Today we have B I G news for an indie studio: We are bringing the multi-award-winning BADLAND to Steam! Redesigned and improved to big screens, keyboard and game controllers, BADLAND: Game of the Year Edition will be available this spring!
When BADLAND was initially released in 2013 on iPad, our goal was to create a console-quality game for tablets. Frogmind was just a team of two at the time, without the resources to enter the desktop market, but we always dreamed of bringing BADLAND also to Steam. Thanks to its success on tablets we can finally make that dream reality in scale. Feels good to be able to tell all the fans who have asked for a specific Steam version that it is coming soon.
BADLAND: Game of the Year Edition has been redesigned for Steam. It builds on the beautiful, hand-painted graphics of the original with enhanced Full-HD visuals. But the biggest change is the gameplay. We knew that one button control would not be the optimal experience for Steam. We tested several alternatives and ended up expanding the controls for both hands using either keyboard or a game controller. With the new controls, the player has a lot more freedom – he can fly backwards and control the speed of his flying. This type of control felt best to us but it broke a lot of puzzles and levels that depended on the player to be able to do less. The solution was to modify every level in the game to accommodate the more expressive control scheme and that’s what we ended up doing. It wasn’t the easiest thing but it needed to be done and it was worth it. The Steam version feels very much at home here. The multiplayer mode suits desktop playing really well with multiple controllers or shared keyboard, and it feels great to be able to be more tactical in it with the new controls.
The Game of the Year Edition features over 4 times more content than the original did when it was launched. It has over 15 hours and 100 levels of single-player story content and 100 co-op and 27 multiplayer deathmatch stages in an up-to-four-person local multiplayer mode. And did I mention that it looks awesome from a large monitor/TV and feels very much at home on the platform. If you saw the Steam version first, you would not suspect that it wasn’t initially made for them.
BADLAND: Game of the Year Edition will be released in Spring 2015, exact date and price are to be announced later.
