Last week was all about PR, customer service and whittling down a horde of bugs, but now things are finally starting to look kind of normal around here! As such, we’ve actually gotten some “new” stuff done.

A couple of days ago we added a feature which we’ve mentioned before on the blog but never got around to implement, namely the memory room!

memoryroom

Many of our bosses drop items just like regular enemies, and will eventually also drop cards. This creates a little Collector’s dilemma, where if you don’t get every drop the first time you defeat a boss, you’ll have eternal holes in your item codex for all eternity! That is of course unacceptable in a modern society, and that’s how the memory room came to be.

For every boss you defeat in the game, you’ll unlock a statue in the Memory Room. By interacting with it, you can then choose to relive the battle in order to farm items you didn’t get the first time around.

Currently, the feature isn’t very balanced since the boss drops are both strong and worth a lot of money. That worked well when the boss items were rare, but less so if you can fight them an infinite number of times! While the economic aspect can be solved by making the items sell for less money, the issue of having easily farmable but very strong items is a bit more tricky.

There are a bunch of ways to deal with this, though. One is to simply add a fee to battle memories, so you can’t fight over and over without cost.

Another is to adjust drop rates when in a memory battle. Boss drops have pretty high drop rates to compensate for the fact you only fight a boss once, and we’d like to keep it that way for when you meet them on your natural journey through the game but obviously it doesn’t work when you can farm the bosses.

A third option is to rethink the drops which bosses have, and only focus on either flavor drops (style hats, furniture, etc) or crafting materials that require at least another rare material. That way we’ll prevent having boss farming be the be all end all way of getting certain gear upgrades. We’ll play around with it until we get something that feels nice!

Marino, our Gary of the game, has received quite a make over! The main reason for this was that the old sprite looked a lot like the officials of the Collector’s Headquarter, something we wanted to avoid to set him apart more.
RemakeMarino

Since Marino is a recurring character, he needed to be able to do more interesting stuff than just walking around being smug. Below are a few animations foreshadowing things to come!
MarinoWalkFenchStance

 

Wow, it’s actually out there! Still far from finished, of course, but out in the garden interacting with the real world (under close supervision).

The impressions have generally been favorable! We’ve gotten some big mentions from streamers and from video game news sites like PC Gamer and Giant Bomb, but what’s making us most happy is the great response from individual fans, and the activity over at the forums! People are reporting bugs in style (good labels, screens/videos) and providing feedback, and also helping each other out which is great to see.

One big worry was that people wouldn’t read up on the game beforehand, and get angry when the Story Mode didn’t have that much content, but you’ve all been very cool about that and spent time doing all the other stuff!

Speaking of other stuff, the Arcade Mode seems to bring a lot of grief and anger, which is great since our Black Ferret Doomsday Device is fueled by our player’s tears! Thanks bees!

In all seriousness, though, Arcade Mode seems to be a very appreciated feature while also being the target of many frustrated tweets and forum posts. So far, though, we’ve found that the difficulty of the mode has a net positive effect on how it’s ultimately perceived! The high difficulty improves the replay value, the satisfaction of getting better and also something for people to talk about. How to beat the Story Mode isn’t exactly something that needs to be explained (for the most part), but the community has yet to defeat Oldman’s Furious Giga Slime!

So, a question that’s come up a few times and we’re sure is on many people’s mind is: how did it all go?

Honestly, we don’t really know as we don’t have any data to compare it to, but we feel it’s gone pretty well so far! We’ve decided to provide full transparency, so here’s some insight into how the sales have been, and what that actually means in terms of paying rent and buying things to eat:

We’ve currently sold 2954 copies of the game over all tiers (4 packs counting as 4 games, of course). Most are simply copies of the game, but quite a lot have been chipping in with some extra funds for the higher tiers. We even have a master collector and a legendary blacksmith lurking about in the forums!

Of these, 2000 were sold the first two days, after which the sales have been slowing down considerably, but we’re still doing fine at roughly 10-15 sales per hour.

Despite the slowdown, we’ve had noticeable bumps when popular streamers or sites have featured us, such as ZiggyD’s stream and a post by PC Gamer. When we simultaneously got featured on Giant Bomb and by this Brazilian dude (you don’t need to know Portuguese to get hyped by this guy), our website went down for an hour. :(

So let’s do some number crunching, giving you insight into what’s actually involved when calculating profits on game sales! We don’t think many people are aware of how this process looks, but it’s actually pretty good to know if you’re interested in how much money people are actually bringing in from their Kickstarters, pre-orders or just sales in general.

We’ve sold for $50,260 before VAT, payment processing and Humble Bundle’s share. VAT differs from place to place. In Sweden, 20 % of the total amount is paid in VAT. Payment processing (Paypal or Amazon) is ~5 % off the transaction. Humble Bundle then takes the very humble cut of 5 % (source). What’s left after this is then wired to our bank.

So, the $50,260 in sales becomes $36,287 paid out. Now, the Swedish state takes over and wants some return on investment for all the free education it’s handed out over the years. On all money we earn to the company, we’ll have to pay employer fees and taxes, which is about 31 % and 33 % respectively. That brings it down to $16775, but we are three people, so in the end, we get $5,592 each. (Formula is SALES * 0,8 * 0,95 * 0,95 * 0,69 * 0,67)

We’re not rich (yet!!) but we’re very happy with those results! Many years as students have taught us how to survive on a low income so that’s quite a bit of money to us.

A handy formula for people who don’t like math is this:

For every copy we sell we’ll all be able to survive for one more hour.

So here’s to hoping the sales stay above one copy per hour! :D

Okay, so it’s not “the date”, but it’s one of them! Namely, the date we’ll open up for pre-orders!

Ready? Ok, here it is:

Wednesday, April 16th

And there you have it! This Wednesday, on April 16th, we’ll open up for pre-orders! More specifically, we’ll open them up sometime in the Swedish afternoon of April 16th, which means in the morning for Americans, and night for Aussies.

In preparation for that, we’ll share some specific information regarding the pre-orders.

First, let’s talk about updates! We’ve decided to split the beta into two branches: Stable and Frontline. You’ll automatically have access to both with your Steam key.

The Stable Beta will be updated episodically. Updates can take everything between 1-3 months. The Stable Beta is for people who want an absolute minimum of bugs. It’s mostly recommended for streamers and YouTubers, or if you don’t really care about update frequency.

The Frontline Beta is, essentially, a beta of the beta. This will be updated whenever we damn well please, which probably means around every 1-2 weeks, like the Steam beta up until this point. People who play this version will help us out a lot by testing and giving feedback on new features and balance.

When enough content and features have been amassed in the Frontline version, we will feature freeze and bug fix for a week or so, and then do a new Stable build. So, in short, if stability is more important to you than update frequency and helping us with bugs and feedback, keep it at Stable.

Second, we’d like to remind everyone that this is in fact only a beta, and that you should think twice before purchasing. If you want to support us, then it’s an easy choice, but if you only want to pre-order to play the game, please be aware of the state of the game: it’s not finished!

And finally, we’ve gotten a lot of requests regarding the purchase tiers! We’ll have something for poor students and rich philanthropists both. Below is a full list of all the tiers we’ll have available:

$15 – Slime Tier
* Full game on release (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Instant beta access (Steam key + DRM-free version).
Also available as 4-pack for $45.

$20 – Rabby Tier
* Full game on release (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Instant beta access (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Unique hat only available through pre-orders (Picture | GIF).
Also available as 4-pack for $60.

$30 – Jumpkin Tier
* Full game on release (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Instant beta access (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Unique hat only available through pre-orders (Picture | GIF).
* Full Soundtrack by Andrew Riley of Lucky Lion Studios on release.

$50 – Snowbacca Tier
* Full game on release (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Instant beta access (Steam key + DRM-free version).
* Unique hat only available through pre-orders (Picture | GIF).
* Full Soundtrack by Andrew Riley of Lucky Lion Studios on release.
* Digital Production Booklet (.pdf) with behind the scenes design decisions, step-by-step art, early concepts and much more! Available on release.

$100 – Bottomless Bag Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Design an equipable item (not visible) that can be found in the game!

$200 – Carpenter Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Design a furniture item for the housing part of the game!

$300 – Fabulous Hatter Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Design a hat or facegear that can be equipped in the game!

$500 – Master Sculptor Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* A statue in the game will be made to your likeness (or the likeness of whoever you chose)!

$750 – Legendary Blacksmith Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Design a weapon that can be equipped in the game!

$1000 – Collector Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Become or design an NPC found in the game!

$2000 – Master Collector Tier
* Full Snowbacca Tier.
* Become or design an NPC found in the game!
* Design a sidequest for the game!

That’s all for now! See you on Wednesday~

This week, as you can probably imagine, we’ve been pretty busy with preparing for the upcoming pre-order! We just updated the beta with what we hope will turn out to be a stable build we can use for the pre-order launch.

Besides all the administrative work (setting humble widgets up, making the pre-order site, etc), we’ve still hammered away quite a bit on the game! For one, we’ve added a new little main quest to the Pumpkin Woods, to make players experience the atmosphere a bit more before moving on to the temple. If you’re in the beta and have som spare time, please try the quest out and share your thoughts on the forums! It’s supposed to be played between the exams and the first temple, story wise.

We’ve also worked a bit on removing some player confusion. First off, pets now have a small aura so they can be distinguished from their bloodthirsty, farmable counterparts:

petauraWe tried to keep it subtle yet noticable, so you’ll
know what cute things to murder!

Another thing that wasn’t all that clear to player is that you can jump down certain ledges! To help with this, we’ve added small arrows that appear when you get close to a ledge from which you can jump down. If this doesn’t work, we’ll probably have to implement escalators instead.

JumpdownarrowWait, how did he get up there without turning off the bullets?!

Apart from this, Vilya has kept on updating portraits to the new style! Here are a couple of them, step by step:

ninja schoolkid

As for Fred, he’s been working on some juicy animations for the new quest as well as the enemies of the Season Change Temple, who are slowly but surely being brought to life! The knight has taken its first steps while the Wizard is doing his best not using feet at all.
KnightRun WizardIdle

This week we have so many announcements to make that there’s not even room for game progress to be shown! So let’s dive right into it.

First off, after over two years of development we’ve finally opened up an official forum. Yes, it’s true! We’re using the XenForo forum software, and so far everything is working really well!

Forumscreen

The forum is all-compassing and have sections for both general discussion and feedback from all our followers, beta testers or not! Get over there, register and hang out!

Even more exciting – and who thought something could be more exciting than a forum – is that our plans for Early Access have finally taken enough form to be shared!

We’ll be taking pre-orders through the Humble Widget, which means everyone who pre-orders the game will get both a DRM-free copy and a Steam key.

There won’t be a separate beta tier. Instead we include instant beta access in the base price of $15 (about €11/£9). In traditional crowd funding fashion, we’ll also have several reward tiers if anyone feels more money needs to be thrown around!

preorderpreview2No, you’re not dreaming. We have a hat as a reward!

Our hopes with this funding drive is to get enough income to replace our student loans, letting us entirely focus on the game 100 % without having to (barely) pass courses! There’s also been a huge community demand to open up the gates to the beta. There are over 3500 posts in the beta application thread, and it’s still growing faster than we require new testers!

Now, people will be able to try out a demo to get a feel if this is a game for them, and then decide whether they want to support the development to get beta access or not!

The exact date for the opening of this pre-order is not set in stone, but it will happen in the next 2-3 weeks!

And so the last piece of news is that we’ll invite 40 new testers later this week! There are some adjustments to the story mode we want some fresh insights on before the Early Access goes live.

The testers will be, like always, selected at random form the IndieDB thread. You’ll receive a message asking if you’re still interested in beta access, and if you are, we’ll send you a Steam beta key!

Hopefully, you’re as excited about all this as we are!

PS: Check out the forum!