Hi, Mark Lohmann typing to you here, sitting on my couch in the shade of my newly bought extremely big plant.
Anyway, exactly one year ago we released Everybody Wham Wham. Today we’re celebrating it with a 40% discount on Everybody Wham Wham on Steam and a short story of how the game came to be.
I might be using names below so just for clarity, Bonte Avond = Kyon Edelenbosch, Mark Lohmann, Matteo Karkazis and Mark Benis.
How it started
It was October 2021, and we had just released our real first (free) game Tower Guy Remastered.
We really liked making stuff together, recording music and voices and coming up with stories. So we wanted to do more of that. Back then Kyon was just starting a school project where he had to work on something for 3 months. So naturally, we decided to create a small game where you could build a snowman. Just casual: make a snowman and that’s it. So here is what it looked like back in October 29:
Once you could make a full snowman, we started on coding the AI for Snailmn and Piggy, so that they could build their own snowman. Check out the first ever AI-made whamwham snowman below:
Once you could compete, we started thinking of some sort of town where you could walk around and talk to some characters…
Before we knew it the game -- back then still called Wham Wham The Snowman-man Snowman Building Festival -- grew bigger and bigger in size, like a snowball rolling downhill.
The town started taking shape and before we knew it we had filled 9 days with characters with their own voices and stories. Some more tragic than others…
The Wham Wham Radio Station
The idea for the radio station actually came from one of our short games we made in a weekend called Crash FM. In this game you would use the radio channels to communicate with your friends. We thought making a fantasy radio station was the funnest thing ever. It was in the middle of the pandemic, and being musicians we missed performing on stage. By making a radio station and using mostly first takes and doing improv we kind of found the same vibe, except this time we’d be in Kyon’s bedroom and not on stage. So we decided we’d make a radio show for each day. We did what we always do, we get together and everyone just writes the first things that come into their mind and then we would improv based on what was written:
What the bling is Wham Wham?
One of our old games was called “Bling Bling The Pumpkin-king Harvest Pumpkin Festival”, and this snowman building game was basically a sequel to that. We needed a name for our shared folder so one of us typed “Wham Wham the Snowman-man Snowman Building Festival” as a joke. On December 3rd we came together to work on the game a bit. We were holding instruments and played a few chords and someone randomly sang ‘everybody wham wham’. We liked how it sounded so we quickly recorded an improv demo with nonsense lyrics and saved it as Everybody Wham Wham.mp3. (you can listen to it here)
From there on the game started shaping into what it would become very quickly. We wanted to release it before Christmas, but sadly missed our deadline for that. We worked day in day out on the game after Christmas until late January, and on January 29 2021 we finally released our game.
Thanks for all the support!
Lately the game has been getting a lot more attention because of musician CORPSE, who started doing wham wham shout-outs in Foolish_Gamers’ streams. A couple weeks later Karl Jacobs decided to bring everyone together in a stream and play the game. Since then a lot more whamming has been done and we’re super thankful that they showed our weird snowman game to a wider audience. Their enthusiasm about the game has lifted up our spirits even more.
Most importantly, we’re super thankful of the support from all the people who found out about our game, played it or listened to the soundtrack or even just typed ‘wham wham’ on twitter. Also, the fan art that we’ve seen the past week has blown us away. Someone even made earrings, earrings!
Well, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this story about the game. There’s much more to tell, but that will have to wait for another day. For now we’ll be working hard on our next game, Once Upon a Jester.
Thank you. Bonte Avond