DROD: The Second Sky -- Beta Testing
Hello, everyone! We hope you enjoyed the 2014 Winter Olympics. Here in the northern hemisphere, winter is now coming to a close and spring is beginning. Caravel has been hard at work wrapping up "
The Second Sky"
. We're now into beta testing, and the process has been going well so far. We’re so excited to be sharing the game with you soon! Our testers are doing a great job of rooting out (no pun intended) every little issue in the TSS hold, balancing difficulty in a few places, and we've found and fixed some important code bugs. On the whole, the build appears to be stable, and it's mostly functional issues we're addressing at this point.
Feedback from testers on the overall TSS experience has been quite positive so far. Lots of great feedback for the levels themselves, how we handled new and old characters, the beautiful new music composed by Emmett Plant and Jon Sonnenberg, and also for the great art created by Alex Kowalczyk. Also, we have a stellar cast of voice actors to reprise previous roles, including Sten Ryason who’s back to voice Beethro, along with Tony Porter, Steve Anderson, Daniel Pugh, Logan West, Michael Abbott, and more. Some testers have played through most areas twice now! I can tell they're dedicated testers, and they seem to be enjoying the journey as well.
Steam Greenlight
We're working on a Steam Greenlight page for TSS. About all of the content is up, and soon you'll be able to go and see it for yourself. We've started working on a new trailer video, and we'll wait until it's up in order to make the Greenlight page public. At that point, we're hoping for a lot of up-votes and positive comments for TSS from the get-go so that we'll have greater opportunity to share our creation with the Steam player community at large. More news on this in the next few weeks!
Edit: Here's the link to
the DROD:TSS Greenlight page:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93828972
TSS Pre-orders
We're opening up pre-orders for TSS! Pre-ordering (via BMT Micro) will let you register your license on the Caravel Forum, so you can download and enjoy the game as soon as it's publicly available. At that point, you can either download the game from BMT Micro or from the Downloads page on the Caravel Forum. There are some added perks to ordering we’re still working out the details for that we'll disclose in a few more weeks, in our next Illumination.
Game + music bundle
If you've played DROD RPG, then you're already familiar with Emmett Plant's beautiful and engaging music. He has composed ten new and improved thematic tracks for TSS. You can hear one of them already in the TSS teaser trailer, and others are themed to characters like First Archivist, thematic moments like the Grand Event, and more. These tracks aren't available as part of the three new room styles composed by Jon. As part of our arrangement, they won’t be featured for general use in the level editor. However, after considering feedback from many fans about making Emmett’s music available, we've worked out a nice option for a TSS game+music bundle. By ordering this bundle, you can download a lossless version of his TSS music collection for your listening pleasure.
Also, as part of this bundle, we worked out an agreement with Emmett that ordering the bundle grants you a license to use any of his tracks in your own holds. If you pre-order this option, you can start listening to his music right away. You can buy this option for $5 more than the basic game. If you decide to go with just the game, Emmett is placing his music collection up on the iTunes store, so you'll be able to order it separately from there in the future, though I'm expecting that the deal won't be as good as in this bundle.
Edit:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-second-sky/id829214897
Pre-order link for the TSS game+music bundle:
https://secure.bmtmicro.com/cart?CID=7477&PRODUCTID=74770032
Pre-order TSS only:
https://secure.bmtmicro.com/cart?CID=7477&PRODUCTID=74770028
We’re nearing the end of our journey, and soon yours will begin!
Happy DRODing,
Mike
____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.
[Last edited by mrimer at 05-28-2014 10:06 PM]
You are the wind beneath my lazy wings.
