the game on Facebook! If that sounds like something you'd be interested in, like/follow us on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/penguinslapgame/ And you can also subscribe to our email list to get notified when the Kickstarter goes live next month!...

We're getting close to finishing the card art! Here's what some of the card backs look like! In Penguin SLAP! there are 4 different colors of fish cards. Each color does something different! There are multiple draw piles, so having a general idea of what the fish cards will do before you pick them up allows you pick the best fish for your hand! The different colors also gives you a general idea of what your opponents are capable of! Watch out for the Yellow cards!