That’s right, Friends and Neighbors! We’ve cut prices on thousandsof Rewards and Add Ons!(well, maybe not thousands-Kickstarter will only let us cut prices on Rewards and Add Ons noone has claimed yet), but we’ve reduced prices on everything possible! Winnebagos? We’ve got a herd of Winnebagos! We’re Given’em away!!
AND, if you pledge today we’ll throw in a free lifesize cardboard standup of Robert you can display in your living room, and a 5 disk cd set of “Robert Goulet Sings the Spirituals of His People”! (Well, no you don’t really get either of those, but you get the idea. This sale is big. Huge! The Hugest!!! )
So run, don’t walk! And grab the bargains today!!!
We’ve lowered the required donations level for our two favorite Stretch Goals to help us get there.
One of my personal favorites is an updating of the GK2 Beast Within Opera! This clip talks a bit about how that could happen! Thanks to Sean Parker for his video skills on this and other clips!
A Huge Thank you to all of you who are making this project possible! Let’s get to 45k in the next 12 days so we can do this!
Read a great game lately? Played a great story? Now’s your chance! Lori’s prequel adventure to Rogue to Redemption, Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale, is now available on Steam and itch.io. We’re calling it a visual novel adventure, and we hope that you – our greatest fans and supporters – will love it.
The Summer Daze stories are designed to fit between Hero-U games. Tilly’s Tale takes place in the Summer before Rogue to Redemption, and helps explain Terk’s attitude towards Shawn. In Tilly, Terk has already met a rogue, and met his match.
The second Summer Daze game is Ifeyo’s Adventure. It stars a Wizard student, and is a lead-in to Hero-U: Wizards Way, should we ever manage to make that game. Third up is Sami’s Story, with a half-human, half-Corgi Warrior.
Sierra’s “Quest” games, and Quest for Glory in particular, are best known for their storytelling. Years after playing them, fans keep returning to the games to experience their favorite characters and scenes again. Lori kept that in mind when she created the characters and events in Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption.
But adventure games, and especially role-playing adventure games, sometimes make it challenging to experience those stories. Everyone gets stuck sometimes on a tough puzzle or difficult combat encounter. Sometimes we crave that challenge, but other times we just want to collaborate with the game on experiencing a great story.
That’s one of the reasons we created Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale as a visual novel adventure. Just as Quest for Glory crosses the RPG and adventure game genres, Summer Daze is a visual novel and an adventure game. You’re reading a story while making choices that affect dialogue and relationships. We think of it as the “good parts” of adventure gaming.
What kind of story is it? I like to use words like “funny,” “charming,” and “heart.” You’ll love Tilly Appleberry, and her connection with Quest for Glory. She’s the adopted daughter of Amelia Appleberry, the healer in Spielburg. She’s mischievous, but sweet. Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale is the opposite of high-stakes, violent games. It’s gentle, charming, and funny.
Each scene has a gorgeous vignette-style background, painted by JP Selwood. Tilly and other characters have “talker” images, as in Quest for Glory and Hero-U, but there are no small characters walking around. Instead, you navigate by clicking on maps on the University indoor and outdoor areas. All of the conversations have full professional voiceover acting, as well as on-screen text. Zehra Fazal of Young Justice stars as Tilly, and the entire voice cast is amazing!
Original box cover concept before we shortened the title
You Might Already Own Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale
When we started working on Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, we optimistically guessed that we could complete the game in under 18 months, with sequels every 9-12 months after that. With that optimistic schedule in mind, we offered digital keys to Summer Daze: Wizard’s Way as an add-on to the R2R Kickstarter campaign. Almost 500 backers chose that add-on.
As we all know now, development and production of Hero-U: R2R took more than five years, and we could see that sequels were impractical under our tight indie developer budgets. We came up with the visual novel format as a way to get back on schedule. We also decided that backers who preordered Hero-U: Wizard’s Way would instead get the first Summer Daze game.
It’s been a long wait, but that game is here! Log on to BackerKit with your original credentials, and check the Digital Downloads page of the “Hero-U Adventure Game.” If you pre-ordered Wizard’s Way, you’ll find a Steam key that you can redeem for Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale.
If you have any questions or problems with this, you can contact us through BackerKit, or by sending email to support (at) hero-u (dot) net. Make sure to include your Kickstarter/BackerKit email address so that I can find your account.
Now Is the Time!
If you don’t own Tilly’s Tale yet, there’s no better time than now to buy it on Steam or itch.io. Steam will give us better placement, and more promotion, if enough people buy the game there. Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale is only $20, a bargain for a four-year Lori Cole project with professional voice acting. Everyone wins!
As always, the game is DRM-free. The Steam version includes achievements that will help you keep track of the many paths through the story. Learn more, wishlist, or purchase the game, at Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale on Steam (steampowered.com).
We hope you’ll love the new Summer Daze series as much as you loved our previous games – Quest for Glory, Mixed-Up Fairy Tales, Castle of Dr. Brain, Shannara, and Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. Buying Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale, and telling your friends about the new series, is a great way to help us continue making indie adventure and role-playing games.
This is just a quick update to let you know that Lori and I are doing a livestream at 2 pm PDT today, a little under 3 hours from this post. We’ll be giving a sneak preview of the second Summer Daze at Hero-U game, Summer Daze: Ifeyo’s Adventure. We’ll answer questions about Ifeyo and Tilly, and generally talk about developing our RPG and adventure games.
The stream will be at transolargames – Twitch. If you aren’t able to make it, the stream will be available later at Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption – YouTube, along with many previous streams, game trailers, and other content related to our games. Subscribe to that channel to keep up with our new posts.
Look for another update here in a day or two, with more information about Tilly’s Tale and Ifeyo’s Adventure. If you pre-ordered “the second Hero-U game” on Kickstarter or BackerKit, you can find your Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale key on the digital downloads page on BackerKit. The next update will have more information on the relationship between Hero-U and Summer Daze.
As mentioned in prior updates we’ve been busy working on the game. We decided to enhance the heck out of our VR version, and roll it to several more platforms (SteamVR, PS VR2, PicoVR). We also on the precipice of releasing the PS4 and Xbox versions. Both have passed certification and will be launched soon. We’re also tinkering with our user interface to allow effortless and intuitive gameplay on touch-screen tablets and phones with touch screens. Lots to come!
We’ve also been updating the core game, largely to make the game more fun for the player. One update I’m particularly proud of that we added is a television that players can discover near the beginning of the game. Roberta is featured on the television, personally giving guidance for how to maximize enjoyment as you play. We also had the idea to write and produce a short documentary on the history of the game. We added that, too. In doing our research for the video we were surprised by all we found. This game is deep. More on that later in this newsletter.
In this edition…
“Historic” Update
A livestream interview with Roberta Williams!
We have an exhibit on Colossal Cave at the VCF East 2023 show!
Thank you for reading.
Howdy, Colossal Cavers!
Over 300,000,000 years ago, water started tricking through some limestone, eventually carving what is currently known to be the longest known, connected cave system on the planet: Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, USA.
Did you know that the woman who made this discovery was a tiny programming caver, named Patricia Crowther? This tiny, but colossal discovery is known as being the speleological equivalent of summiting Mount Everest, for the first time.
Did you know that her husband, William Crowther, also a programming caver, had an integral role in programming the packet switching between the first 4 connected “routers” (Interface Message Processors) making up the ARPANET (the precursor to today’s internet)? Will played a pivotal role in the invention of the Internet. Yes, that internet.
Did you know that Will Crowther built the first text-adventure game around muddy little maps he’d made with his wife? Inspired by 60’s style AI (known as ELIZA) and made as a bonding exercise with his young daughters, ADVENT (as it was known at the time) would be one of the first viral games, as it spread across the ARPANET, shutting down entire departments for weeks at a time, as people were so entranced with the depth, light whimsy, and whisps of Dungeons & Dragons style fantasy.
There is so much more to this story. And you can learn all about it, in today’s update!
Please Note: This auto-update is currently only available in the version found through Steam, Epic Games, and GOG.com. We are working on ways to add it to the other consoles.
Behind the scenes, fanciful little elves are endlessly hard at work polishing the experience of playing and navigating Colossal Cave. The most recent addition is that of a dilapidated, fuzzy, old television set. We’ve added some fun and informative goodies to this TV, like a look back at the history of ADVENT and Colossal Cave. We’ve included a fully realized documentary to the game, narrated by Roberta Williams. We’ve set it up for more programs in the future. Grab a TV dinner and stay tuned!
While we’re thrilled to include this little nugget of history directly to the game, for ease of access, we’ve also added it to YouTube, for those who may prefer to watch it, online.
Live Interview with Roberta Williams at VCF East 2023
Colossal Cave Adventure, originally created by Will Crowther and Don Woods in 1976, is considered one of the first and most influential text-based adventure games. Roberta Williams, co-founder of Sierra Online and designer of Kings Quest and Phantasmagoria has come out of retirement and created a newly rendered version of Colossal Cave in full 3D, which is now available wherever games are sold.
Visitors to our exhibit can experience the original Colossal Cave game as it was played in the late 70s on the Teletype Model 33 and in the 80s on Apple III computers, as well as the IBM DOS versions that were released over the years. For those who prefer a more tactile experience, we also have the original retail boxed games on display for visitors to examine and appreciate.
But that’s not all – for those who want to take their exploration of the Colossal Cave to the next level, we offer a Virtual Reality version of the game designed by Roberta Williams. This exciting new format allows players to fully immerse themselves in the game’s world and interact with its locations and treasures in a way that was not possible with the original text-based game.
Whether you are a seasoned adventurer looking to relive the nostalgia of the original game, or a curious newcomer eager to explore one of the earliest examples of interactive storytelling, the Colossal Cave exhibit has something for everyone to enjoy.
in summary
A “historic” update to Colossal Cave is now available on Steam, GOG & Epic.
This is Zuzu. Zuzu’s human Robert Holmes has a Kickstarter running for his new album. Zuzu loves her toys, but in an act of love and commitment, she has sworn to kill and disembowel one toy a day till the goal is met.
She means business. Save a toy’s life. Pledge today!
