The team and I (Adriaan) are proud to release the On Tour areas as a free update today!! Watch the trailer:
I'm especially proud of Celine and Sylvain for once again coming up with hundreds of funny stories and interactions. For this update, Celine took over pretty much all level and interaction design from me and, I hate to admit it, probably came up with more inventive interactions than I did! Playing Sylvain and Celine's first draft of the new areas was perhaps the first time I played Hidden Folks without knowing every little detail about it - the closest thing to being a player of the game as opposed to the developer - and I was blown away and laughed out loud all the time. You folks are lucky to be on the player side of this game and I'm super jealous!!!
Pricing changes
As announced a few weeks ago, we decided to include all areas in your original 'Hidden Folks' purchase, including the Beach and the new On Tour areas, for no additional charge. To justify the 3+ years we've been working on Hidden Folks since release, we've increased the price of the game only for new players.
Yeah, to be clear: making the On Tour areas took a team of 3 people and a few part-time others an entire year to make. After the last free update, I got hundreds of comments and emails from folks saying they would have gladly paid for the update. We really, really appreciate that people want to support us, and if you feel that way, here are two things that help:
- leave a review on the store page.
- tell a friend about Hidden Folks.
<3
The On Tour areas
I won't spoil too much here but you can be sure to see and interact with all kinds of instuments, bands, weird objects, animations, and, weirdest of all, you'll get to hear the mouth sound music that Martin put together!! It's weird and wild that it kind of works and the tunes are totally stuck in my mind. Some screenshots of the areas:
While illustrator Sylvain Tegroeg drew all those cute little characters and instruments and objects, game designer and artist Celine Veltman did nearly all level and interaction design for the On Tour areas. Martin Kvale made mouth music with our mouth sounds, Bram van Dijk helped us write all the kind-of-funny clues, Mitty Venbrux made the On Tour trailer, and Aran Koning did some nerd stuff for Hidden Folks on Android and Nintendo Switch. I (Adriaan de Jongh) improved the game's interface, fixed bugs, set up store pages, wrote this newsletter, and did countless of other small things. And last but not least: the incredible Hidden Folks community translated the game to 21 languages! I'm so grateful.
New areas in the future?
It's possible that On Tour is the game's final content update. We know you want more; some of you remind me of this every week! But after five years of making Hidden Folks, we also want to make different, weird, new stuff! We hope you can savor the On Tour update. Maybe you can even replay parts of the game you nearly forgot! Regardless, thank you for playing and for enabling our incredible journey!!!
See you around, folks.
Adriaan