In a surprising double-combo, at DevGAMM Lisbon, our team at Whales And Games won the award for Studio of the Year during the Spotlight Awards by Game Dev Lisbon! The very next day, Townseek won the prize for Best Game from Portugal at the DevGAMM Awards! 🏆 Receiving both these awards fills us with immense honour, and we're incredibly proud to receive them as a team! 🐳

To commemorate the occasion, we've drawn a special artwork to celebrate both of these awards! Whalechan, Capt. Jawline and Watt Zapp dressed in their fanciest outfits and were overjoyed to walk on stage to receive the awards! ⚡

To explain the background to these awards, earlier this month, our team attended DevGAMM Lisbon, a local conference focused on talks, networking, and its award show! Being two days long, it was a fantastic couple of days where we got to hang out with our colleagues, friends and meet even more developers from all over. It just so happens that networking with other developers is one of our favourite things to do! We also took the opportunity to attend some talks, take notes, and play some games. ✨

This year, our team was nominated for two different award shows happening during the event. The first of these was the Spotlight Awards, organised by the local collective of game developers at Game Dev Lisbon. In previous years, Townseek and our team received nominations in different categories but didn't win any awards. This time, our team earned the nomination for Studio of the Year. Alongside us as nominees, were the talented teams at Massive Galaxy Studios, Funcom ZPX, and Digitality Games.

Much to our surprise, Whales And Games won Studio of the Year! 💡

Being around our local community for many years, we're really grateful for the jury for having picked us among our colleagues! Until our nomination, we hadn't stopped and reflected on the amount of work our studio did this past year. Between our trips and booths at GDC and gamescom, to the continuous events we put together, to all the work we've been doing towards bringing Townseek to its completion, we've really had a packed year! We're proud to be part of the Portuguese community and grateful for its vote of confidence for the year ahead.

The second award show of the event was the DevGAMM Awards, put together by the conference's main organizer. Being an international contest, this marked the first time we participated with Townseek in an award show of its scale. We were very surprised when the international jury nominated us as one of the candidates for Best Game in Portugal. Alongside us, we shared our nomination with the excellent ARC SEED, Demon Spore, Gloomy Juncture and The Night is Gray, all of which have their own Steam page! Our bets were on some of the other games receiving the award, as all of them rightfully deserved to earn it themselves.

Against all our expectations, to the point it left us shaking in shock, Townseek won Best Game from Portugal! 🏆

We're incredibly thankful to both the judges and event organisers for considering our game a worthy winner. We also really appreciate the feedback they've shared with us! Likewise, we also have to extend our thanks to Associação de Produtores de Videojogos Portugueses and Scorewarrior for delivering and making this award possible.

If you'd like to review the award ceremony by itself, you can watch the video here! You can also read a recap of the event by the organizers through this post. You can spot the photos featuring us because of our Whales And Games themed hats! 🎩

Lastly, but not least, alongside the Spotlight Awards and the DevGAMM Awards, another long-running Portuguese showcase, Indie X Online, now in its sixth edition, also nominated us for Best Portuguese Game earlier this month! For that showcase, the award was won by Digitality Games for their upcoming game Floatylands. Still, we're thankful to Indie X and once again to Associação de Produtores de Videojogos Portugueses for including our game. It's been quite an eventful month!

We're truly at a loss of words to express the gratitude we've felt over these past weeks. With everything that happened this year, we're privileged to have such overwhelming love and support from our friends, family, peers, colleagues, community, supporters and from such a diverse industry. These awards inspire us to push forward with our work. We aim to make the industry and the world a better place, even if just by a little. ✨

While we have one last surprise related to the events we've attended throughout the year that we'll be posting on our social media channels fairly soon, this pretty much closes out our event season for the year. It's time for our team to prepare for the holidays. We want to take some time to focus primarily on the game and on our community. ☃️

Finally, we wanted to close with a note for what's ahead, and we can confirm that Townseek will release in 2025! 🧭 As we head into next year, we'll confirm a proper release date. We would rather not go through the irony of submitting our game to these award shows again next year. 😅

We've been wrapping up pending tasks for the game and made great strides despite some challenges these last months. From improving the narrative, improving mouse controls, adding achievements, random events, and overall rounding off the game, we've been really busy! We're also addressing some of the last issues raised in previous demos. We're really thrilled with how the game has been shaping up!

We'll be diving back into action and showing you more of the characters, locations, and details we have spread across Explora soon! As always, you can keep up with us by joining us on either our Discord server, through any of our social media channels, or by following us here on itch.io!

Well then, it's time for us to respond to these awards in kind, seek onwards, and finish charting Townseek! Cheers! 🦈