Happy new year (time zone depending)!
We're both at the end of our holiday family visits, Tamas in Toronto and Jake in Kentucky near Elizabethtown. We've been spending a lot of this downtime wrapping up Act I of Kentucky Route Zero: finishing the art and writing for a few scenes, dealing with last-minute bugs, and testing a bunch of new content that sort of organically grew out of what we'd expected to be a relatively small scene.
It being now the last moments of the year, we're not quite going to hit the "December 2012" indicated in our last trailer, but it'll be very close. We want to be sure to spend a few days testing this new content and continuing to respond to feedback we've gleaned from testers. Thanks again to those of you who have volunteered playtesting and bug-catching feedback! Feedback has been crucial and formative for the game, as it should be.
After the game is released, this newsletter will continue, but it will additionally be sent to everyone who purchases the "complete" edition of the game (all five acts). We haven't been consistent with it for the last couple of months, spending all our waking hours building the game -- sorry about that! We plan to be more rigorous about sending the newsletter out at the same time each month, etc., in the new year.
We'll be in touch directly with download instructions and other information when Act I is released. For the moment, here's some of what we've been up to lately:
We built a new map interface for traveling between locations, which looks like this:
This has added a new dimension to the game in the form of these small vignettes or "detours" you encounter on the road. Most of the detours are text-only, like very short hypertext or choose-your-own-adventure stories. We've been really inspired by the work people have been doing recently in the Twine engine (an engine for making hypertext games), so it's been great to experiment in this form also.
We've done a ton of work in this new location, which now comprises a large portion of Act I:
We don't want to say much more about that for fear of spoiling anything, though :)
Thanks for sticking with us through this process. We're excruciatingly close now, and it's really exciting for us after a little over two years of work.
cya soon!
jake+tamas
