In our first two weeks back on the game side of the project, we’ve made some good progress. First among those is getting to some of the improvements and suggestions that have been on the back burner since the Early Explorer release and our time showing the game at IndieCade, IGF, and SxSW.
- We’ve planned out some changes to the introductory levels, to better control pacing and give the player more control over how and when KRIS learns certain vital pieces of information about himself.
- We’ve implemented a number of small technical changes that the later levels need: for instance, now activating a socket can reveal hidden sockets that depend on the parent socket to make sense. (This feature has long been planned for the 5th and 6th levels.)
- We completed the design and layout of the complex 6th level (“the maze”), leaving only the final level of the game to be implemented: this is one of our priorities in the coming week. The content for these levels still needs to be written also, which will also be ongoing over the next few weeks.
- We’re in the midst finishing up the written content for the 3rd (Aaron) and 4th (Jacob) levels, which was started way back before the Kickstarter but is now being dusted off and completed.
- We’ve updated the music engine to the latest idea of how it’s going to work, and added all the hooks for UI sounds. Our composer is working over the next week to fully build out the sounds for one level.
We’ve also invited our Kickstarter backers at the “Author” and “Legendary Author” levels to help us with some special pieces of content. (If you were a backer at these levels and haven’t received these instructions, please let us know at [email protected].) We’re looking forward to seeing what people come up with!
Compendium Update: the printers have been analyzing all eighty pages of the book with a fine-tooth comb, and have sent a few back with questions or concerns. (For instance, we have some images that are deliberately low-res or pixelated for artistic effect; when they quite rightly brought these to our attention, we had to assure them this was in fact deliberate!)
We’re about ready to move on to the next phase, which will be getting a few physical proofs.
Another chance to see us gab: We’ll be talking Ice-Bound and interactive story this weekend at Indie Revolution Expo, a free online indie game convention happening now and continuing through the weekend. Check out our panel “The Future of Truly Interactive Story,” streaming tomorrow (Saturday July 18th) at 12 noon EST.
