Hi all!
It’s been a while since I (Alex) wrote directly to you guys. Since my brother and colleague took the whole PR and community management flag, I focused on the game production (which is a good thing), but today we have a rather important announcement: we are going to push the game release to a TBA date around August/September.
Why?
The quick answer to this is: Kona is our first game and we don’t want to screw it up, hence the need to work on it a bit longer than expected.
TL;DR: Exposing our game here on Early Access was the best way we could find to gather feedback and fix issues efficiently. We could respect our commitment and ship Kona on the market in May, but the thing is, we got some really interesting and valid feedback/suggestions that we would really like to address. Plus, as you can see on the banner image, we went to PAX East in Boston last week. It was really nice and people really enjoyed the game. However, we felt that some areas would benefit from some adjustments. The bottom line is: we concluded that the best thing for our community and the project is to inject all the profits from Early Access, plus some contract work money, into making the game better.
What are you going to do with the additional time?
Since I do not want to write (and have you read) a novel about it, here are the major elements we are going to work on this summer:
- Improve English texts and narration;
- Improve the game performance;
- Rebrand the game (new logo, banners, UI, etc.);
- Make the UI more clear (especially the “combine” feature);
- Improve wolves AI;
- Adding Italian, Spanish, German and Russian translations;
- + Surprises!
Here’s a preview of our starting point for rebranding (don’t tell anyone):
(Art, not final, by Alex Asfour)
Note that we will be trying several approaches, so that could definitely change in the future.
What should we expect to see in upcoming updates?
Kona is an adventure game. Unlocking more story-related areas would mean spoiling (more of) the game. Most of the changes we’ll introduce will be about how the player interacts with things in the game world. For the other 2/3 of the game, we want to keep it for the final release as you will appreciate it even more at that point.
We also plan to introduce a special community area in the game. We are still discussing about what it should be (could be a house, room, or else), and we’ll soon make an announcement on this. The area will show off things made by you guys. It could be one line of text per user or some drawings. The goal is to have a hidden easter egg “credits” area. We want that place to be special and community-driven.
More on that later!
Conclusion
Pushing the game back (again) is not an easy decision (we’d rather spend the summer enjoying the sun than working with snow), but a necessary one. We want all of you guys to enjoy Kona in its highest-quality form. We hope you all understand our position. Thank you all for all the good comments (and even for the bad ones :P) in the forums, the lengthy and helpful reviews, the beautiful screenshots in the gallery and for being simply awesome!
As always, you can reach us anytime on Steam, GOG, social networks and at [email protected].
Cheers!
Alex