Humans of Earth! It is that time again, or possibly past that time. No matter: grab your favorite liquid, prepare a good repast, and buckle your eyeballs into their sockets for the thrilling text adventure that awaits as we review the progress we’ve made on Children of Infinity and its attendant parts!Before we go deep, there are two important pieces of information we want to make sure you see, even if you read nothing else: spoiler warnings incoming as well as cards being charged in BackerKit for late backers or those who got add-ons.First: going forward, this is the last update you can expect which we guarantee has no game spoilers at all. That’s not to say all future ones will all have some, but we expect information to breach containment slowly as we show more and more finished work. Names and images of aliens in the game are likely to start entering the wild, at a minimum. Nothing that you wouldn’t find out from reading marketing material, and we do want to tell people about what’s in our game! Our Lorebook, which we’ll get deeper into in a bit, contains bits of information that we almost certainly won’t share, but that backers will receive before the game is out. They might share information and we can’t really stop them! As we start to want to explain more of what the story is about, it will become clear just who from UQM or The Beyond is involved, along with vague story arcs and possible names of villains and friends.Second: if you pledged funds on BackerKit either as a late pledge or to get add-ons, this is your final heads-up that we’ll be locking all the orders and charging your cards shortly. Please be on the lookout for emails around this, especially if we have trouble charging your credit cards. BackerKit will send emails nagging you, but be sure you’re getting them! As a reminder, we know we’ve had trouble with Apple’s private relay bouncing emails in the past. If you signed up with one of those addresses and aren’t receiving any emails from BackerKit or have any other troubles with your order/survey, please contact us. If you don’t have your survey link, just use the “Lost your survey?” section on the BackerKit page.I Wanna Be UpdatedSome of this update will be sharing the progress and what we’re working on, but we’re also going to be sharing some of our plans that are about to go into motion as well as look for your feedback on the things you’re excited about. We are in the middle of some big decisions, and they all revolve around all of you! If you pledged for physical rewards, we’ll have some information and updates on those as well.We have been mostly focused on polishing a very narrow, essential part of the game: Melee! In particular, the ‘stand-alone’ melee experience where you can pick a bunch of ships, get into a match with an AI or human opponent, and start playing. We’ve been creating VFX, updating ship hit boxes, finalizing ship designs and fixing bugs, and putting in all the work so that we can reasonably put a player who knows nothing into the Melee experience, let them pick whatever ships they want, and see if they have fun. This is a critical benchmark for being able to do what we had brought up before, which is playtesting.Getting this all right has caused our plans for what the released version of the game looks like to spread out a bit, and we’d like to share these plans with you.When our previous games were released in the 90s, they were technically two games released in sequence! Before the Ur-Quan Masters, there was a game before it which had a little taste of the story and universe told mostly through the 1v1 combat of Melee.We’re not suddenly making a separate game, but we decided it would make a lot of sense to take the Melee experience to completion as soon as possible so it could get into more hands. We put together a plan which would actually give us a total of four possible versions which would serve as our next milestones and also allow us, if we wanted to, to even make them into releases to certain audiences. We’ll talk more about our thinking and our questions about that, but let’s first talk about the four iterations of our game we’re going to be building towards. When they come out and if they come out (beyond internal playtesting) is separate and covered in a bit.Introducing our four builds: Melee Playtest, Adventure Lite, Adventure Medium, Adventure Full, and, finally, the one which is most certainly released to all of you: Version 1.0.Like a VersionThe Melee Playtest is what we’d consider the first, fully playable version of the game. It just doesn’t have the Adventure mode with the story! It will have 1v1 melee play in all of its intended forms: local against an AI, local between two players, and networked between two players. Whether or not we include all of our ships is an open question if we want it to be, mostly revolving around who plays it and if we release this version. There are actually a lot of things in this version from a tech backbone standpoint: support for different input devices (controllers and keyboards), nuances around just playing a network game, and also being able to carve our game data up into a melee only subset. This and our subsequent versions until 1.0 would be for PC/Linux/Mac working with Steam & GOG (i.e. not consoles).Adventure Lite is the first playable version of our Adventure mode with a very small slice of the story centering around just a handful of aliens. Only single player would be supported, but along with the Melee gameplay experience we’d also have HyperSpace, Interplanetary, Planetside, and Comms. The storyline would be set up to focus on a particular climax of our characters’ stories in the middle of the game. Think of it as the first third of the game’s main story, but with a lot of caveats about order since it’s an open world game. In a full playthrough, players might find other things first! It’s possible we’d actually use a limited Starmap or other barrier in HyperSpace to further contain the experience. Likely included in this version would also be the work from the Melee Playtest, just as a standalone Melee mode a la UQM.Adventure Medium is an extension of Adventure Lite but with more gameplay features. We would include Gas Giants, Interiors with Floyd, and Trading Posts. We’d also allow multiple players to play cooperatively. The amount of additional story and characters we include in this version is a bit of a sliding scale, but the main focus would be on features and not additional story.Adventure Full is what it sounds like! It is the full experience of the story. All of the game’s story would be playable from the very beginning to the end along with all of our aliens available. It would include all of the intended gameplay we had built in the prior versions and be playable solo or cooperatively.Lastly, for the purposes of the current releases, we come to version 1.0, which is just Adventure Full but with full VO support. There may be platform-specific features we didn’t fully implement which would be available here too, like Achievements or being able to play network games via your platform’s native tools (selecting your friend on GOG and joining their game through that interface, for example). It should go without saying, but we always expect some number of bugs in everything we do. 1.0 would strive to have as few bugs as possible from Adventure Full.There will be some amount of post-1.0 work, as well. At the very least, this will include localization and console versions, with the Switch taking precedence before we do the Xbox and PS5 versions. Depending on how things go, Switch and localization might just become part of a 1.0 release. One thing on the edge is really extensive modding support. We have planned for it from the very beginning, but it’s possible focusing on making it awesome will take our limited resources away, and we’d rather have a great game out first. There is a wide world of possible post-1.0 work, with plenty of people asking about things like Switch 2, but we want to finish all of our commitments we made first before making any new ones.The only date we’re firmly committed to and track for right now is our Melee Playtest being done in October. Beyond that, we have some working dates, but it depends on a few other decisions: namely what versions we release and to whom. We can at least say the absolute earliest that Adventure Full will be done is May 2026. We are going to need some time to get all of our ducks in a row to our satisfaction.Wait of the WorldOur choice to spend more time is simple: it will make the game better. However, we didn’t want to just say to ourselves and all of you that it would be that long before we can get more people playing it, since getting it in players’ hands is also a key part of making it better. The compromise became putting Melee in front and working on our Adventure Lite slice. So why did we put Melee in front and what does it have to do with the time it’ll take for Adventure?Firstly, it’s not just a fun observation to point out that we’re following in the footsteps of the originals, since there’s a reason to approach it that way. We bit off a lot for our adventure mode, and one of the challenges there which does echo the originals is that improving one area of gameplay doesn’t intrinsically improve the others. Making Melee really nice doesn’t improve gameplay on Planetside or improve the experience conversing with an alien. By freeing ourselves mentally from trying to lift the quality bar of everything needed to experience the story across the whole galaxy all at once, we can get a better, more focused result.Secondly, our writing has taken longer than planned for a few reasons, and we want to allow for that time. The one we could see coming was simple: doing voice-overs for a game like ours is hard. We don’t mean just finding a great voice actor and getting lines recorded and in the game—we mean that once we record something, it’s pretty much set in stone. We can sometimes have the opportunity to do additional recording sessions, but that involves a lot of coordination and budget concerns and is overall something we want to avoid. There’s a reason it was our costliest stretch goal, and it is a real stretch as we had predicted.Because there was a knock-on effect of slower writing leading to a further delayed voice recording schedule, it adds an extra slice of work for our Narrative Lead, Mallory. She is the one who holds the whole story in her head and can effectively communicate what’s needed to writers or voice actors. If she’s helping a voice actor, she isn’t helping a writer, building a conversation flow, or writing herself. If we had finished with our writing sooner, she wouldn’t be having to split focus. Getting everything truly, one hundred percent polished so it could be recorded involved a lot of playtime and feedback from not just Mallory, but myself as well.By creating our Adventure Lite and Adventure Full versions, we are giving ourselves permission to build and play our game without having the VO deadlines constantly in front of us. There are still some VO deadlines we are trying to hit because we have found voice actors and have a lot of writing truly done, but otherwise we get to put that on pause.After doing the scheduling shuffle where we scoped our different versions, we were immediately able to work in a more productive fashion! With new deadlines leaving more time for reviews, we also didn’t have to put time into helping voice actors do the recordings too. We feel much happier and confident about the end result since we have more time to play the game and truly experience the writing in situ, especially for characters which have longer, more complex arcs that interact with others (okay, that’s almost everyone in the game, but some are more sophisticated than others). We’ve built in additional buffer time for some of those characters so we get a chance to revisit them too.The last reason our writing has been taking longer is that our writers needed more time than we gave them. Some reasons were not on the writers as we called out above. If we can’t review it, they can’t finish it! However, some of our writers were directly impacted by international, armed conflicts. For obvious reasons they have needed more time to finish their work, and we really couldn’t have predicted or imagined the impact because we’ve never dealt with it. We all wish for a world where people aren’t dealing with life and death decisions, but they are far more important than any work for our game.These are just the things that slowed us down, with a few nods towards the advantages of taking our time that we’re already realizing. There are many upsides to having these versions, and our biggest questions are around what our strategy ought to be for actually playtesting them or trying to spin them into full releases.Left to My Own DevicesThere are effectively three types of releases to consider for any of the versions we’re working on: Playtest: Something meant to represent the final result but clearly not finished, where we’re mostly focusing on getting feedback and observing results. We wouldn’t expect someone to necessarily want to buy and play the game after this. Demo: Something meant to represent the final game which feels finished, even if the player can’t experience all of it. We would want someone having played this to leave wanting more: “Wow, this is awesome! I can’t wait to buy and play this game and tell all my friends and enemies about it!”  Early Access: Something meant to represent the final result, finished enough to be coherent and fun, and with a clearly described path toward completion. Players who want to try this would be willing to accept some missing things, but we would want players to be excited to come back and see what’s been added along the way or upon 1.0. We have written a deep dive as a separate piece if you want some more context and information on the three release types. Give it a read if you want to explore the myriad considerations we’re putting into our decisions!Here’s what we’re thinking right now.We would love to get Melee in the hands of people to play with as soon as possible. We’re not sure how wide that group of people is, but we’ve been the only ones playing Melee for far too long, and especially the 1v1 version is at a point where we’re all curious what people will do with it. Because it stands alone from Adventure mode and there’s not a lot of story secrets contained in it, we’d just love to let people play with it and have fun! We think it’s fun. We want you to try too!We have already decided to take our extra time for the story to make it just the way we want. The more we can just focus on the Adventure mode being a great experience, the better it will be. It really is like a separate game! Having an Early Access period does feel like it would be a marketing risk, since, although we aren’t labeling it as a Demo, if it feels like the game is unfinished, it can still leave a bad taste in players’ mouths. As Greg Kasavin has said regarding his own Early Access release of Hades: players pretty much expect a finished game. Parts can be missing, but what’s there better be fun to play! This tends to point us toward at least some sufficient playtesting and polish level before an Early Access, if we did that. Would Adventure Lite be a good Early Access? Or would something a little further along serve it better?If we did go down the Early Access path, we’d be pretty strict about the duration and our schedule. It wouldn’t be an indefinite, “finished when it’s done” development effort, but something with a clear schedule with deliveries we’d provide. We think some of our Adventure Lite to Medium to Full lends itself well to Early Access, since we can graduate some of the things in Medium. For example, one release could include Adventure Co-Op. The subsequent one could include Gas Giant and Interior gameplay. Then we could add on the Trading and the full HyperSpace experience. Then the one after it would be Adventure Full with the whole story, with the subsequent 1.0 release being our 1.0 release.One last simple advantage to Early Access is also income! Right now we have gotten ongoing support from Patreon as well as plenty of late backers supporting us in BackerKit, which is wonderful, but not everyone is going to pay for something they can’t play yet. More funds means more investment in our work, especially things which are at the end of our ‘feature tail’. For example, we don’t have the bandwidth to work on our ports or localization in tandem with our initial 1.0 release, but what if we could afford to bring in additional support to do that? That would be a win for us and the players looking to play on other platforms or in other languages! The final consideration is simply: what about our players who don’t need convincing about anything at all, like our Kickstarter backers? We know there are some people who are happy to wait. We also can imagine there are people who are champing at the bit and hungry to get their hands on some of our work. Is there a serendipitous path that lets everyone get what they want? For example, using the Early Access concept above, if you wanted to play it as soon as possible, you could do that! It might not have voice overs, for example, but with the above strategy of clear deadlines for features we’d be hitting, you’d know how long to wait for the features you care about.As you can see, there isn’t yet a clear decision, but there are some possibilities. We are pretty certain we want to get Melee out there as a standalone version, whether it’s a playtest or some other form. Where we’re still weighing our options is in the Adventure mode and if using one of the more limited versions as an Early Access or a Demo makes sense.Whatever we do, if we are able to follow a strategy which creates a great game, we want to do that! The better our game is, the more it makes everything... well, better. It’s better for you, and it’s better for us, since our success with this game means a brighter future too.What do you think? We want to know! While you mull that over, let’s take a look at some of the work we’ve been doing besides just planning!Take a Chance on MeleeAs you might imagine since we’ve narrowed our focus, Melee has progressed by leaps and bounds since we last shared it! All of our 38 ships are fully playable as intended and have visual effects tied to their weapons. While we finished the ships’ core art, visual effects are a separate effort to add character, color, and in some cases communicate gameplay. Shields and other unique behaviors need a visual language so they are understood by a player.Several ships have gotten audio passes, which couldn’t happen without the visual effect to indicate what the audio might be, and we started adding some of the more general audio behaviors like collision sounds for when ships bump one another, or asteroids, or the planet. All of the captains’ windows are connected, including some which have special behaviors like the Scout and the Spirit (a new ship).Last but certainly not least, we’ve put in a little bit of polish work on the theatrics of ship destruction in Melee with the one moment of calm: the sequence between destruction of your ship and picking a new one. We are very excited to bring forward a favorite feature from UQM by having a unique musical ditty play depending on the victorious alien! They were all composed by Justin McGehee who had a ton of fun making unique, expressive tunes which players will relish—or loathe, depending on which side you’re on—hearing.We put a pass into our HUD (the non-interactive UI elements on screen) to support our intended vision as well as some of our new design features, like a minimap, which is possibly nifty in 1v1 mode but will be an important part of communicating target selection when more ships get involved. There’s a lot of things which can happen before you actually start duking it out in standalone Melee. Having what we call a “lobby” where players can join up and configure their ship rosters is an important part of a match. Right now, we only support setting up a 1v1 match against either a local player, remote player, or local AI, but in the future we’ll add controls for setting up other match types with more players. The core 1v1 experience is finally working, and completing it lets us provide a setup where players can configure a match, play it, and then return to either play a rematch or reconfigure things for a different type of match. This required a lot of under-the-hood work and also was a lever for building some more complete menus.Beyond just what was needed for the lobby, our Menus (interactive UI) have also seen a ton of progress and new features. We had completed their art assets last milestone, but there was work to actually hook them up and get the correct behaviors in-game. We implemented a few of the first art pieces for regular buttons and menu frames along with unique widgets that have different interactions like checkboxes (e.g. ready?), sliders (e.g. volume), and toggles (e.g. language). are starting to have menus which don’t just look like a bunch of placeholder items and even have some of the intended user experience for buttons which interact differently, like a slider. We’ll still have more work to do here, especially for the Adventure modes with a lot of unique menuing needs, but, ironically, Adventure has already received a bit more UI love since we knew it would have some more bespoke elements like the Starmap.Mock-up of the Adventure pause menuLocal 1v1 Melee presented a unique UI challenge which was somewhat different from our other modes we had been putting effort into (online Melee, split-screen Adventure co-op). Both players share one viewport (physical gameplay screen) but each player will often want to have their own menu screen, possibly at the same time. For example, when players are selecting their ship rosters for a match of Melee, each of them should be able to independently play around in their menus to pick and change ships.Local two player roster building experience example in engine (controlled with two devices). UI art is placeholder.This was previously possible in split-screen because the menus were tied to the viewports, one-to-one. Some work had to be done for the special case of local co-op with a shared gameplay space, since that rule wasn’t valid anymore. Now we can have menus for both players in a shared viewport, and we can even follow that same rule when playing single player by letting one player control both menus—think of playing 1v1 against an AI and wanting to go change the AI player’s ship roster. We also are able to have shared menus both players can interact with locally, like the pause menu, which can overrule gameplay-specific ones like ship selection.Describing some of these nitty-gritty features, all of these things seem like features which ought to exist! They don’t until they’re created, though, and it’s not always trivial to make them. It is, however, a lot of fun to see our vision come to life for all of these seemingly small touches, which will make controlling the game fun and not frustrating. Of course we want friction and frustration in gameplay challenges that require it, but “getting into a match to play with the ships you want” shouldn’t be the hard part.We Are the RobotsAI was our term first, folks.Most recently, Fred and I have been putting work into our Ship AI for playing against computer opponents, which is important since it is needed in both stand-alone Melee or the Adventure mode. We could do a really deep dive on the ship AI at some point, but the short version is that it’s a collaboration we’re developing that combines some flexibility on my side to support different ships’ powers and creating some unique character when a human isn’t behind the helm, while also ceding the “smarts” to the smart half of the operation, Fred.We spent a couple weeks creating a decent proof of concept Melee AI probably two years ago and even showed it during our development streams. I was able to script a few unique ships around it, from simple ones like the Ur-Quan Dreadnought which just wants to shoot you to more complicated ones like the Kohr-Ah which has a more specific version of shooting based on how it controls—holding the key to launch a blade and releasing the key to stop its flight. It was enough to convince us the strategy was sound, but we left it on the shelf until recently.The way it works, at a high level, is that the AI has access to a few pieces of information: things it wants to pursue (usually the enemy ship!), objects it might want to avoid (enemy missiles, the planet), and what steps it would need to take to land a shot with its weapons. Fred’s AI code just tells me which of those are most imminent and what direction a ship should go if it wants to achieve that goal.In the case of the Druuge Mauler, it is just going to do its best to keep its distance, train its weapons on you, and fire. Its secondary power, sacrificing crew for energy, doesn’t really have much to do with the state of the world, so it doesn’t need to know as much. It’s not a terribly maneuverable ship, so it’s unlikely it would ever try to dodge fast moving things, but it would still try to steer clear of the planet. The “winning strategy” for the Druuge is just going to be focusing on the weapons all the time.In the case of the Yehat Terminator, it wants to get pretty close to you and fire as much as possible, but it also has a shield to block damage. Using the avoid rules above, a Yehat knows it doesn’t need to dodge things like enemy weapons, but it can detect when a collision is imminent and react by raising its shields. An incredibly rude version of the Arilou Skiff was also made by having it teleport any time a collision is about to occur. It’s absolutely infuriating (success!).For a Pkunk Fury, it also wants to get close to you, but it’s a fairly maneuverable ship with a very short range weapon and slow energy regeneration. The Fury pays more attention to avoidance and keeping out of range of its opponent’s weapons until it has enough energy to do some damage when it tries to close in. Since the Fury can avoid a lot of weapons fire, it will actually try to steer to avoid missiles. Once it gets in close and expends its energy, it’ll soar off until it can come in for another pass.What’s especially cool to us about this AI approach is that, while the AI can have a spectrum of ‘knowledge’ about the battle and the physical relationships of objects, ranging from perfectly calculating all trajectories to maybe being a little imperfect sometimes so it’s not too good, it can’t cheat. All the AI scripts do are emulate key presses! While they can be really good at timing the presses, they can’t do anything a human can’t do. If you’re familiar with some tool-assisted speedrunning which just plays back a sequence of inputs that a human could hypothetically do, it’s a bit like that.I could go on and on explaining the nuances of how it works, but the last, important take-away is that we’ve only found what makes a good ship AI by trying a whole bunch to make good ship AIs. As I go through each ship and try to make it behave in a way which is fun and at least understandable, I might stumble on new questions which Fred and I figure out answers to together. Until we started to make ships like the Pkunk Fury, who can avoid a lot of weapons, and the Earthling Cruiser, who can’t avoid many weapons but pretty much always wants to stay at an ideal range, we didn’t have the concept of separate chase and avoid information. Fred’s code would just give me one option, but we quickly discovered that both pieces of information would be relevant.At time of writing, we’re through almost all of the UQM ships and have done a few of the new ships as well. As we polish the AI more, we can give them additional pieces of information, like inspecting the flight and weapon characteristics of an enemy ship to slightly alter its optimal play. For example, an Androsynth Blazer should prioritize use of its comet form against a Dreadnought because it’s so slow, but it might want to consider more bubbles against a fast ship that it can’t ram as easily like a Pkunk Fury. There can be special case matchup tables as well, so a Ur-Quan Dreadnought knows not to even bother with fighters against an Earthling Cruiser, since they’ll just get shot down. It’s really cool to see our design panning out and the improvements we’re making having an impact on playing against AI in Melee. From a design standpoint, even setting up ships to just “play a certain way” that’s fun and unique, even if a human player might not always do that, is also a surprise treat. Ships have a lot of unique identity even just in the hands of a human player, but having their AI do specific things will make them even more characterful and even possibly give players ideas about how to play them.Space to FaceWe can write and write and write—and we will write and write and write—but it’s at the point where a video will be a lot easier to appreciate than our explanations. Check out the video below which just showcases some Melee gameplay as it can be experienced now. Audio levels and mixing have not been tuned yet, and there is still polish to do, but it’s pretty close to feeling real at this point! For now, we’re only showing UQM ships per our spoiler warning above, but the rest are there too.Let’s Get Physical (Rewards)Regardless of our game release date(s), we are on track to deliver physical Kickstarter rewards this year, barring any extreme surprises! We’ve been updating everyone about our progress on these as we go for most of them, but we’ve started on (and in some cases finished) our print items, the Starmap, Lorebook, and Thank You Card, which we were saving for the end.We talked about the sticker sheets and the patch in our previous updates, and we were awaiting one last revision on the sticker coating to verify our work. The bulk sticker order is ready to go and should be going out by the time you read this. Our patch was already perfect, and we’re just waiting to finish tweaks to our pins to do the bulk order together, since we’re using the same manufacturing partner for both.Dan's transit card is way cooler nowSpeaking of pins, let’s talk about the pins! They have been the most complicated to manufacture. Mandy, our pin artist, has done manufacturing before, but we’ve had a few extra challenges thrown at us that have slowed us down. Since our last update, we did one round of samples where we were able to see the results and then make corrections as needed. In one case, the first pass was already perfect (Chmmr). In a couple cases, the design worked just fine, but we had a few color corrections based on how they looked in real life (Spathi, Yehat) or needed to tweak the metal treatment for better results (Ur-Quan). You can see what the samples looked like here. They’re super cool, even the ones which needed fixes!Yehat and Chmmr pin samplesUr-Quan pin sampleSpathi pin sampleIronically, the villain of UQM has been the villain of our pin production: The Kohr-Ah Marauder! We’re sharing this with you because it’s funny, not because it’s what the end result will look like. With that in mind, in the first pass of the Marauder, you can see how beautifully shiny it is, and also the polishing has stripped away some of the red details on the runes.Captain, are you SURE their ships were black as space?Look, we all know it’s not supposed to be silver, but there was a mixup with the manufacturer, and I’m guessing they’ve never played UQM either (their loss!). This is why we’re taking our time to do samples! Once we clarified that it was supposed to be black—black nickel plating, for the metallurgists following along from home—we still needed some back and forth to figure out the way forward. The original design called for a black and bronze metal treatment as well as the red color parts, but the factory was actually having trouble with this process. Most two-color metal pins, if you look around, tend to be silver and bronze/gold, not black and bronze like ours. So the factory actually needed to do some of its own learning to figure out how to do it. Even then, once it did, the metal process would have made it hard to create the red details because they’re so small.Intended Kohr-Ah colorsWe’re now waiting on the next round of samples, which will include a modification the factory was able to do to the mold which will let us use a UV printing process for the small color details. We used it once on the Yehat to make the hazard stripe motif, so the factory and we think it will work well here. After years of the players racing against the Kohr-Ah clock in UQM, it is fitting that now they are the ones holding up us Earthlings with delays.Even more fun to holdNext, on to the Lorebook and Thank You Card! We’ve been working with a local printer down in Santa Clara on these, and they have come out amazing. It would be hard to measure exactly how much time and effort was put into the Lorebook, but it does all come out to about 13,000 words across all of its pages. While we were working on it, we thought it was going to be really cool and unique, but once I received a printed copy for proofing, I became truly excited. Maybe it’s just because we spend so much time making virtual things exist or I spend so much time reading text on a screen in our game, but getting to hold something physical full of words and art about the game really makes me envision one of you getting the same feeling of excitement. We really think you’re going to love it, and it does feel extra special since we never would have done it without the Kickstarter as motivation!The Thank You Cards have also come out wonderfully, and Fred and I are loading up on markers in preparation for a sign-a-thon where we are going to personalize almost two thousand of them. We’d love to show you what they look like, but we also want to make sure you’re surprised by at least one thing that’s delivered to everyone who is receiving physical rewards. I will at least share that it’s a two-sided print, with one side being nothing but beautiful art done by Robert and the other side with the writing. If you just want a nice piece of art to hang up, it will be great as that!Original Star Map mockupThe Starmap is the last printed item we’re making, and we went on a bit of a journey to get it made! Our printer we’re working with couldn’t handle the many folds the map would require, so I had to do some calling around until I found another local shop here in San Francisco that had specialized equipment for doing multiple folds on a big, big sheet of heavy paper. We’re currently wrapping up the final art for that now, and then we’ll start doing that print run.You gotta know when and where to fold emThough we think it’s a fun nod to getting goodies folded into a box as was often the case with games of the 90s, we do know some of you asked about having unfolded starmaps. To address this again: the logistics and price of shipping and tube mailers is just too hard for us to take on right now. Down the road when and if we have more bandwidth, if enough people absolutely love their Starmaps and wish they could just have one sent to them in a tube mailer at the high cost of shipping it’ll work out to be, we’ll circle back and find a way to create and ship some flat ones. If we can get a minimum number of folks interested who already got a Starmap, we’re thinking we’d just charge the cost of shipping and handling as a fair middle-ground for folks who had already purchased one.Virtual (Reward) InsanityHow about digital Kickstarter rewards? There are a few special ones like the Precursor Legacy, Private Playtest, and Design Tutorial experiences, but there are also things like the Digital Deluxe Edition which includes the Lorebook and soundtrack. For the unique/limited ones, we’ll be in touch with backers who supported us for those things individually. We’ve already been in touch with our Precursor Legacy folks, but for people who backed for the Private Playtest, we’ll be figuring out scheduling slots with all of you. We’d love to have you be some of our first playtesters of the Melee version, but we also understand how busy lives can get or that you might rather wait until the game has gone through more polish! For the Design Tutorial, that will be easier for us to do later and we won’t be scheduling that until next year.How about the digital deluxe version of the game? This depends on a couple factors: when we finish things and how we distribute things. The Lorebook we made is designed for printing, not distribution. It’s oversized and laid out specifically to allow for clean cutting with bleeds. We could just distribute it, but giving it proper chapters and cropping will make it much more fun to read on a device! The digital version of the Starmap is in a similar state but with a lot less work to prepare digitally. Finalizing the soundtrack, however, will take us into next year.As far as distribution, there are at least two ways to do it. The most straightforward is to pack it in with the digital distribution of the game. That is, if you have a Steam or GOG key for the digital deluxe edition, you get the extras along with it. It also sets us up to sell that version on Steam/GOG if we want, but that’s neither here nor there, since we could decide to do that at a future date anyway. Without having launched some version of the game, distributing through those platforms will be a little trickier, and if you backed for a console edition, we’d still need a way to deliver your goodies. That takes us to our second approach, which would be to distribute them as totally standalone objects on separate platforms (e.g. a link to download a PDF, a Bandcamp page where you are gifted a copy of the soundtrack, etc.) and not packed into the game.We are definitely going to need a way to distribute digital goodies to people regardless of platform or location, so it’s safe to assume we’re going to do that at some point. The question is: do we do it now? Right now, we’re leaning towards no, not because we’re mean and want to withhold things, but because it will feel better when we can launch a truly complete digital experience for backers that’s been done well.The soundtrack won’t be done in short order, and, as for the Lorebook, it’s not that we don’t love it, but it’s more that it’s meant to be a companion to the game in digital form. As a physical object, it’s extra special and we don’t want to hold up shipping physical things out; digitally, it’s a little more tied in to the game experience. The Starmap as a digital thing is a bit more neutral. Would backers be excited to have a gigantic digital map of a game they can’t play yet? We’re not sure! It could be great fuel for fan wikis and stories! The most important consideration is that it’s simply one more logistic hurdle to figure out how to distribute multiple things at different times while also juggling our other things, versus doing it all at once and likely doing a better job.If we see a path to doing this nicely in a staggered way, we’ll take the opportunity! We might figure it out accidentally as we go just distributing our wallpapers (we didn’t forget the small things everyone is getting!).Together AgainBefore we get into the wrap up, we wanted to cover a few more odds and ends with communication and our communities.We did an open casting call for voice acting and got your submissions! Unless you type like a robot trying to sell me on AI-powered lead generation with 10 business acronyms I don’t understand and are asking to schedule 15 minutes of my time, which would send it to junk mail, I got your email. If you haven’t heard back from us, it’s because we’re going to be doing voice overs for a while and we’re not ready to say yes or no to anything. I’ve got a big ol’ casting sheet with all of your emails, and we’ll follow up with everyone when it makes sense, whether that’s a few months down the road when we’re looking to start voicing a character or we’ve finished all of our casting and will at least let you know when we’re done.We know there are long spells between these updates! This one felt especially long, but we also had even more to say too. It’s not because we have things to hide, but it’s because we really are busy focusing on our work and have a lot of it to do. We’ve been considering some ideas to bolster our communication and our community, especially thinking about what our ideal community looks like and what kinds of things we can foster with it. Though it’s quieted down now, we’ve already created a space where people are able to grab on to Simple and use it if they want to, for example; so we’re thinking about what other things we would love to see happen.This becomes especially important to us as more and more things start getting into more hands. Imagine if we were going to launch an Early Access version that anyone could play! We’d want to have our communication cadence and schedule down since we’d be opening up the floodgates to anyone willing to come and join us.With that in mind, our most successfully active place is still our Discord, and we’re thinking about how to best set up our communities for success, both within our Discord and without. That includes setting up structure for making our already great community even better, like adding more moderators or ambassadors who can help us talk about the game, organize thoughts, and help direct people to resources (whether we make them or just foster what the community wants to create). Our subreddit has been intentionally closed (i.e. only we can make posts) for a while since we had formed it as a community to mostly help us speak with you and ask questions. Now it would probably serve everyone better as an open forum to talk about what we’re talking about. We could likely do that with the help of a few moderators, too, but that may be more aspirational compared to “doing one thing well” in the places we’re already doing well, like Discord and Patreon.Since we’re going to be letting some more proverbial cats out of proverbial bags, it also brings us closer to returning to another place we had a great community: Twitch! Part of the journey we set out on is more than just completing our game, but sharing the process with all of you. We want to educate, inspire people, and wear our transparency on our sleeves. We think we have unique assets others don’t have, and we want to use as much of what makes our process special as we can. Sharing openly is one of those important ones. Once everyone can know the names of our aliens, for example, I’ll feel a lot less shy about going on stream with those names clearly visible.No More WordsWe feel comfortable sharing because we also know you have been along for the ride and all of us are better off for it. One thing we want you to get out of reading these updates, watching a livestream, or participating in our Discord is that making games is hard! Not just that statement in a vacuum, but all the different ways it can be challenging. It is no walk in the park to have to juggle all of the parts of the game, all of the responsibilities we have to our players, and also do it in a way that’s true to our values. No DRM, no microtransactions, no live service, no .The time we spend sharing these updates, working with someone to manufacture an object, or describing a single thing to someone is all time that we are choosing to spend on top of just creating our game. It meshes with our own mission to share how exciting and dynamic working on this is, but also just how challenging it can be. We hold a lot of responsibility for the game but also a responsibility to all of you to show up as our best selves by being honest about what’s involved. When we imagine our ideal community, that’s part of it too—people who are there to be honest and bring out the best in everyone, themselves included.We alluded to this when talking about our writing schedule, and it bears repeating: right now is an especially challenging moment to find and bring out the best in everyone because of our global social environment. There is a pervasive air of helplessness that I see in all my interactions and everyone is fighting against it in different ways, through escapism, denial, or even paralysis. There is a world of difficulty out there that we can all find and are tapping into, whether or not we want to admit it, and it gets projected and reflected by others. Things must be difficult. Things can’t be easy. One challenge of my work is navigating that with everyone! Must things be difficult? They might be outside, but why are we bringing or creating that in here?When we are surrounded by suffering (real or imagined), what does it mean to be happy or succeed? It’s a little scary. Our game alone has had more than a few unforeseen bumps in the road, from legal challenges, to Paul and Ken moving on, to trying to get some objects shipped into the country which suddenly can’t be delivered under budget, to having to rearrange our schedule around immovable parameters. It would be pretty easy to focus on those as emblematic of what our work must be like: hard, uphill, and just one thorn after another. It’s easy to feel despair, but I mean this honestly: what’s the point of despair? It’s a trap. Don’t fall for it! Optimism is much more reliable because it lets you access curiosity and growth, and the upside of challenges is that they require us to grow. The challenges we didn’t ask for or anticipate are more than an opportunity, they’re a demand. We must define our own future. How will we do it? To paraphrase David Deutsch: optimism is not to be confused with blind optimism—the hope that things will be better because the alternative of acknowledging challenges is too hard. It is understanding that even if solutions to overcome obstacles are not immediately apparent in the present, they will become available once sufficient knowledge has been acquired. There is a proven track record of that in our history, and he would probably argue it is part of human nature—or the human spirit, if you want to wax poetic.I don’t think I’ve written this out in a while, but I often say to people I work with, “Aren’t we all here to learn?” Not be perfect, not get it right, but just learn. What’s the most fun thing we can do with the constraints we have? What’s the path forward? How do I do this thing I’ve never done before, or this other thing I’ve done before but now I get to do again but better or with different constraints?I see that if we ask people to just show up and be as amazing as we know they can be, they can, paradoxically, instead react by choosing to forever stay safe in their comfortable pillow fort of self-doubt. Ask someone to move out of it and believe in themselves, and out of nowhere is an unconscious monkey-wrench thrown into a process because if it went well, it would be scary. Now more than ever, I can see that people are actually afraid of succeeding. What does it mean for the people who can’t do it? If we believe our project can be successful, what about the ones that weren’t? It’s a disquieting thought that people may not even know they’re having. If misery loves company, then self-doubt and fear of what lies beyond that are the communal instigators.With that in mind, a big thank you to our generous Patreon community who continues to support us. While I am writing about my experience encouraging people to believe in themselves, you are encouraging us very directly, and we all feel it.We are glad to continue to share this journey with all of you and have you here.Please join us on Discord, Bluesky, and Reddit to be a part of our community. You, too, can still support us on Patreon as well.