I am NOT shy about professing my love for Pixelnest Studio’s roguelike shoot ’em up Steredenn ($3.99). Originally launched on Steam way back in the fall of 2015, the following year it made its way to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and drew critical acclaim everywhere it went. It wasn’t until May of last year that Steredenn finally made its debut on iOS complete with some very novel improvements and features that made it play extremely well on a touchscreen device. We loved the iOS version of Steredenn in our review and I gushed over it in our Game of the Week writeup as well as included it in my personal Best Games of 2017 list. Like I said I’m not shy about telling people how much I love Steredenn.
Well, since before that iOS release, Pixelnest had been working on an absolutely massive update for Steredenn called Binary Stars which would add in multiple new playable ships, tons of cool new weaponry, a number of new bosses, and much more. They worked on that content update for more than a year and initially released Steredenn: Binary Stars on the Nintendo Switch this past March and then went to work bringing the new update to all the other platforms. One by one Steam, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 all received that sweet Binary Stars goodness, but it never ended up materializing for the iOS version. I actually reached out to Pixelnest on Twitter at one point to ask what was up and they assured me that it was in the works but they weren’t quite sure when it would be ready. Well, now we know thanks to a new blog post from Pixelnest today. The iOS version of Steredenn: Binary Stars is coming this January! I am V-E-R-Y E-X-C-I-T-E-D.
With the iOS version of Steredenn: Binary Stars finally coming out, that’ll be all platforms taken care of (sadly an Android version is not in the cards). And with that all wrapped up, Pixelnest has also announced in their blog post today that they’ll be disbanding their studio to pursue other endeavors. You might be surprised to learn that Pixelnest is just two people, and rather than being some sort of breakup the two individuals simply want to go in different directions. Steredenn has been their entire lives for the past 5 years, and sometimes you just have to move on to something new. This doesn’t mean they will be dropping support for Steredenn: Binary Stars completely, as they’ll continue releasing bug fix updates as needed and plan on keeping the Pixelnest company itself active for at least a couple more years. They just won’t be making any new games, not as Pixelnest anyway. All I can really say is that I wish the chaps from Pixelnest the best and am incredibly thankful for the wonderful gift that is Steredenn. I will be looking forward to whatever projects they get involved in in the future, and I’ll most definitely be looking forward to playing Binary Stars on iOS come this January.
I have a question and that is how long does it takes from the idea on paper and the release like Steredenn and are mobile games made with an engine or is that only done for console titles or is there no difference because I have some mobile games with Unity and don’t see many console games made with Unity.
Hello, dev here. :)
Original Steredenn is 18 months of work with Unity3D (a ppopular engine) and a very solid programming background.
This is an average dev time for an indie title, in my experience.
Binary Stars expansion is 15 months of work (including 3 months dedicated to the Nintendo Switch)
Engine like Unity3D or Unreal Engine have exports for consoles, mobile and PC so you can quickly have a running game everywhere but each platforms is specific: controls, requirements (a nightmare on console), leaderboards, etc. And those specifities takes a lot of time.
Thank Damien to take the time to answer my question. I have no background in programming but it really interested me.I am playing games for a long time now and it is still my favorite pastime sadly I see a trend in the AppStore that there are a lot of really “simplistic” ftp games.I bought my first iPhone at the time that BioShock was released and I hoped that this became a trend to release console games on mobile but we now know how bad that ended.
Greetzz from the Netherlands and thanks for your info.