Yesterday was “Thanksgiving Day” in the U.S., and we are very thankful for all our wonderful fans and supporters.  Thank you again, everyone!  We are very excited about moving from the uncertainty of the Kickstarter phase to the chaos and overtime of the design and production phases.  Most (99%) of the payments from backers have cleared, and we will have access to funds in about two weeks.

I will start sending Backer Surveys in the next few days so that you can provide a shipping address, tell us which add-ons you want, and so on. If your rewards include keys to previous games, we will try to get those out in December.

Meeting Tonight

Lori and I will host a meeting tonight at 8 pm EST (Saturday 1 am GMT). Visit http://www.anymeeting.com/HeroU1 at that time and enter your name, location, and email to attend.  This is a free site and we haven’t used it before, so we’ll all learn as we go.  Up to 200 people can get in to the meeting, there is a chat window to ask questions, and you can visit the site later to hear the recording.

Post-Kickstarter Store

We now have a PayPal page for people who missed, or were unable to contribute to, the Kickstarter.  It allows you to back the project with reward tiers identical to the Kickstarter $20 – $500 tiers.  We will also add a Donate button soon if you just want to contribute.

Visit – or send your friends to – the Hero-U KS Store at http://www.hero-u.net/get-hero-u.html#storetop. You can purchase with a PayPal account or with any major credit card through PayPal.  All purchases made at the KS Store through February will count towards project stretch goals.

We are not selling add-ons through the store at this time.  We will be adding a separate page for them later.  For now, there are some school-related items available at http://www.cafepress.com/herobazaar. Purchases at the Hero Bazaar are print on demand, so you will get them quickly, but we can’t count them towards project stretch goals.

Partner Projects That You Will Enjoy

Some people have the idea that there is a “gaming pie” (mmm, pumpkin), and one slice of it for all the adventure game sales.  So if a lot of people buy one adventure game, all the others suffer.  To this I say, “Stuff(ing) and nonsense!”  Each successful adventure game gives players more fun and helps the rest of us too.  So please support these games if you can.

There is still time to back the Shadowgate CRPG. They are almost at their goal with 56 hours left – http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zojoi/shadowgate.

The other three games I will mention were all successfully funded on Kickstarter, and are being created by “Sierra On-Line Alumni”.  Ken Williams got behind us because we are part of “the rebirth of the spirit of Sierra”.  All of us made fun games in the 90’s, and now we’re showing you what we can do with modern computers. (We give thanks for not having to ship a game on 8 floppy disks!)

The folks at Replay Games, and especially Josh Mandel, gave us a lot of valuable publicity towards reaching our goal. They are making a new and improved version of Leisure Suit Larry 1 over at https://www.replaygamesinc.com/.

We also got some big boosts from SpaceVenture, the new game by Space Quest creators Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy.  You can back their new game at http://guysfromandromeda.com/paypal-reward-tiers-spaceventure/.

Jane Jensen – designer of the Gabriel Knight games – has a new game studio, Pinkerton Road. Her first new game is Moebius, and she has several other games planned.  You can join her CSG (Community Supported Gaming) group at http://pinkertonroad.com/join-csg/.