Tanglewood Kickstarter was a SUCCESS!

[BigEvilCorporation]

...and a huge success at that! We achieved 114% of our funding goal, hitting not one, but (close enough to) two of our stretch goals!

A huge, massive thank you to each and every one of you, for every pledge, share, like, retweet, mention, and comment. For every Let's Play video, for every news article, for every interview, for every piece of praise, advice and criticism, for all the suggestions, for all the testing, for all the prooff reading help, and for everything else that helped us kick start this dream.

What happens next?

Paperwork! Glorious, glorious paperwork! We've taken on board a superteam of developers to help bring this game to life - Simon Butler (of Ocean Software, Team 17, Atari, Probe), Armen "Adoru" Mardirossian (of Pier Solar and Pier Solar HD), Nathan "freezedream" Stanley, and Matthew Weekes (of Freedom Planet) - who all need plans and designs and tasks and contracts.

Some backing tiers have special requirements that we need to act on immediately - Developer Edition backers need hooking up to our development process, we need to help our Design a Monster backer, well, design a monster, and plans need arranging to have the custom Tanglewood Mega Drive consoles created sooner rather than later.

We need to finalise the level designs, one of the most important parts of any game. We have designs for most of the levels in place, but the feedback we've had from over 1,600 downloaders has been monumentally useful for improving our demo level, and we think some refinements in this area would be advantageous for the rest. We're now in a position where we can rapidly prototype sections of levels and puzzles, making changes and tweaks to perfect the experience and ensure the game is fun to play from beginning to end, so we're going to get it right.

Matt

[elefas]

Hi Matt!

Any progress update on the project? It has been longtime since the last update. How is everything going?

kind regards,
elefas

[BigEvilCorporation]

It's going great! Very manic, lots happening, all terrifying, but very nearly ready to show off some new stuff

The artists and composer have been very busy; we have all-new graphics and audio in. There are lots of gameplay improvements, tweaks and bug fixes, but most importantly there's been a big emphasis on player movement improvements - unanimous feedback from the Kickstarter demo was that Nymn needs to respond to controls faster, and move a bit more fluidly. I've re-thought about terrain traversal and have a few tricks to show off. It's now faster and - I hope - more fun to just move around.

I've also been addressing some technical backlog, to make the editor and tools more pleasant to use. Once the engine is nearing completion and I'm happy that the mechanics are working together properly, it'll be a long and drawn-out process of getting the rest of the levels in, so the tools need to be in top condition.

The next announcement will come with a completely revamped release of the demo, with all the shiny new visuals and tricks, so you can compare side-by-side with the old and see just how far we've come in such a short space of time. I'm aiming for mid to late March to release this.

I'm excited, but I can't rush it out the door, this demo needs to be special. I'll let you know when it's ready

[elefas]

Thanks Matt! Very interesting update, keep up the good work!