Howdy! This is the private monthly newsletter for Kentucky Route Zero. We've been pretty busy since we last wrote, working on Act II and traveling to a few festivals/conferences
. Here are some updates on where we've been and where we're going next!
IGF
In mid-March, we traveled to San Francisco for the Independent Games Festival, at which Kentucky Route Zero won the "Excellence in Visual Arts" award. Here's a picture of us accepting the award, visibly shaken by the intimidating light show:
We had a great time at IGF and were really honored by the award. The "visual art" category was particularly competitive, with finalists like Simogo's "Year Walk," Northaway's "Incredipede," and Asteroid Base's "Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime" -- all bold and assured experiments in art direction.
We gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference (which hosts/contains the IGF) called "Designing for Mystery in Kentucky Route Zero," tracing some of our influences through experimental film & video art, and articulated a distinction we find ourselves making between "puzzles" and "mysteries" in our design process. A recording of the talk is up on the
GDC vault
now, if you have access to that site. We're hoping the recording will be made free at some point soon. If it is, we'll let you know; if not, we'll make a new video on the same topic.
Act II
Our goal for Act II has been to release it by the end of April (our general development goal is three months per act). All this exciting but unexpected work setting up distribution, going out to IGF, and troubleshooting for a larger number of players than we anticipated took up a lot of our time in the last few months, so we're pushing the release of Act 2 back a few weeks, into mid-May.
It's looking really good though, and we're anxious to have it out in the world. For the next few weeks, until the release, we'll be posting a small/weird screenshot from Act II on our
Twitter
and
Facebook
pages every day. So thanks for your patience, and keep an eye out for those!
Forest Concept Art
Our friends at Kill Screen magazine graciously offered to run a full-page ad for Act II in their next issue. Tamas came up with this striking image, a bit of (in-engine) concept art for one of the most important scenes in the second act (click the image to download a super high-res version if you'd like to print it!):
Other News
-
Polygon's Charlie Hall wrote up this interview with Jake & Tamas, accompanied by some early prototype screenshots (those of you who've been following the game since its inception will recognize the first few passes at the art treatment):
Read the interview at Polygon
.
-
Elizabeth Simins wrote & drew this lovely comic about getting lost on the highway in KRZ:
Read the "Bad at Games" comic
.
-
We totally re-wrote the conversation user interface. It looks and behaves the same (but animates better in some perhaps-subtle ways), fixes some weird line-feeding bugs, and adds some new functionality for playful and weird text behavior during conversations. Look for some of that in Act II.
-
We made an experimental tablet/touch-screen build of the game. This is on hold for now while we focus on getting Act II out, but we hope to revisit it shortly thereafter. It feels really good on a tablet so far, but there's a significant amount of work and testing to do in order to get it released on any specific platform.
-
Not specifically KRZ-related, Jake gave a talk at the Notacon conference in Cleveland last week called "Bad Games Arcade." It's mostly about kitsch and a playful approach to game design:
Watch the talk on YouTube
.
Off to a bit of a rocky start with these newsletters; we totally missed the March newsletter due to our festival travels & scatterbrains, but we'll march on and use the May newsletter to pick apart some of Act II shortly after its release.
Thanks for your patience and support!
Jake+Tamas
