Super Raft Boat Together: The Past and Future

It's been over one year since Super Raft Boat Together launched on Steam, this calls for a celebration!

The Super Raft Boat Together Soundtrack is now on all places you listen to music, including Spotify!

I’ve been working on SRBT and making new updates since launch. Last month we released v1.4.0, which added the Froggy Swamp biome, new bosses, and tons of polish and fixes. After 4 major updates post launch, I think it’s time to look back and see how this game came together.

Magnetic Terrain

We’re going all the way back to 2017 to Ludum Dare 38. This was the summer before I started college, and I was at the time working on 2 other games: Cloud Bashers (September 2017), and KAP ALPHA (Canceled). In February 2017 I released my first game under the name Shattered Journal Games, Burning Wood.

Magnetic Terrain - Ludum Dare 38 (Made in 3ish days)

The theme for the jam was “A Small World”. I thought it’d be cool if your world was the land you move on, so you need to keep expanding it. With a magnet, you could pull material over to make a makeshift island. While you’re trying to expand your land, enemies of all different kinds would try to kill you. This game was Magnetic Terrain, which kind of became my “enemy playground”, where I made a ton of different enemy types of different designs/themes, with gameplay variety at the forefront.

Later after the initial jam I started at Becker College, and very shortly after released Cloud Bashers after finding someone to help with music, that being Sick. For most of my freshman year, I was known as the Cloud Bashers guy, because I showed it off everywhere I could and pushed it as much as I could. I did a couple updates for it, and did jams and had class projects, and I continued work on KAP ALPHA and Magnetic Terrain on and off.

In early 2018 I participated in the MassDigi Game Challenge with Magnetic Terrain. After losing in the first round, I had a big reality check on what it means to make and pitch a game. Before that I just made games cause I wanted to, and made games I thought were fun. A lot of my games were notoriously tough, and tended to focus on gameplay mechanics that test how good you can get. I also didn’t have a firm grasp on a lot of concepts, like juice, polish, scope, and theming. KAP ALPHA had over 50 levels, and 20 bosses, so actually finishing it into a full game would take too long to be worth it.

With Magnetic Terrain, it had no consistency with its themes and designs. I made it to be fun, but it didn’t make any sense without tons of context. I knew there were problems with my games, but I didn’t want to stop working on them. Ultimately I did decide to cancel all projects I was working on, to focus on just one project under SJG. That project was Floaty Fighters, which I also used as a chance to learn Unity, since I had mainly been using Game Maker, and I used Unity in everything within college.

A fun fact about Magnetic Terrain is that my brother Josh helped me brainstorm a lot of enemy designs. A funny one was the painter, who would paint a picture of death in the background, and when they finished it, the player instantly died. Another fun fact is the same guy who did the music for it also did the music for Super Raft Boat Together, that being Jake!

Magnetic Terrain v1.0.0

After Floaty Fighters, I worked mainly on Last Slice. For a while, I considered Magnetic Terrain to be one of my worst projects, with tons of flaws and not worthwhile to return to. At some point, I showed Magnetic Terrain to Carson and he actually liked it. He also had the same idea that Yukon had pitched to me to potentially revamp the game: instead of having it in space and with a magnet collecting metal, make it on the ocean in a raft. This made everything click together a lot better thematically.

From this, I actually did spend a little bit of time making a v1.0.0 of Magnetic Terrain and made some small polish and fixes to it to make it more beatable/playable on September 25th 2020. I didn’t revisit the game idea again until the beginning of 2021 for Global Game Jam, where we used it as an opportunity to remake Magnetic Terrain into Super Raft Boat!

Super Raft Boat Classic

The team for Super Raft Boat was Carson as Lead Programmer and music, Yukon and Jen on art, and me as another programmer. I had used Game Maker before Unity, but I was primarily using Unity at the time, so this was my first big project jumping back into Game Maker on.

The theme for Global Game Jam 2021 was "Lost and Found", but we already planned to make SRB and used the jam as an excuse to do it, so we were able to effectively scope the game and use the week of the jam to build most of the core game. With 3 different characters with different mechanics and weapon choices, 4 areas, 10 trinkets, looping, and daily leaderboards, we packed a decent amount into a small package.

At the time, Yukon and Jen were getting ready to release Snoozy Kazoo’s first game, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, and Carson had multiple projects himself. I was still working on Last Slice, and pushed for this to be a Shattered Journal Games game, which they were nice enough to agree to! SJG had many games already, and it was based off a canceled SJG game, so it fit in nicely with my past games.

We released the game for free on Steam, itch, and Newgrounds! Soon after, Game Maker launched their own platform with Opera, GX Games, so we also put it there. A lot of people played it, over 600,000 currently! We even won the first award for best GX Games game! Later on we released a v1.1.0 update that added the Arctic Ocean and new trinkets! Later on after there were 3 different games called "Super Raft Boat", the original was renamed to "Super Raft Boat Classic" to better differentiate them. Super Raft Boat Classic is also on Newgrounds!

Super Raft Boat Classic

Super Raft Boat VR

We can’t talk about Super Raft Boat without talking about Super Raft Boat VR. Alexis made Super Raft Boat VR basically all by herself. Made in Unreal, did all the art and code, added over 10 new trinkets, new game mechanics, a new area, and a new boss. It’s a crazy cool game, and we took a decent amount of things that she changed and converted them into Together. In VR, you can damage rocks even if you don't have Pickaxe, which made them no longer complete death sentences. We also recreated some of the trinkets from VR into Together.

Super Raft Boat VR released on August 4th 2021, about 4 months after SRB released. Later on she released a v1.1.0 update that added the Soda Sea and new trinkets!

Super Raft Boat VR

PAX East 2022

In 2021, I worked on a lot of smaller projects, but I was working on Last Slice as my main project. Last Slice tried to be a lot of things, a single player action game where you deliver pizza and fight enemies with a story and characters, and also a party game where you battle for the last slice of pizza. It ended up being too many things, and would take too long to fully complete as we envisioned if it were to continue. I decided that the current game which was about half done (10 levels, 40ish party maps, 30ish pizza toppings) should be released for free, rather than being canceled or being paid and barely be played. I worked on it a little more to polish up, and it was released on April 20th 2022.

Last Slice

Now being done with Slice and no other projects, I felt like I had one choice left if Shattered Journal Games were to continue and successfully pitch a game to a publisher: make multiplayer in Super Raft Boat. Everyone in the discord would constantly ask for this, and for tons of other things to be added to the game. If people didn’t play SRB and didn’t keep asking for more stuff, I have no idea what game I would have made instead. But because there was actual demand, and a lot of the design groundwork was already there, it felt like a smart move. It was thanks to all of you for asking for this game to be made, that it became a reality!

A slide from our pitch deck showing people want multiplayer

There was one big obstacle for me, which was ONLINE MULTIPLAYER. I’ve done a lot of local multiplayer games in the past, but never online, so it was pretty intimidating. I asked my friends and top tier coders, Yukon and Gavin, if they thought it’d be possible to make a pitch and build for SRBT in about 2ish months, and they thought I could do it, and they were right! If I was gonna pitch an online multiplayer game, I had to show I could do it. This may have been the most I’ve ever worked on a game, but if I was gonna make this work, I had to give it my all. I worked on SRBT basically non-stop until PAX East, hoping to pitch to someone there and finish it before then.

April 21st was the first day of PAX East, so we showed Last Slice in its released state at the Boston Indies booth and at the Made in MA Party during PAX. I also had the mission of pitching SRBT to publishers. Strangely though, it wasn't me that got SRBT a connection to our publisher, but Del who chatted with the Brace Yourself Games devs at their booth. He got me linked with them, and from there things moved forward until they were officially our publisher!

Starting SRBT

I was the producer, lead programmer, and designer on SRBT. I've worked on a lot of projects in this type of role, but never at this scale. I had to juggle getting the game done, and managing our timeline and tasks to make sure we're moving forward smoothly.

I recruited Chris to do art for the project as we've worked together multiple times before (Floaty Fighters, Last Slice). Chris also handled sound effects and helped with design. For the music, I got Jake who has done music for multiple games of mine (Floaty, Slice, Magnetic).

Yukon was also a core part of development. She made a package of systems called Snoozeworks, and let me use it for SRBT, which saved me a ton of time not having to make tons of systems. She also helped me multiple times throughout development, and was one of the most active consultants for the game.

Brace Yourself Games are most known for creating Crypt of the Necrodancer, and only recently started experimenting with publishing. This was new ground for both SJG and BYG, and they helped out with some dev related things, which I think most pubs probably wouldn't!

Every milestone, we prepped a slide deck to show BYG what we were working on and what got done. They never told us to do this, it just made sense for us to do it, and they liked them!

A slide from one of our milestone slides

Multiplayer was the biggest addition, but we also added lots of content and made changes to the gameplay loop. Here’s a list of some things that we added to SRBT that weren’t in SRBC or SRBVR:

• Online/local multiplayer
• 6 new areas (new enemies and new bosses)
• Active abilities
• Super rafts
• 4th character (Beta)
• New trinkets, weapons
• Cosmetic systems (skins, emotes, banners, hammer skins)
• Ghost system in multiplayer
• Shops + currency systems
• Helpers (egg animals, sailors, mercenaries)

One small thing we added was wind direction. In SRBC, rocks would always come from the top, but now they would come from the direction of the wind, and some areas would have stronger winds, making obstacles like rocks, and players move faster in the water. This also applied for good objects spawning outside of the raft, like chests or sailors.

PAX East 2023

Development of the game began in the Summer of 2022. The game was announced publicly on January 26th 2023, so until then we only told people in our inner circles about the game. Then in March 2023, at PAX East we showcased SRBT and the BYG booth for players to try for the first time!

In preparation for PAX East, I had to grind to finish local multiplayer. This wasn’t something that we originally planned, but it was decided that it would be best to have it, especially when showcasing the game like this. The only thing that was tougher than making online multiplayer was making local multiplayer after online! Though if I started this any later, it never would’ve been implemented, or taken MUCH longer. 

This was a super cool experience, being at one of the prominent booths at PAX with our game. A lot of people really enjoyed the game, and we were able to get feedback and make adjustments to the build based on this live playtesting.

SRBT Launch

Super Raft Boat Together released on July 25th 2023. Getting to release was quite the battle for me, as both the producer and lead programmer. In the later milestones I had to make calls on what we can do, and what had to be cut. A lot of my time was also taken up by online and local multiplayer, and getting everything working smoothly with that.

There were tons of things to fix right after launch. We launched with an invisibility bug on enemies, so if you encountered that, your run was over (NOT GOOD). There were multiple hotfix builds that I made during the weeks after launch until it was stable enough to leave for a bit.

The game came out, and it was not a mega hit like we hoped. We made the game with the intention to add content over time post launch. After launch, and a year later, we still have not reached recoup, so we have not received any revenue from the game’s sales. This slowed down work on the game considerably, and also made it a question of if we should continue working on it at all. And while it could not go at the speed or strength it did during active development, I decided I did want to continue it for a bit, or in this case a year-ish.

PAX West 2023

SRBT was also at PAX West, now in its released state. I've gone to PAX East many times now, but this was my first PAX West! It was the same booth from East with BYG running everything for us, and it was fun to talk with people that typically go to West rather than East. A major highlight was definitely meeting and chatting with devs from the Rivals 2 team, and getting them over to play SRBT at the booth. I also beat Dan Fornace at Rivals 2, so that was pretty epic.

Rivals 2 devs playing SRBT at PAX West

SRBT v1.1.0

Shortly after PAX West, v1.1.0 was released on September 25th 2023. It added the Soda Sea biome with new enemies and the Cooler boss. It also added new super rafts that you could use that aren’t the ones you start with. To do this we added a Super Raft Swapper, and we also added the Weapons Dealer since they were very similar systems.

This update aimed to add more variety and content to the game, but also make it longer. A lot of people were beating the game pretty fast, and even from the tutorial, so we made multiple adjustments to make the “Path to the Super Kraken” longer than just one good run. The Path to Kraken made it so you had to beat a run 4 times before attempting to fight the Super Kraken. Each run would get slightly harder, and make you fight the Kraken Swarm for longer. We also made it so after finishing the first area in the tutorial, the game would take you back to Raftport, so you couldn’t win straight from the tutorial anymore.

Missions were also added, and players now had to rescue the shopkeepers at Raftport to utilize their services. Adding missions and making it so the shopkeepers weren’t there by default made it feel like there was more to do in the game. This update also revamped Raftport to make it more condensed, and easier to get to everything. We also added Keybindings and a bunch of other stuff.

v1.1.0 Full Patch Notes

SRBT v1.2.0

This update was released on November 6th 2023. At this point, Chris had gone on to pursue other ventures. Jake later returned to finish a couple extra songs. I was now the only person working on SRBT.

This update aimed to add more from what we had with Boss Squads. Now when you loop for some bosses like Dolphin and Otter, instead of fighting a stronger Dolphin each loop, you fight multiple slightly stronger Dolphins, ranging from Duo, Trio, to Squad (Quartet).

We also added lobby ghosts that appear in the hub when players are matchmaking. This was aimed to help players find randoms online that were queueing up. This update also introduced 3 new trinkets and a new super raft.

v1.2.0 Full Patch Notes

SRBT v1.3.0

This update was released on December 21st 2023 for the Winter Sale. A big part of this update was the Turnip Boy crossover content! Turnip Boy could now appear as a mercenary for hire, and the cat apple could hatch out of eggs. We also added Vegetable Stew, a new area with enemies from Turnip Boy. It also features a new boss, God Onion.

Snoozy Kazoo helped out to provide art for all the Turnip Boy content, even some cool promo art! We also used a couple songs for the area and boss fight from Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. This was before that game was released, and the music was done by Jake, the same guy who did the SRBT soundtrack!

Also added in this update was the Fishing Raft, 4 new trinkets, and the Ship of Gear which could now show up sometimes instead of the Ship of Deals. This update added a decent amount of content and was made as a big push to get sales for the Winter Sale.

v1.3.0 Full Patch Notes

SRBT v1.4.0

After v1.3.0, and entering the year 2024, it was clear that while sales did help, we were still very far from getting to recoup. v1.3.0 -> v1.4.0 was the longest break between updates. I was working on SRBT in January and a bit after, but at some point I decided I could no longer have SRBT be my main priority. I took a long break, and with the Summer Sale coming up, I decided it was an opportunity to return and make one more update.

This update was released on June 29th 2024 during the Summer Sale. In this update we added Froggy Swamp, a new area with frog and fly enemies. It also has a new boss that can really destroy rafts, the Crocodile! We also added another new boss with two variations: Freezer and Electric Freezer. They show up in Arctic Ocean and Electric Flow, they’ll be a much bigger challenge than the previous main bosses there, Giant Trout and Giant Jellyfish.

This update also changed how progression worked, making it 5 biomes per loop rather than 6 which was changed in v1.1.0 when Soda Sea was added. Each biome had an alternate, with the 4th level now having an extra rare biome (Electric Flow, Soda Sea, Vegetable Stew).

This update also brought back the demo with all the polish and fixes from previous updates, but with much less content to only give players a taste of the full experience.

Most updates have a large section with tons of fixes and polish other than the headliners, and this update has the most!

v1.4.0 Full Patch Notes

Looking Forward

Super Raft Boat Together will most likely not get a v1.5.0 update. With the amount added over the 4 major updates, I see it in a much more completed state. It may still get some small updates with fixes or small additions, but consider it mostly done. Now that it’s been a year since release, I think it’s time to work on some new games!

A big outside factor worth noting is that to continue using the Unity version I made SRBT with, and not have the unity splash screen, I’d have to renew my Unity license in December, which would be $2400 (it used to be $400 but they removed that option). A side mission will now be getting to all my unfinished business with all my Unity games before then.

Currently I am working on a couple projects on and off, and other dev related things. I also have a part time job, so I definitely have my time split a bit more. But I think after working on a single project for so long, I’m fine doing lots of smaller things before I commit to a larger scale project again.

Thank you to everyone who supported me, Shattered Journal Games, and Super Raft Boat Together. My family, my friends, and all the SRB players! I hope you enjoy whatever I cook up next!