We know that hundreds of individuals (mostly 2x Kickstarter tiers, add-on keys and some late Ko-Fi supporters) didn't receive Hawthorn's Proof-of-Concept playtest keys. We apologize that so many supporters couldn’t get into this weekend's playtest. We even heard of people taking time off work to play and not being able to receive the keys in time to take advantage of that time off. That really sucks and I'm personally very sorry to anyone that this affected in that way.
Here’s a quick video update:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AbyYYEeKX7Y
We were notified on Sunday by our email campaign application/platform that our account was frozen. Then Monday afternoon (after I already filmed this video), they responded to say that there was a "complaint" and it triggered an automatic freeze. They reviewed our account and determined that we weren't spammers and restored access within a few hours of the campaign ending.
We will attempt to send out keys again over the next week ahead of the next playtest. You can redeem the key in Steam even if the playtest isn't active, so at least you'll be ready to go for the next playtest! Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate that you all have been understanding as we figure this out.
We have also received overwhelming love and support from the community and from playtesters playing the Proof-of-Concept Demo. The overall sentiment towards the demo has been positive. This lets us know that we are on the right track and gives us confidence moving forward.
We even saw some players trying Hawthorn on their Steam Deck!
Here are some of our favorite screenshots from playtesters:
We are going to be looking over your feedback and will make a post soon about the bugs that are already fixed in the current build of the game. We will catalog and prioritize bugs that we didn't know about and determine where in the roadmap they should land. It was great to see the Village Council Channel being lively and active with excitement for Hawthorn.
If you haven't already, please be sure to jump into our Discord to join in on the festivities and as always please Wishlist and follow Hawthorn on Steam. If you want to join our Village Council, to get in on future playtests, please support our small bootstrapped team in making this game on Ko-Fi.
On behalf of the Hawthorn dev team, we appreciate everyone that played and provided feedback and we are looking forward to the next one! We will be hard at work on the game in the meantime.
Sincerely,
Heather Cerlan
Co-Founder/CEO of NEARstudios