The Response to E.V.O. and Progress Updates

It’s been a little over a week since we released our translation patch for E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution out into the world, and response from you guys has been nothing short of wonderful. When you spend a lot of time with a project you tend to start having doubts that anyone will play it. We were expecting maybe a couple hundred people to take an interest at the most, but our expectations have been exceeded by a fair amount. Before getting into that though, let’s get a few news items from us out of the way.

First up, we’ve just updated the E.V.O. manual to the official release version. The pages have been cleaned up significantly and we’ve even rearranged the timeline into a more readable format. I don’t think anyone plans on doing it in particular, but it might be possible to print it out and make a nice physical version out of it. You never know. The new manual is now available on the E.V.O. project page.

Also, we’ve been making some very good progress with our work on our other projects. Rusty in particular has received a lot of attention. The text from within the game has been mapped out, dumped, and now has a full first draft translation. We’ve also begun work on some of the font/assembly hacking required to get the text to show up in the game properly, but that’s still very early stages. We’ve also got the ground work in progress for the manual. Not a bad bit of progress.

That’s it for news, so now…

The Response to E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution

Let’s start this section off by saying, you guys have been having a lot of fun with the game, and that’s great for us to see. It’s been a long time working mostly in the dark without any kind of real input on what we’ve been working on. It’s normal in the process in creating this sort of thing, but that doesn’t make it any easier to get through sometimes. At least it was fun!

We’ve been keeping track of people talking about the game since release, and there have been a lot of different articles and forum posts written concerning the release. From smaller sites like Retro Gaming Magazine and NicheGamer, to larger sites like Kotaku, and even a small mention in AnimeNewsNetwork’s This Week in Gaming, E.V.O. has certainly been making the rounds. Hell, there have even been a number of non-English sites reporting on it, such as JRK’s RPGs (Polish), OtakuFreaks (Spanish), and in MO5’s Le Mag (French). There have also been some more in-depth write ups about the game itself posted on fan blogs as well, like this one from Mattozoic.

In the social sphere, we’ve seen a few big mentions on Twitter from @ClydeMandelin, a translator in the industry as well as the founder of Legends of Localization, @tobyfox, developer of Undertale, and a bunch of other users who all seemed pretty positive about the release in general. There was also a decently big post on tumblr from A Bowl of Lentils with over 150 notes. Our trailer on YouTube wasn’t spared from this attention either, and with a little help from the article on Kotaku it has just about crossed the 9,000 view threshold as of this post, which is pretty impressive.

We’ve also had a number of people uploading gameplay footage and streaming themselves playing the game already. There is footage up from one of our beta testers, Highwang, who made a supercut of his first stream to highlight some of the fun that he had while testing. There was also a New Years Eve blind race of the game by authorblues and his gang of friends.

All in all, a great release with only a few real bugs keeping people from playing the game. Thanks so much to everyone who reported problems to us so we could iron them out and get things mostly fixed. There might be a version 1.1 on the horizon, but we’re going to wait a little bit to gather more information and make fixes before releasing that. We’re also going to be creating/testing a better patching system that will make it so it won’t matter which version of the FDI/HDI files you have, which was a problem people were having.

Thanks again, and we’ll try to keep you updated with our progress on our other projects!