Have a wonderful Holiday Season! – 2022 In Review

Happy Holidays from the Thunder Lotus family!

Hey everyone!

Another year has flown on by, it’s time for us to look back and reminisce on just about everything that happened in 2022… but first, I’d like to thank each and every one of you who have been supporting us, be it through reading my shenanigans, playing our games, making art, or being involved in our community. Your passion for games gives us the fuel to keep on burning as bright as ever! We really wouldn’t be here without you! 🥰

Now, without further ado, let us dig in our recap of 2022!

Start of 2022 – Winter

The year started off fairly smoothly.
With the busy release of the Spiritfarer‘s Farewell Edition at the end of 2021, we figured we’d take some time to recuperate and properly prepare the rest of the year.

Spiritfarer Poll

With the release of the Daffodil plushie last year, I figured it’d be fun to see which other spirit you’d like to see as a plushie. Figured it’d be fun to showcase my findings.

Since I figured ranking 10+ characters in order of most to least huggable would be a nightmare to decypher (and answer 😰), I narrowed it down to Alice, Atul, Stanley and Summer, and sent it to our Mailing List. With almost 7000 votes compiled, the battle raged on and, in a rather convincing fashion, Atul was crowned our winner! 🐸

Surveys

Through this experience with the poll, I’ve came to realize that I did not know much about who was reading my emails, so I’ve started cooking up some fun small~ish surveys for our Mailing List audience to answer, in order to could learn a bit more about who they are, where they’re from, what they enjoy playing, etc.

While there were no big surprises to share, it did confirm my suspicions that I was indeed talking to an amazing group of lovely gamers 🥰

Thanks for answering my silly surveys!

Spring

New Office

We officially moved into a new, bigger office in the Saint-Henri neighborhood of Montréal, Québec.

It’s a really lovely place, with a lot of open space, a gym and an outdoor pool!
We still haven’t fully made this place our own just yet, so I won’t share any pictures, but we love it very much and we can’t wait to share how it will look once we’re done!

With it, we changed our routine from full remote, to two in-office days, which took a bit of getting used to, but we’re all pretty happy with our current arrangements 😊👍🏻

I get to see trains go by every hour. 👀

Discord Events

Soon after, Discord released a new feature called Events to all servers, so it seemed fun to try it out with our community.

Given my lack of culture of Ghibli movies, which were a huge inspiration for Spiritfarer, I figured I’d remediate the situation and host some movie watchalongs in our Public Discord.

We’d get ourselves our own version of the film, synchronize on my timer and react together. We watched movies like Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service.

It was a lot of fun, thanks to everyone that joined and hung out!

We also created an Events channel, for those interested in hosting their own event for the Discord community!

Fall

Spiritfarer Mobile Release

Over the Summer, we announced that a Spiritfarer Mobile Version was in the works from our partners and friends at Playdigious & Netflix.

Then, in early October, Spiritfarer iOS & Android came out on Netflix‘s streaming platform.
The game is free for Netflix subscribers, so if you haven’t played through Spiritfarer yet, you can do so on the go! 🤳🏻

Soundtrack Update & Blogpost

The long awaited, and often requested, Soundtrack Update was pushed live in mid-November, adding a lot of the missing tracks that were added with the Lily, Beverly, Jackie & Daria updates.

To commemorate this moment, and the shipment of the soundtrack’s Vinyls, I sat down with MaxLL, our amazingly talented friend and composer, to talk about his processes while making the Soundtrack, and posted his answers in a Blogpost.

Artbook Update

Alongside the Soundtrack, we figured we’d take a stab at updating the game’s Artbook, to add the post-release content contained in the Farewell Edition.

Curious to know more about the Spiritfarer universe, see amazing high resolution art of all the locals & characters, and read about our inspirations? The updated Artbook is available on itch, GoG and Steam!

End of 2022

Discord documentary

In early November, Discord approached us with a fun proposition to highlight our Discord community in a mini-documentary, focusing on Spiritfarer. We wholeheartedly accepted!

For the video, some members of the Spiritfarer team, two of moderators, a handful of community members and I had the wonderful pleasure of discussing with a lovely member of Discord’s staff, about how our server came to be, how it has evolved in the last few years and how it has impacted our lives.

The video was released in early December and was teased at the Game Awards 2022.
If you haven’t already, we highly recommend you to watch the video and join our amazing community. 💖

Mobile Awards

The end of the year celebrations came upon us by surprise through some Pocket Gamer Awards nominations!

Spiritfarer‘s mobile version was nominated for their event in the Mobile Game of the Year, Best Netflix Game, Best Storytelling Game, Best Mobile Port, and Best Mobile Sports Game categories (with the last one being my favorite. 🎣)

I’m happy to announce that we took home the gold for Best Storytelling Game for 2022! 🥳

Games We Loved 2022

As always, we posted a list of all our favorite games we played this year! If you’re looking for things to do during your holidays, I highly recommend you to check it out!

Plans for 2023?

We’re now days away from the start of 2023.

Truthfully, there will be a lot going on next year, a lot of things I’m super excited about, but a lot of things I’ll be unable to share with you until the time is right. We’ll be taking two weeks~ish off to rest and prepare ourselves for the exciting new adventures that awaits us. We hope to see you there! 🥳

If you want to stay up to date with our news, I highly recommend you sign up for our mailing list, if you haven’t already!

Okay, that’s all I have for 2022.

Thanks again for all the support, it really means a lot to us! Your passion for videogames grants us the ability to continue making what we love! Thank you for playing!

Stay happy, stay healthy and please don’t forget to take care of yourself! Have a happy holiday season & a happy New Year!
See you in 2023!

Many hugs,
-Med and the Thunder Lotus team