Hey there, Hoomanz fans!

Gamescom 2024 was a blast, and that’s mainly thanks to YOU.

You, the person who took the time to stop and listen with interest to what Hoomanz is about.

You, the person who laughed at Shoo getting hugged to death and teleported back to a checkpoint (and laughed at our attempts at what one might call “jokes”).

You, the person who loved the gameplay, art style, story and just generally boosting our confidence!

You, the one who just sat down without asking, refusing any info about the game, speedrunning it in record time that even our devs couldn’t match, getting up and leaving without a single comment like a proper GigaChad – hats off to you, but at least a “gg ez” next time would do.

You, the one who tried our demo, felt frustrated with constantly getting caught by the fast hoomanz, took a deep breath, let out a rumbling battle roar and internally whispered “challenge accepted!”, while getting caught by the Hoomanz once again on the next try. Next time you’ll get it! And if not, then next time!

You, the one who gave us valuable feedback – which we’ve been going through since Gamescom, helping inform the next phase of development.

You, the one who thought our H was a W… Yes, we updated our logo for you.

You, the kid that saw our booth, but went on to explore the rest of Gamescom because there was a queue, but continued to nag your mom all day only about coming back to play Hoomanz… then coming again the next day to show your friends and play it again… that really hit us right in the feels (I’m not crying, it’s the ninjas cutting onions again!)

You… ALL OF YOU. Thank you. (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ

Enjoy our aftermovie from Gamescom 2024!

As Hoomanz is our first game with our own original IP, and having high expectations for it internally, we went to Gamescom with a touch of anxiety and doubt.
“The game isn't ready. What if they really won’t like the game? What if the gameplay is boring? This is our debut, we cannot mess this up! Will the idle Hoomanz peeing animation be off-putting? Let’s take the peeing out. You know what, let’s put it back in, that’s part of our humour and direction.”, but all of this couldn’t be further from the truth – your feedback was overwhelmingly positive! Especially regarding the art style, concept of the game, the story, and mainly Shoo getting hugged.

We also heard your feedback loud and clear. We’ve noted areas for improvement, such as enhancing our tutorial, as well as adding more variety and challenges to gameplay.

You gave us a huge dose of confidence that will fuel our determination to make the game better, so you’ll be proud of us when Hoomanz releases in 2025!

Gamescom in numbers:

453 of you played our demo
763 of you wishlisted Hoomanz on Steam
220 of you filled in our feedback form (that’s almost 1 in 2 of you!)
132 of you subscribed to our Newsletter (that’s 29% of the players! Guess beta-access was a real motivator)
15 of you joined our newly created Discord server
85 of you followed us on IG to keep an eye on what we’re cooking
3.5K of you checked out our website

Preparations

First, we explored going with group organisers for indie games, as all indies usually do. Now, that thought of having all the legwork done for us was intriguing. But we’ve done activations and booths for our clients before, so the “you can do it!” voice whispering in our heads won and we decided to go SOLO BOLO!

The journey was a big learning curve for all of us and we’re looking forward to applying all those learnings for Gamescom 2025! From changing the booth dimensions and evolving merch giveaway ideas, to searching far and wide for accommodation in Cologne and last-minute changes to the demo 2 weeks before Gamescom…

Yep, you’re reading that correctly, 2 weeks before Gamescom we completely rethought the demo and changed it, significantly. And as if that wasn’t enough, we had a fatal error for 5 days and nobody could figure out what was causing it. Apparently, that push was well worth it as we managed to hit the sweet spot with what we had. But yeah, let’s not do that again or it might turn into a The Office scene.

Our booth went through plenty of iterations too, until we finally landed on the one we called home for 5 days (and no, that doesn’t mean we slept there… We did manage to actually book accommodation in Cologne for everyone in the end. But hey, we’re keeping our options open for 2025!).

Here are the 3 main phases our booth design went through.

And this is how we rolled up our sleeves, spending the entire day before Gamescom building ourselves our cozy little booth.

While planning our booth setup, pesky Gamescom forgot to mention that our neighbouring booths are way taller than us! So as the problem-solving enthusiasts we are, we rolled up our sleeves once again and decided to make a banner last minute. Thanks to a lot of sweat from our team and friendly printers we found in Cologne, we managed to get a banner printed and delivered to us that evening – massive W!

What’s next?

Now we’re taking some time for a short rest to reflect on all of your feedback. We're already hard at work plotting the next steps for development, and we're excited to implement your feedback as part of this. In the meantime, let us cook!

We’ll be back with an update in a few months, but we’ll keep on posting behind-the-scenes bits n' pieces on Instagram and Discord.
If you want to get access to our beta build once it’s ready, it’ll be available for our Newsletter subscribers!
All the necessary links can be found on our handy linktree, feel free to share it with your friends, it would make us happy.

Till next time, friends ʕ•́ᴥ•̀ʔっ