Yes, I've fallen to the whims of the crowd. I'm sliding like a penguin into the sea of unoriginal ideas. I travel on, in, down into the cavernous waters of Mandatory Post-Launch bugfix.

A greater game developer might say that "a game shouldn't have a small handful of game breaking bugs the day it comes out", but this is a vapid notion. QA is only a fairy tale that is told to make Game Major students and interns at AAA studios sleep well at night. In reality, it's impossible to tell what could or would break the game.

An indie video game is like a feral beast. I have but merely tamed it for your amusement - yet it could break free of its chains and bound once more into the wild at the slightest whim.

An indie game is a field of flowers, and no good garden would be complete without the bees, the butterflies, the insects of all kinds. To use insecticide on an indie game leaves it devoid of the colour and spectacle that a bug provides. You might see a bug where 1000000 wizards spawn because I forgot to remove them when they died. Beautiful. Astounding. A once in a lifetime sight.

Yet, I have just bought a brand new can of proverbial Mortein. I travel on into the penguin filled ocean of Game Developers That Have To Fix A Huge Error As Soon As The Game Comes Out.

• Lag that pushes you into the ground now pushes back up, so you end up on the platform again instead of doing circle on the bottom of the screen

• Made dead players be removed in the Test Chamber when playing with 2 or more people

• Fixed a bug where breaking the bottom left or right corner in a round with CPUs would crash the game

• Made the particles hollow on the APPLE CORE theme

• Discovered that the game can occasionally crash when playing with a large number of CPUs - and hopefully fixed it (but if the game suddenly closes, let me know!)

WIZARD PUNKS!!!'s first ever showcase - Game A Week 2024 at the Sabby Gallery in Melbourne, Australia

To be perfectly honest, it feels weird!

What??!!!?! This game I made in my spare time around Uni classes is out?? on STEAM??

It's pretty cool. I'm chuffed, as some would say.

This game has always been intended as a bit of a learning experiment for me. Originally, I made it for a one week game jam (back in January 2024), and then I would occasionally update it for events every few months. Turns out, a local multiplayer party game is pretty fun to play in person.

I showed it off at a handful of Uni related things, and some local game dev meetups - then I thought, why not just try put it on Steam?

Well, obviously I did. But the plan was always - "Hey, I'm a Uni student, you know what would be some great experience? Doing the whole game development life cycle."

WIZARD PUNKS!!! at Freeplay Parallels 2024 in Melbourne, Australia - I wasn't even here for this one, I was too busy doing a Semester's exchange in Germany!

So I did! Paying the Steam fee, making a page, submitting to events, getting into digital showcases, showing off the demo, Next Fest, becoming a TikTok star - okay, maybe that's an exagerration. But for a budget of $0, the marketing went pretty well! In fact, odds are you're reading this now because you saw some WIZARD PUNKS!!! post on Insta or YouTube that I made.

And then, one last step... release the game! Which I can now offically check off.

Well, I say one last step - but I have a few more ideas to put in updates. Expect some new content and definitely some bug fixes and quality of life features.

Thanks so much for supporting WIZARD PUNKS!!!

It's been a delight to make (though my sleep schedule might disagree) - and I hope you enjoy playing the full game as much as I did making it.

Happy punking!

- StormCat

The original Wizard Punk - made in the first hour of development, and kept in the files until the very final build.

P.S. I updated the demo as well, so here are the change logs:

• Added 3 levels of CPU difficulty

• Greatly improved the AI brains across the game

• You can now also choose the CPU hats