Why a Break?

The team here at BYG is passionate about making games that are fun, challenging, and unique. A summer break lets everyone recharge, come back with fresh ideas, and tackle the rest of the year with renewed energy.

What Does This Mean for You?

• Support: While our official support channels will be monitored less frequently, we’ll still do our best to respond to urgent issues.
• Social Media: We’ll likely be a bit quieter than usual – talk soon!
• Development: Don’t worry, work on Rift of the NecroDancer, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Phantom Brigade, and our other projects will resume as soon as we’re back. We can’t wait to share more updates with you!

Thank You!

To learn more about our benefits like our summer break, check out our benefits page, and this interview with our CEO, Kimberly Voll, who talks about 4-day work weeks in BC.

We appreciate your understanding and continued support. Here’s to a fantastic summer for everyone! We’ll see you on the other side, refreshed and ready to dance to the beat of game development once more.

The post Brace Yourself Games is Taking a Summer Break! ☀️ appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

We’re deeply invested in Danil’s success as a game developer and are excited to see him take full ownership of Godless. To that end, we’ve agreed that he will not be responsible for any recoupment moving forward, allowing him to fully benefit from his hard work.

This transition enables us to focus on our internal projects while ensuring a seamless handover of Godless. We remain dedicated to supporting Godless through to its launch as advisors and are excited to see what Danil achieves in the future!

Brace Yourself Games is actively developing Rift of the NecroDancer, slated for release this year, and providing ongoing updates for Phantom Brigade.

You can follow Danil and Godless at the following links below.

• Discord
• YouTube

The post An Update on Brace Yourself Publishing and Godless appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

I want to begin this final post of the year by acknowledging that it’s been a tumultuous year for many in the games industry, ourselves included. While 2023 has brought us some of the hardest times we’ve had to face as a studio, we’ve learned a lot in the process, and we hope to take our learnings and our wins into 2024 with acuity. We couldn’t be more grateful for your support throughout everything!

Our team is officially on break for the holiday season, but before we sign off, we wanted to look back at some of this year’s highlights.

We released 4 games!

Yeah, four whole games! After many years in early access, Industries of Titan and Phantom Brigade finally launched in 1.0 at the beginning of the year. On our publishing side, we had the pleasure of working with Shattered Journal Games and Rocket Rat Games to announce and launch two wonderful roguelike titles: Super Raft Boat Together and Cobalt Core.

P.S. All these titles (and more from our repertoire) are currently on sale in Steam’s Winter Sale 2023!

We teamed up with Klei for Rift of the NecroDancer.

We were super stoked to bring on our good friends from Klei as a publisher for Rift of the NecroDancer. Klei originally published Crypt of the NecroDancer, so we couldn’t be happier about getting to work with them again for a new NecroDancer title. Thanks Klei! Love ya.

We met a lot of cool fans at PAX East and PAX West.

We got to show all of our titles at PAX East and/or PAX West this year! One of my highlights was running a contest at PAX West to see how many people could get an S or SS on the Rift demo’s hardest track: RAVEVENGE. Across the whole event, only 2 or 3 people managed to do it and win themselves a signed Danny B vinyl. What can we say? We like making difficult games!

We released an EP for Rift of the NecroDancer.

In tandem with PAX West and the new demo we showed at the event, we released the Rift of the NecroDancer 2023 EP with songs from each of the AMAZINGLY talented artists collaborating on the game’s soundtrack. Danny Baranowsky, Family Jules, Alex Moukala, Josie Brechner, Sam Webster, Nick Nausbaum, and other additional artists are lending their talents to our game. We can’t wait to share the rest of the soundtrack with you all in 2024.

You can add the songs to your holiday playlists on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube for a little nightmare before Christmas.

Crypt of the NecroDancer did some awesome collabs with Among Us and Pinball FX!

Finally, we had the honour of collaborating with Among Us, and Pinball FX this year for some fun NecroDancer partnerships. Seeing the Pinball FX team bring the Crypt to life in their virtual pinball worlds was so surreal, and seeing Cadence, Freddie, Nocturna, and dancing skellies completing their little bean tasks (or hunting down other beans in The Fungle) has been very special to us. We still can’t believe that we got to do these collabs this year. Here’s to more cool collaborations in the future!

And that concludes 2023. Thank you for everything, and we’ll see you in the new year!

Maddie & the Brace Yourself Games team

The post That’s a Wrap on 2023! appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

These designs are made so that you cut out the black sections, and shave the grey parts. We tested some of them out for you already to show you what some of the designs look like (see above). If you use one of these stencils, we’d love to see your results! Tag us at @BYG_Vancouver on Twitter or @braceyourselfgames on Instagram/TikTok.

You can download all the stencils here.

The post Brace Yourself Games Pumpkin Carving Stencils appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

At BYG, we aren’t looking to publish hundreds of games — we want to work with a small handful of games to which we give our full attention and care. It’s important to us that we only publish games that we love and believe in, with teams that we’re very proud to work with.

The types of games we’re looking for are:

• Hooky and unique in some way
• Replayable and deep
• In a genre that has a reasonably sized player base (we are not looking for hyper-niche games)
• Just plain fun!

If you’re an indie dev looking for a publisher, we’d love to here more about your game!

You can submit your game here.

The post Announcing Brace Yourself Publishing appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

Baseline

We had a pretty even number of responses from fans across our games. Among the responders, 43% are fans of Crypt of the NecroDancer/Cadence of Hyrule, 41% are fans of Industries of Titan, 41% are fans of Phantom Brigade, and 3% are fans of BYG-TV and Clark Tank. This makes us pretty confident that we’ll be able to make good adjustments for each part of our Discord! We’ll be covering feedback on @-mentions, moderation, channel organization, community events, and emotes/stickers. So let’s dive in.

Mentions

Regarding @-mentions, 78% of users say that the current amount of pings are good. Surprisingly though, 11% actually want to be pinged more. Because of these numbers, we’ll try to ping a little more here and there, but will probably keep it around the same.

For the 6% of you who say there are too many pings, and 5% who say that even 1 ping is too many, did you know you can customize your Notification settings by right clicking on a server icon and selecting Notification Settings? You can even adjust it to apply to specific channels. The last thing we want to do is annoy you with too many pings and notifications. This is an area where it’s hard to please everyone, so we encourage you to personalize your settings.

Moderation

Next, we asked about how you feel about the level of moderation in our Discord, to which 98% like the level of moderation in the server. 1% say moderation is too strict, and 1% say moderation is too loose. This unfortunately leaves us at a bit of an impasse, but we are always open to feedback. If you are ever unsatisfied with how moderation is handled in the server or see an instance where it can be improved, please reach out via ModMail or to a BYG Staff member at any time.

Another comment that we received is that it feels like moderators are active in the Titan and Phantom parts of the Discord, but less so in NecroDancer, so we’ll start looking for a new moderator to join our team in the new year who has a keen interest in NecroDancer!

Channels

Now to the meatier part of the feedback. In this part of the survey, we asked our users if there were any channels that they would like to see that aren’t there, or if they had any other feedback. There are two sides of clashing feedback here. The first is that there are too many channels, and the Discord feels a little cluttered. The other is that there are a number of specific channels that users want added. What we’re going to do is remove or consolidate less used/redundant channels, add some of the highly requested channels, and reorganize a little bit.

Removed/Consolidated Channels:

• Removing the #experimental chat channels for PB and Titan. These are used pretty much in the same way as the main chats.
• Removing the #content channels for each game. These are not used very often, so we’re consolidating these into a #self-promotion channel which will then be placed under the General category.
• Removing the #youtube channel
• Removing the #patch-notes channels for PB and Titan. Patch notes will be put into the #news categories instead.

Reorganization:

• There were a couple suggestions to rename #off-topic to #general, and to move the whole category to the top of the list so that fans of each of our games are encouraged to mingle more! We really like this idea.
• We’ll also add a couple more channels for general use like #creative and #games for people to share more of their general interests with each other.
• We will also be removing the Streams and Videos category, moving #byg-tv-streams to the Announcement category, and moving #clark-tank-discussion into the General category (to be renamed as #game-dev)

Specific Channels Suggested:

• #speedrunning channel for NecroDancer
• #phantom-strategy for Phantom
• #titan-suggestions for Titan
• #titan-polls for Titan. We may consider bringing this to the other games if people like this channel as well, so please let us know.
• #dev-diaries channel for people to see more Discord exclusive behind the scenes content. We are still talking this over, but the idea for now is that some staff members will take turns posting something about their week, and we can also share some fun photos of the shenanigans we get up to in the office.

Community Events

One of the most mentioned things in the survey was that people wanted more community events and contests, so we’re going to look into doing more Discord events – maybe things like Gartic Phone nights! We are always open to suggestions here.

Other suggestions included:

• Weekly Art Prompts
• Art Contests
• Collaborating with CoNDOR (NecroDancer racing). Keep an eye open for some BYG participation! You can join the fanmade NecroDancer server here, which also organizes NecroDancer races for people of all skill levels.

Emojis and Stickers

Lastly, folks really want more emojis and stickers. So we’ll make some, but because people also want contests, we would also like to host some contests to add emojis to the Discord. Keep your eyes open for that.

We also do art livestream every now and then, so those are some cool opportunities to request specific stickers and the like. We’ve already added a few, but always feel free to request more!

There were more pieces of feedback here and there, but hopefully these changes will be a good start. Changes will begin to be implemented over this week. Thank you all so much again for sharing your voices with us!

The post Discord Survey Results 2021 appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

PATCH HIGHLIGHTS:

MAP ATTACK: 7 new combat maps!
HOVER TANKS: New landing animations for reinforcements.
ANIMATION IMPROVEMENTS: Lots of subtle animation improvements.
BUF FIXES: Lots of bugs squashed.
AND MORE!

Phantom Brigade is in Early Access, which means we are actively updating and adding new content based on our roadmap and your wonderful feedback. We update Phantom Brigade on the third Tuesday of every month. You can expect the next major update on Tuesday, November 16, 2021 at 11:00AM PT. See the full patch notes here!

The post Phantom Brigade Update 11: Megamaps Megapack appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

At Brace Yourself Games, we don’t just try not to crunch; we are anti-crunch. We have a 4-day work week from Monday to Thursday, and we are closed on Fridays. No one is ever required to work more than 32 hours per week (with the exception of the events team, during event-related travel). In fact, we treat overtime as a mistake. We are an independent company, and we are in a fortunate position where we always have the option to cut scope, or push out timelines. Eliminating all overtime may not be possible, but we can at least learn from those mistakes, and make changes to our processes to ensure that the same situation will not arise again in the future.

That said, we have observed that some employees will choose to work more than 32 hours per week even if it is not asked or required of them. We discourage this practice, but it still occurs. In the past, we’ve tried forbidding overtime, but what occurs then is that people choose to do it in secret. This makes it difficult to prevent entirely, and what’s worse, it makes it impossible for us to compensate people for any overtime worked.

Taking this all into consideration, we’ve crafted this overtime policy. The goals of BYG’s overtime policy are:

1. To reduce overtime as much as possible and to promote a healthy work/life balance.

2. To encourage discussion of any overtime that is worked so that we can learn and prevent it in the future.

3. To ensure that if overtime is worked, that it is fairly compensated.

The policy itself is fairly simple. Here’s how it works:

• No one at BYG is ever expected to do overtime, nor can a manager ask someone to work any overtime. (Ever!)

• If an employee chooses to work overtime, they must speak to their manager about it before working any overtime.

• However, to ensure that no one tries to hide overtime, managers will not reject overtime requests.

This policy accomplishes two things. First, it ensures that the manager knows that their employee felt the need to work overtime. If they felt this need, it likely means that there was a problem with our scheduling or production methods, and we can take steps to prevent this from happening again in the future. We want employees to speak to their manager, not to receive approval, but so that managers are aware that they will be working overtime.

Second, it allows managers to provide possible alternatives to working overtime. For example, imagine that you have a task that was originally only scoped to take 1 day, but upon starting said task, you realize that it will take an additional 4 hours to complete beyond your original estimate. You decide that you really want to complete this task before the deadline, so you ask your manager to approve 4 hours of overtime. Your manager will approve your request, but they may also present you with some other options. Perhaps the feature is not vital for the current deadline and could be pushed to the next update? Or perhaps a smaller-scoped version of that feature is an option, which would alleviate the need for overtime?

Without discussing overtime with their manager, employees may not be aware that these options were even available to them. However, if they still wish to work the overtime after this discussion, their manager will approve it to ensure that no one is motivated to hide overtime in an attempt to avoid having these discussions with their manager.

It should also be noted that working voluntary overtime will not help employees advance their careers at BYG and, conversely, sticking to working exactly 40 hours per week will not harm their career.

The topic of overtime is really important to us, so we hope this gives you some good insight into how we do things here at BYG!

The post Our Stance on Overtime appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

Back in 2009, before he founded Brace Yourself Games, Ryan Clark was the studio head of Big Fish Games’ satellite office in Vancouver where he implemented a similar 20% program. You might be thinking, “If employees dedicate a whole day out of the work week to personal projects away from their usual responsibilities, won’t their current workload suffer?” It’s certainly a risk, but during that program, the expected 20% decline in productivity at the company was actually not observed. In general, the program was very well received by employees, and productivity remained largely unchanged, though not without its hiccups.

Fast-forward to January 2021. After meeting with individual team members and frequently hearing requests that people would like the opportunity to branch out (for example, prototyping new games, learning new skills, taking courses, doing technical R&D, sidequesting etc.), Ryan decided it would be a good time to try out the 20% program here at Brace Yourself Games in the form of Free Choice Fridays (or Free Fridays as we call them). To avoid people feeling pressured to deliver something “valuable”, there are no required check-ins, though people often share work that they’re proud of. Instead, we will simply trust that our team is doing something appropriate with their time.

We ran a 6 month trial of the program to great success. Employees took it upon themselves to expand their  programming, illustration, animation, and many other areas they might otherwise not have been able to explore. Many people teamed up to work on prototypes, and we even started up Lightning Talks to encourage people to practice public speaking.

Long story short, Free Fridays is now a beloved and permanent feature here at Brace Yourself Games. Please enjoy some examples of things that have been cooked up (that we’re allowed to share) since we started Free Fridays below! Proceed cautiously if you’re afraid of spiders because there’s an image of 3D modeled spider at the end.

Some character design and modeling from Nick Gunn, 3D Artist

Some Unreal Engine 4 plugins and programming from Ben Humphreys, UI Designer and Programmer (see links below)

https://github.com/BraceYourselfGames/UE4-BYGTextToSpeech
https://benui.ca/unreal/byg-localization/
https://benui.ca/unreal/byg-rich-text/

A cool cloud shader from Alain Carter, Programmer

Example from a raymarching rendering engine by Mo Fikree, Tech Director

A way too realistic spider in Blender by  Alexa Schiess, Sr. QA Tester

The post Free Choice Fridays appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

As the Founder of a new city-corporation, and backed by the unforgiving and mysterious Council, you’ve been granted new headquarters in Titan’s inhospitable atmosphere. There, you’ll need to bear the onslaught of ruthless rebels while keeping your benefactor happy and explore the ruins of a forgotten civilization. The Council expects much from you. Do you have what it takes to truly thrive?

Strike down your enemies, design powerful factories, and stake your claim to the industries of Titan.

Buy it on Steam: https://bit.ly/3cRdomr
Buy the OST: https://bit.ly/2SOSQE7

Make sure to check out our Steam stream broadcast for a chance to win a $100 gift card every 10 minutes.

This contest will be ongoing 24 hours a day until the end of the week. All you have to do is type ‘!contest’ into the stream chat.

Conditions apply! Please see full contest rules for details: https://braceyourselfgames.com/contestrules/

Hope you enjoy Industries of Titan! We can’t wait to see what you think.

The post Industries of Titan is OUT NOW on Steam! appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.