OUR VERY FIRST TURTLE DEVLOG! 🐢
Hello everyone! With this being our first devlog and us still being a very fresh studio, we would like to introduce ourselves real quick and then get into some of the recent things we did and lead into what we're going to do next!
Who are we?
We're Riding Turtles, a Germany based duo consisting of Andre and Albina – partners in life and gamedev, united by our wish to create unique experiences. We've been working on Code: 9 for roughly a year now. The first 6 months were spent on preproduction and the last 6 months on active development. Right now, we're close to getting the vertical slice done on a test case before we can go into full development for the proper cases of our game!
The Page is Live and reaching the first 100+ wishlists!
Our Page has been live for almost two weeks now! It still feels a bit surreal, but it's here. So far it's only been translated into German and English, but we plan to translate it into more languages along the way.
We also reached 100+ Wishlists already! Thank you!!💚
We have very modest goals for wishlists, as neither of us is very versed in marketing etc, and reaching the first milestone we set for ourselves quicker than we expected is very encouraging to us!
CAGGTUS and Feedback
From April 11-13, 2025 we had the chance to attend the CAGGTUS exhibition in Leipzig, where we met many amazing people who shared their thoughts and impressions with us, which were immensely valuable.
- Firstly, the conversations gave us confidence that we were indeed creating something unique and gave us more motivation to keep pushing!
- Some visitors even played the demo case we had for 2-3 hours to attempt or actually solve the case! Which is really incredible, considering the usual setting of a convention, when most stop by for just a few minutes.
- The playtests there also made us realize how much our game needs a proper introduction into the game mechanics and how to "speak" to the Large Language Model in our game to have the deductions verified. The beginning was a bit rough for most, but once they got a hang of it, things went smooth. Our goal will be to make the learning curve much more smooth with a fitting tutorial!
- Additionally, our UI and UX for our main mechanic (writing up your deduction in the terminal of the Klarafon yourself) was not good enough. People overlooked key aspects, which could have guided them a bit, got lost on what to write next, or forgot that the terminal also has the ability to search for archives. For now, we have identified it as our weakest aspect and already started to iterate on it.
- We also found several other smaller bugs, like assets not being examinable or having the wrong name, etc. All of that is also something we're fixing
- We also learned, the hard way, that WIFI just doesn't cut it when there are so many people at the convention. Our LLM inputs did not get through at some point and as such the demo became unplayable.
- Fun fact: Our game was categorized as 18+ by the USK. Which was a bummer for us at first, but turned out to be one of the reasons that pulled in several people to check it out and find out firsthand why we're the only 18+ game on the CAGGTUS. The reason: It was the first time the USK had to assess a LLM integrated game and could not verify themselves how well we actually have it under control before the convention. The concern was amplified by the thematic world our game is set in. We do have it firmly in check, but we understood the decision and were just happy for the opportunity to show our game! The final age rating should not be 18+, but that assessment is still quite a bit away in the future.
Next Steps
There are always a million things to work on, but for now we have set our next tangible goals:
- finish the next set of iterations in time for the "Lange Nacht der Computerspiele" exhibition in Leipzig on the 10. 05. 2025
- implement the feedback we have been given and make improvements
- and lastly: pick out a few play testers to test the new iteration of mechanics! (soon) to stay up-to-date either follow our Steampage here or join our Discord server! We will probably use Steams feature for playtests, but have not completely decided yet.
That's it for now! We plan to make some semiregular updates (monthly or semi-monthly), on here and our Discord Server.
Thanks again to everyone for your support in one way or another!
Your Riding Turtles Team 🐢💚