substatica

Hi everyone, This is a very important moment for our small company. Our second game, Of Lies and Rain, is now out of early access and ready for the public. PSVR2: store.playstation.com/product/UP8666… Meta meta.com/experiences/of… Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3141330/Of… A Little Backstory: Castello Inc was founded in March 2021. None of us came from the video game industry. I was creating 3D renderings for advertising and architecture, our coder worked at an industrial refrigeration company while programming PLCs, our sound designer was part of a folk band, and our 3D modeler and narrative designer were both employed in a warehouse. Given this background, you can understand why we struggled to find a publisher or investor who believed in our team when we pitched ou second game "Of Lies and Rain". We were told things like: "Too big for your studio, try something smaller" "It ticks all our risk categories" "You need more people and a huge budget" "You don’t have any experience in story-driven games" and "You’ll need to hire someone to write the story" Two and a half years later, here we are. Of Lies and Rain is a reality. It came at a cost though... We’ve been working without compensation for the past two years. For the game to be successful, it needs to cover our two years of development costs and generate enough revenue to give us time to create another game, a very difficult task. If it doesn't the company will not survive. During the entire early access period, the game sold just over 3,000 copies, not nearly enough to cover even a few months of development. The publishers and investors might have been right after all. But none of that matters now. During the brief seven week early access period, we rolled out one update per week. We addressed every major issue with the game, fixed bugs, and added features requested by our community of players. Of Lies and Rain is now in great shape, still at a 90% positive score on Steam and a 4.5 rating on Meta, with the PSVR2 version out now. Being game developers for the past five years has been the time of our lives. We’re five friends working together every day on something we love, and it’s been incredible. We’re proud of the game we’ve created against all odds, we couldn’t have made a better game than this. If this journey ends here, these memories will stay with us forever and will be amazing to remember "that time when we made games" as we grow older. We want to thank everyone who helped us during development: our playtesters who spent countless hours testing the game, the content creators who helped spread the word, and everyone who purchased the early access version. Truly, thank you to everyone who played our game! Of Lies and Rain is out now. We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we loved making it! Best, Castello Inc Team