d1l2e3v4 Posted January 8, 2018 Share Posted January 8, 2018 (edited) Heya all. I've decided to create a topic that shows all the Kickstarter updates that the game has received, so you can follow all the stuff that has happened in the game's lifespan. This will be updated every now and then. Thanks a ton to the dudes over on /r/NightInTheWoods/ for creating these posts! It took quite a while to fit them in here though! LATEST UPDATE: 1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY! Spoiler This update will be posted in the original format that it was posted in. "Hey all! It's March! It's kinda spring-ish out! Let's talk about some stuff!!! This is going to be a very long post that’s like all text!!!! On February 21st, Night In The Woods turned 1 years old. Bethany and I drove out to the Red Robin in Homestead, PA, the same restaurant we ate at the night the game came out. A year ago were so used to worrying about money that Red Robin, a fairly low-priced casual dining establishment, was our big splurge place to go. So we figured we'd earned it that day. I remember it was unseasonably warm, as it had been that entire winter. We didn’t finish our burgers, just spent most of dinner staring off into the middle distance. When we’d hit the time for all work to stop on NITW earlier that day (we were adding little things right up to the wire) I collapsed sobbing on the ground. Like hysterically crying. Just wasn’t prepared for things to suddenly stop after sprinting for years. I was such a wet blanket that day, despite my best efforts. Alec, Adam, and Bekah were having a google hangout when the game unlocked on Steam and I joined them. We were all tired and bit shell shocked, but very proud and ready to laugh. Except me, I was like “uh I just stopped crying”. That mental lost-ness was sort of my reaction a couple weeks ago on the one year anniversary. I feel like I’ve talked so much about the trauma of those last couple months before release and the personal aftermath that I’ve like painted that entire time as just all bad. Like I haven’t spent as much time as I should being proud of our team, or full of a warm feeling about how it bound us together, or pride in what we did together. This year at Red Robin I was thinking about all of this. So let’s lay out the events of a year ago, at least my own recollection of them: I barely remember the launch, or much of the terrifying weeks before. I remember passing out and whacking my head on the kitchen floor and being woken up by my cat. I remember there was a suicide attempt in my family the week before release when I already couldn’t sleep because of panic attacks. I remember sleeping on the couch while Bethany worked at her computer because I couldn’t fall asleep alone at that point. I remember her watching Forensic Files and me falling asleep dreaming of axe murders and disappeared suburbanites. I remember how there were issues with keys. I remember how an unfinished version of the game was released on PS4 the night before release, with placeholder dialogue and art, due to us coming in so hot on getting the final version over to Sony. I remember my doctor telling me a couple days after release that if I didn’t stop working like this I’d die. I remember not knowing what to do with myself afterwards. I remember falling and seriously injuring my work hand at PAX East, after a weekend of trying to be social but mostly just mentally vacant. I remember how this kicked off months of being in a mental fog. I didn’t really understand what it was at the time, I thought I’d just bounce back and get back to work. But most of last year was a complete write off. I understand now in hindsight how ridiculous it was to think it’d be otherwise, and it wasn’t until I surrendered to the need to rest, to get out of the house, to enforce weekends off, that I began to recover. Ok so here’s the thing- I’ve talked about this all before, at length. If you’ve patiently read the past year of updates, you saw me in real time deal with all of this. I’ve talked about it a lot on twitter, and in talks. Early on I was just exorcising demons. I didn’t know how to handle any of this, all of these unbelievable circumstances, and these updates were a place where I could do that- because I was expected to say something every month. Which ended up being like therapy for me, long before I actually started going to therapy to deal with all of this. I’m really proud that we’ve kept these monthly updates going for 4.5 years, only missing a small handful of months because of whatever extenuating circumstances. And months later when I had more of a handle on it, I starting talking about it publicly to warn people not to do what we did, to take exhaustion seriously, to counteract the bad narratives about work and success and all of that. But all of that was really only part of the story, a small one, and I’ve retold it too many times. So here’s are a selection of other things that happened a year ago: Alec was running a bunch of playtesters and dealing with all of their notes on the fly WHILE finishing and implementing and polishing late-arriving aspects of the game WHILE topping off his massive, massive soundtrack WHILE helping me out on my parts of the game. Alec had not long before gone on a music writing spree that included him writing sometimes 3 tracks a day. And all the while he kept an upbeat attitude. If he was also a panicky mess I never knew at the time. He was superhuman in my eyes. Shortly before launch, maybe 10 days or so, I still hadn’t dropped in all of the frames for the Eide Fight near the end of act 4. We’d had placeholder frames in there to make sure it all worked previously but I had to export like a zillion frames to get the entire thing filled in. But importing and compressing all of those files was too much for Unity to handle. Big, high-res images by the hundreds. Waiting for that to work, and for them to import into Sourcetree (the version control software I was using) took up most of the afternoon, time we could not in any way spare. I never got them properly in during those hours, so Alec grabbed them on his end after I finally was able to push them to him, and he cut them up and resized them and got them working. Took time out of his terrifying task list to help my dumb ass out, with solutions I should have thought of. He jumped in during the final push and wrote a good deal of the Smelters fans dialogue, including their little story arc that people rightly love. He also set up the epilogue scene with the rats in the Food Donkey. We’d talked about that scene forever and I don’t think I even realized he’d done it until the day before launch. And it’s hilarious. He did so much. I was in my misery hole and he kept things running. Like I said, superhuman. I’m definitely forgetting like 75% of what all he did those last couple of months. He had a launch party that week too. That alone is a monumental achievement given what we’d just been through. And he spent lots and lots and lots of time fixing little bugs here and there for months, even before we started work on Weird Autumn, the development of which saw him go down a minor-bug-chasing rabbithole I still can’t comprehend or measure. Heather Penn made the crossbow bolt for the forest god shooting scene with Gregg. I’m very happy we got some Heather Penn in our game. She’s one of my favorite artists. Em Halberstadt, our sound designer working with A Shell In The Pit, deserves way more attention than she’s received. Her work on the game was brilliant, and there was so MUCH of it. When we were initially look for a sound designer the year before we were having problems because so many of the folks who approached us did work that sounded, well, videogamey. But Em had experience making sounds for film and animation, which is more what we were wanting. We wanted real foley work with subtlety and character. Where a lot of sound designers for games would have made Mae’s jump sound like a powerful maneuver, Em could make her sound like a sack of flour with boots on, and add a little effort grunt when needed. She actually recorded a huge amount of potential Mae sounds because at one point we’d thought of having her make little noises in dialogue a lot. I remember sending Em a song from this pretty obscure 90’s band Frogpond, because that was what Mae sounded like in my head, all husky and drawl-y (which I guess means Mae has a canon voice for those interested in such things, along with the Gregg voice I’ve talked about before). Em did so many sounds for her, and we only used a tiny number of them. Sorry, Em. They were brilliant. But that was her work on all of the sounds. She threw herself into the work and did way more than we expected, far better than we could have imagined. She also worked right up to the end. A whole lot of the character of Night In The Woods comes directly from Em. Scott links one of the songs Em told him about: Adam and Bekah over at Finji… geez, where even to start. Bekah was juggling playtesting the game as well as working with our long-suffering reps at Sony as we came in EXTREMELY hot getting the game out. Our schedules had been changing so often and so unpredictably and she kept things under control. I don’t think she slept much during those last few weeks. She was on top of things as they got crazy beyond belief, things well beyond my knowledge or memory. Through like sheer force of will sometimes it seemed she worked things out as we kept throwing in complications. Bekah is amazing. Adam, along with Chris Dwyer (Finji’s PR guy at the time) took on some art duties in those last few days. The dvd covers in the video store? That’s them. Adam did those products in the grocery store close-ups, as well as backgrounds for scenes like the battery disconnecting scene and the robot button scene. And probably a bunch of other stuff. That’s just what I remember. I think he placed some of the rats around town? Or made them work? I’m betting he did a lot more. I remember him also not sleeping much. I’m telling you, I have major holes in my memory from that time. I wish I recalled it more clearly so I could at least credit people correctly off the top of my head. Bethany, oh dear Bethany. Bethany wrangled all things Kickstarter related. She worked with Bekah getting keys out to backers. And then she dealt with the hundreds of emails and messages coming in about everything you can possibly imagine. She took over Kickstarter messages during launch. Bethany isn’t quite the talker that I am and I’m still super grateful that she shouldered that. As I was finally able to get some sleep in the days after launch, Bethany was staying up all night fielding questions and all kinds of problems. And this is no small task, but she dealt with me, with the health problems and the panic attacks and collapsing and crying my eyes out on the floor at 11:30 am when the deadline hit. She dealt with all of that. And she ended up at Red Robin that launch night with me, both of us lost in the massive impact that we’d just experienced. And a year later we went back. And then we went to Target and bought Coke Zero and bandaids. I got a caramel frap at the Starbucks. It was just a normal night. Normal had returned. I’ve talked about this before, but these updates are from my own experience. You’ve gotten just my end of things. That was mostly just because right from the start I volunteered to do these, and do our public communication in general. Over time they morphed into these journal entries, like Mae’s doodles, and they gradually got more and more personal. I don’t know how long this whole run of updates would be if they were put in a book, but it wouldn’t be particularly short. I’m grateful for those of you who still read these, who chat with us outside of here in person or on twitter or through messages or emails. I feel like I’ve talked enough about my own baggage, and I hope I’ve given a look into what others were doing and going through a year ago. I am proud of them. I am proud of us. I’m thankful. So how did the game "do"? This is a question we’ve gotten a lot, and one I’ve seen discussed endlessly all over the internet. Well, in the year since the game launched we’ve sold somewhere north of 280k copies. That’s like not Cuphead numbers or anything. They’re not retirement numbers, they’re more like “fund a lot of your next game and you can move into a slightly better apartment” numbers. They’re pretty damn good for a weird game like ours. I certainly expected them to be a LOT lower. But then again I never forecast success for anything I’m working on so my predictions are unreliable. Almost 300k copies is kind of bananas. And sales haven’t really slowed down all that much. We have what marketing people call a “long tail”, which is to say after the initial big burst of attention and sales, there’s a lengthy period of interest afterward. New people keep discovering the game and the attention is pretty constant. We still get a lot of requests for interviews and features and I’m like “really? A year+ after launch?” and yet they keep coming. It was funny when like a few months after NITW some folks who were seemingly invested in NITW not being successful were like “THE HYPE IS DEAD LOL” and it’s hilarious because as I was reading that we couldn’t keep up with emails and fan creations and requests for various things and our sales were doing just fine. The outside perspective on how a game is faring after launch is generally really really flawed and incomplete, because how couldn’t it be? Most of what happens with a game happens far away from the vantage point of the internet, or the press, or anyone outside those who are dealing with all of it. And then Weird Autumn hit only 3 months ago, and I realized that most people had never played or heard of the supplemental games before that, and that touched off a whole new wave of players. That coincided with the year end Steam sales which were the first sales we took part in. There’s so much pressure to put your game on sale like, immediately. Or put it in a bundle sale where people can buy it for like 30 cents along with 6 or 7 other games. That race to the bottom in pricing has reinforced the idea that our work as independent developers is somehow less valuable than the giant studios that have traditionally often sucked up all the air in the room as far as videogames are concerned. So those couple sales we’d waited to do also introduced tens of thousands of new people to the game. And then the Switch version dropped only 5 or 6 weeks ago, bringing in another huge crowd of people. It just hasn’t stopped. The game will be out on mobile sometime this year so we’re ready to do this all over again when that happens. This will go on for a long time. Nothing really ends. In addition to sales numbers and audience we’ve also been pretty highly reviewed both in the press and in player review spaces. That last bit is pretty cool seeing how much hostility there can be in those places towards games involving… well, literally anything in Night In The Woods. We’ve also been nominated for a lot of awards, several of which are coming up in the next couple weeks. As always, awards are kind of silly and arbitrary and can really lead to bad decisions if you make things in hopes of winning them. But I would like us all to have a weird shiny statue on our shelves. So stay tuned. So yeah. That’s a look back. I’m leaving out so many things- the friends we made, the stories we’ve heard, the opportunities that have come our way, the fact that I run into NITW fans in real life pretty often now. That last one is weird. At our most recent DSA meeting here in Pittsburgh I bumped into several. That was surreal. I know Alec runs into them from time to time. We also hear of other people who have been brought together by the game, and people who credit Night In The Woods with changing their lives in really big ways. It’s wild to think you got to effect so many people. Or rather that so many people were themselves effected. You kind of can’t take credit for a lot of that. The art you make only does a small part of what happens to people who encounter it, good or bad, big or small. But, to quote Mae Borowski and Adina Astra’s ghost astronomer, pretty amazing to be something at least. Ok SO we asked for some questions last month and we got some, both on here and on twitter. So here are some answers! I’m going to paraphrase the questions since some were quite long. Question: Will we do a kickstarter for our next game? Answer: I don’t think so. One because we’re not in a position where that would be our go-to means of outside funding anymore, and two because kickstarters are a lot of work! We’ve had a fantastic experience with it thanks to all of y’all, but it really is a second part time job. I mean I’ve been writing this update for 3 hours now! Also kickstarter puts a lot of pressure on development because from day one, long before you even really know much about what your game is going to be, you have to lay out a concrete vision and a release window, in public. That is a /really/ bad thing to do. It worked for us but it’s a tremendous amount of pressure and it can be really unhealthy for both the dev team and the game itself. It also leads to a lot of increased scrutiny of your every move from the press and some folks that just really want to see your project fail so they can say “see? Kickstarter indies totally ripping off the gaming public!!!” We really lucked out in like 10 ways with this project, not least in having an unusually supportive and vocal backer base. So thanks for making our Kickstarter experience so amazing! But we probably aren’t in a place where we’ll need to do a KS this next time. Question: Can I swap my Steam key for a Switch one? Answer: Sadly no! We’re not giving out keys for platforms that were announced after launch. Sorry about that! Question: Enamel pins? Answer: Stay tuned, friend. Question: Kickstarter backer rewards? For real why aren’t they all done yet? Answer: Because most of the work involved in making them fell to me, by design, and that was real dumb. Also I thought last year I’d be able to just take a bunch of months and get them done, and that was also real dumb, for reasons outline above and in past updates. Last year several people were like “why don’t you just ask some folks to help you out on them?” and I was like “no, these are 100% my responsibility!!!!” (aside from the backer game). But honestly it took several friends yelling at me (and a therapist repeatedly suggesting) for me to accept their advice. So last month I started doing just that. I’m excited about this, we’re doing something neat with it and I’m really happy to get to work with some great friends. It’s gonna be pretty cool. But beyond our own details, I now understand why some game projects in particular still have backer rewards coming out like 2 years after launch. And those are often coming from studios, not like 1-2 people. But you won’t have to wait another year or anything. We’re on it. Thank you for your patience. Question: In the Switch version of Lost Constellation, aiming with the right stick doesn't work. You get a sight but it doesn't affect the trajectory of the ball, the left stick does, so it's impossible to throw balls without moving. It doesn't really break the game, but I hope it gets patched eventually. Answer: You should be able to use the right stick if you throw using the right trigger! Alec tested this on PC and Switch and you should be good to go! Question: (various suggestions for changes to the game from several folks) Answer: We’re mostly done changing things unfortunately. You have to cut the cord at some point! Question: Would you do this all over again? Answer: For my part, 100%. Though maybe healthier next time around. Ok that’s it for this month. Next week the whole team will be in San Francisco at GDC. If you’re there for whatever reason totally come say hello! After that we’re just back to work. Although last time I went to GDC I got the most violently sick I’ve been in my entire adult life and was laid up for like 10 days. It was intense. So this year I’m hoping to avoid that. Anyway, thanks as always for making this all possible. Fun things ahead this year as we wrap this all up. Thank you. <3, -scott, alec, and bethany PS: So Alec is working on TWO game projects, one of which I know what it is, and it sounds totally amazing. I can’t wait to be blown away by what he’s making. Bethany and I are off on our new game, and a couple weeks ago we announced the artist we’ll be working with, Wren Farren. Check her out and give her a follow on twitter. She and I will be working together art-wise on that next big scary game and I couldn’t be more excited." _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OLD UPDATES JANUARY 2018: Spoiler This update won't be very big especially following the rather hefty update of last month. Next month's update will cover the anniversary of the game launching and will be "quite hefty". The gist of the past few weeks since the last update is that they're working on backer rewards, doing some random NitW things that are needed to be done for upcoming awards seasons, and working on their new projects. "Alec is assembling his team and we’re really excited to see what he’s up to. If you want to follow along with him you should follow him on twitter at @InfiniteAmmoDev! It's sure to be very cool. We aren't really telling eachother much about our respective projects so we're looking to be surprised and delighted along with everyone else." "Over on our end we’re bringing on our first team member full time next month for our next game. That’s exciting and scary! She's amazing! But it’s also like whoa hey this is a thing now officially and not just an idea we’re thinking about! We’ll have a new twitter and a couple other things for you to follow later this year sometime for you to follow what Bethany and I are up to so stay tuned for that. Things ending, things beginning." NitW launched on the Switch earlier in the month and it's been a pretty big hit. "People are really liking it, reviews are good and right on par with our scores on other platforms so we’re consistent if nothing else. It's been really wild and neat seeing a whole new group of people discover the game. More on that next update." "A couple days ago we finally released our Mae shirts in the NITW merch shop, which took a while to get in stock because we had them fabricated from scratch because it turns out the exact kind of shirt I drew years ago doesn’t actually exist. It was a long process our good friend and longtime collaborator Dan Rugh of Commonwealth Press made possible and walked us through step by step over the months. So here’s the thing- we expected these to sell sloooow. They’re pricier than our regular shirts (they cost 3x as much on our end as our normal shirts) and they’re a nonstandard design and, you know, Bethany and I always tend to assume a mild response. I was going to post about them here in this update so y’all could grab one. Unfortunately we sold out of all 400 shirts in 3 hours!!?!? This was very not what we were expecting. We were thinking they’d be gone in weeks, not hours. We’re going to do a second run in a bit and I’ll post about it here before it happens so you can get in on it if you’re interested!" "In a week and a half it’ll be the one-year anniversary of the initial NITW launch. I’ll talk a bunch about that in the next update. Still putting together exactly what all we’ll talk about for that but I have some PLANS. " "So yeah that’s literally it for this month. Things are quiet. Just working, getting regular sleep, doing some hiking. I still need to do that travelogue post for y’all that I talked about last fall. I’ll get to it!!! We’ll chat again in a few weeks about all kinds of stuff related to the anniversary. It’ll be interesting. Hit me with questions in the comments!!! Until then, stay warm and cozy and hydrated. Talk soon! <3, -Scott, Alec, and Bethany" END OF 2017: Spoiler Scott says that the Update was delayed by health reasons, thanks for everyone's patience as always. Scott shares this fanart by Twitter user george_kys Backer stuff is going good. The Holiday season threw a wrench into a lot of stuff he was hoping to get done or much further along last month, but now that everything is over, he finally has time again. He had to replace his old computer which put things out of commission for a bit, but now he's back up and running on a spiffy new rig. "It was kinda sad saying goodbye to the workstation I made my contributions to NITW with". With this new computer he also grabbed inDesign which means he can compile that "big zany art/etc book" and get that wrapped up. "I basically have all the stuff I need to wrap things up now. We'll talk about wrapping things up further down in the post." Scott shares a link to this Astral Coal Cover. "Where to start with December? Where to even begin with how 2017 ended? Let’s start at McDonald's. In early December Alec and Bekah & Co were in southern CA for PSX, and decided to hop over to The Game Awards, for which we were nominated in 2 categories, Best Indie Game, which is self-explanatory, and Games For Change, which is basically where they put all the games that have some sort of hint of progressiveness about them. We were joking about it from the start, wondering if we’d get Wokest Game 2017. We didn’t. We actually didn’t end up winning anything! Which is fine! Being nominated is nice, and to be honest awards are kind of silly and arbitrary. However, though NITW didn’t win any awards Alec and Bekah received the greatest gift of all: a visit to what can only be described as a McDonald’s Afterparty Rave Tent, brought to you by McDonald’s, featuring McDonald’s." "If you watched The Game Awards, you /might/ have noticed the presence of McDonald’s as an advertiser. It was subtle, most people didn’t catch it, but it was there for eagle-eyed viewers. Every show like this has advertisers, that’s understandable, and this show had McDonald’s. Lots of McDonald’s. And Uber! Aw yeah!" According to Alec, the tent smelled of hamburgers. A chandelier made of disposable McDonald's coffee cups. After TGA it was time to drop Weird Autumn. "It was really nice to release something we’d been done with for a while. No crazy run up to the end, just “oh hey. It’s out!”. Response was and is really great, once again far and away beyond what we expected. I hope you all got a chance to play it and enjoy some of the new stuff. " Says that Lost Constellation, Longest Night and the Concept Art should drop for PS4 on February 1st (Same day as the Switch version). He links to the reddit thread about WA that reddit user /u/themaplebeast made. "I’m really proud of WA edition tbh. I’m proud of the team, in particular Alec for the mountain of work he put into it along with Adam, Bekah, and our porting team for their work." A couple of days after WA, he and Bethany hit the road for a Christmas road trip, something they didn't get to do a lot of during development. They drove out to his old hometown in northern NJ and saw family. Roamed around some of the old haunts. "It was good to see the town, possibly for the last time in a very long time." "While we were out there Bethany and I headed into Manhattan to the MET. We hadn’t been there since 2012 or so. I was talking to my therapist (hey I finally started seeing a therapist) about this, how there are a couple core feelings that had to be found elsewhere after I stopped believing in god. One of them is connection around the holidays. Not connection in some interpersonal sense so much as a general feeling of community, like we’re all bound together and in on something larger than us. That’s a really specific feeling. Since we lost our faith almost… geez, 8 years ago now, going to museums is our holiday tradition. I think being around that many centuries of humanity gives us a that feeling of connection. Music does this for me too. And art. Making stuff. It connects us, reminds us we’re not alone." "One of the other feelings I had to start recognizing elsewhere in a post-God life was a sense of connection to something larger in the universe itself. I find that these days by looking at stars at night, and general far off space things. I get this deep well feeling. You might have caught some that connection to stars in the whole NITW project. Maybe. It’s hard to pick out, like a McDonald’s sponsorship at a Game Awards show." "I had one of those stargazing moments when we were visiting Bethany’s family in the dead-center of rural PA on our way back after NJ/NYC. It was the Solstice, which is one of my favorite days of the year. Sun low in the sky, day so so so short. The sunsets are intense. The night is long. Some might say… The Longest Night? I was funny watching more than one person on twitter this year make the connection between the winter solstice and Longest Night, our made up christmas/solstice/whatever holiday in the games. Bethany and I were wandering around Walmart because to be honest there’s not a lot to do after dark in that area, and someone tweeted at me that NITW was in the issue of Game Informer that they’d received in the mail. I got all excited (it’s still exciting!) to find a Gamestop and grab a copy of it. Bethany didn’t think there would be one in her small town, but sure enough google maps brought one up in the parking lot next to the Walmart. They closed at 10pm, and I ended up jogging through the front door of the empty Gamestop at 9:55, somewhat out of breath. What followed was a pretty funny bit of me flipping through the Game Informer issues on the counter as the 3 guys hanging out behind the counter waiting to close the store stared at me. “Are… you looking for anything… in particular... in there?” I finally got to do that thing, that really silly thing, that thing you’re not supposed to do because it’s so stupid- I got to say to a bunch of randos “Actually, we made a video game!” Not here to brag, Gamestop employees, but uh the trailer is on your kiosk over there. Yep. Big time celebrity over here. They actually got excited, and opened a bale of the next month’s issues, where the article involving NITW actually was. And for a moment there was a long silence as me and the 3 Gamestop employees in small town Pennsylvania silently skimmed through the story as the moments ticked past closing time. “The game is actually set around here. My wife Bethany is out in the car waiting for me and she’s from around here and we co-wrote the game”. One of the guys lifted his head and squinted at the ceiling “Man… making a game based around here makes no sense at all, and also all the sense in the world”. They didn’t let me pay for the issue. “Dude. Your GAME'S in here. No way we can charge you for it!” It’s sitting on my office shelf now. Later when we pulled into Bethany’s dad’s house, surrounded by rolling hills and trees and fields, I hung out by the car for a while staring up at the night sky. You can see a lot more stars out there. No light pollution to speak of. Just infinite depths of black, endless space. And stars." Scott shared an image of the Game Informer magazine, showing their article. They shared a partial list of the end of the year lists NITW got onto. "Holy shit, you guys. Holy shit. In a year like 2017, one of the strongest years for games in a long long time, to get any mentions at all is kinda nuts. I don’t even have words for the end of year reaction to our weird little game about feelings and history and mental health and capitalism and god and pizza starring animal people and featuring a possum named Rabies and a subplot about shoplifting from Hot Topic." Scott shared two pieces of fan art done by twitter user lavantdapres Talked about how they are nominated for 3 awards at IGF - Visual Art, Narrative and Grand Prize. As well as three at GDCA (Fame Developer's Choice Awards) for Visual Art, Narrative and Best Debut. "IGF and GDCA awards are cool, they’re little industry awards shows where it’s voted on mostly by a lot of game devs. " GDC is the 3rd week of March this year, so stay tuned around then to see if they won anything. Scott will also be giving a NITW design postmortem talk during that week. They were also nominated for two awards at the D.I.C.E Awards next month - Outstanding Achievement in Story as well as the Sprite Award "which from what I understand is kind of a “you did a lot with a little” award. Which is nice." "Oh also, NITW is coming out for the Nintendo Switch February 1st. That’s a thing. That’s kind of a surreal. Hey 10 year old Scott, you do in fact eventually get to make a Nintendo game." Scott shared an image of art for the Switch release, looking similar to the original PC/PS4 release art. He then talks about the end of NITW. " So like, here’s the thing. And it’s a kind of heavy thing. The thing is this: This whole NITW thing, that sprung out of this Kickstarter, that went on to be the thing it became… it’s gradually ending. And that’s fine. That’s good even. In a few months all these long-awaited (thank you as always for your bottomless patience) backer rewards will be out and done. Prints will be on walls. Art book will be read. Animated shorts will be watched. Alec and I were talking about this a week or so ago, that this baker prequel game is kind of our final look at Possum Springs, at Mae & co. It’ll be a stopping point, a place where the story ends. Endings are good. I think a lot of folks would like us to keep doing Weird Autumn-style updates, slowly expanding the scope of the game to gargantuan size, but that would kind of ruin things. Some folks would love to see a new game focused on the backstory of some of the more mysterious elements of the game, but that’s not the kind of storytellers we are. Endings are good. Open spaces are good. Things left to the imagination are good. Embrace them." Scott shares fanart by twitter users gawkiart and jonasgoonface "Too many stories go on too long these days, with endless sequels and tie-in comic books and novels and tv shows and cinematic universes and spin-offs, and on and on and on. But a story that ends, and ends on purpose, and does it as intended, is special. I think at least. For Alec and I this last little game is a good place to leave things. We’ve talked about a sequel and stuff and a story/idea exists for it, but if that ever happens it won’t be for quite a while." "It’s weird to think that this will all be in the rearview mirror for us, for you, for everyone, soon. I mentioned seasons changing way back at the start of this update and that’s how 2018 feels. Alec is prototyping his new project which is sure to be amazing, Bethany and I are already pretty deep into pre-production on our next thing (with a really amazing artist we’ll be working with!!!), and Adam and Bekah’s work as publisher on the game is slowing down now that the main console ports will be out soon and we’ll likewise soon be past awards season. Seasons change. That’s good. I mean that’s a major theme of Night In The Woods, right?" Scott shows an NITW notebook doodle that will be in the art book. "So that’s where we are as this new year starts. I hope you’re doing well, whatever season your life is in right now. Where even were you when you first backed this game? I’m definitely older. Have a lot more gray and white hairs, especially for someone in their mid-30s. Alec and I were talking about how we’re both very very different people than we were when we first met about 4.5 years ago. There’s a very good chance you’ve changed a lot from the person you were who backed this project in late 2013. Seasons change. Thanks for sticking with us. And for your patience and love, as always. Looking forward to closing this out right with all of you. Thanks for reading, and thanks to whoever you were 4 years ago who backed this weird ass project. Thanks, -scott, alec, and bethany" NOVEMBER 2017: Spoiler One of the screenshots for the W.I.P Animations, most likely focusing on Bea. Scott starts off the update talking about the Backer Rewards from KickStarter. BACKER STUFF UPDATE: Working! That's about all that he can say, just working. It was a very hectic month but he made some decent progress. He'll talk more about all of those in the next update. shared some in-progress shots of the next backer shorts animatics. here and here. He thanks everyone for their patience. Things are coming along. Talked about the talk he did at Pictoplasma that ended up being a sort of lightning-fast recap of his entire career. He got through 100 slides in 35 minutes. It went well. While he was in NYC he stopped by the Giant Bomb East offices and was a guest on their podcast. He talked a bit about NITW, Weird New Jersey, Taylor Swift, Judge Judy and more. Immediately after Thanksgiving he flew up to Winnipeg to hang out with Alec. They did a talk together about the making of NITW in depth. They had mostly written the talk 24 hours prior. It was around 2-2.5 hours long. "So yeah we talked about... everything? Or at least we touched on most things. We could do an entire lecture series on just the technical aspects, or the toolsets created for it, or the various influences, or the themes, or whatever. But we stuck mostly to the A to B to C to Z recounting of the whole process. We had some laughs, and some cries, or at least we talked about the cries." He says most of it will be in the Making Of book. "The giant, weird, making of book" (presumably he's referring to the Backer Art Book here). "Until then the folks at the talk can enjoy being the only ones to have full knowledge of the entity that is TRAVIS" "I think, or hope, we accurately conveyed how unlikely this all ways and how lucky we are. And we talked about some personal behind the scenes things we hadn't really laid out publicly before, and how those hard times shaped both us and the project into something better in the end." "The talk was an interesting experience. I think it was kind of emotionally exhausting for both Alec and I, just like recounting the entire experience with the ups and downs and how we came out the other side of it much different people than we were at the start. Alec went pretty fearlessly in depth into some of the stuff he'd gone through and when I talked about getting pretty close to dying it was hard to not make it sound like a joke. I think when I first mentioned it folks laughed so I had to be like No Seriously, This Was And Remains Serious And It's Why I Had To Completely Restructure My Life, Holy Shit. We tried to be up front about both the joys and wonders of the experience while not shying away from the really dark parts. I'm hoping it was helpful and interesting or at least funny. Alec's funny. I'm kinda funny. I think the talk was recorded but I'm not sure what's up with that so stay tuned!" "We're lucky. We're really really lucky. That what I came away from that whole experience with. There's no reason any of this should have worked. We shouted y'all out several times, and it was cool to see how many raised hands there were when we asked if there were any backers in the room. Thanks." WEIRD AUTUMN is out this week! Wednesday! They'll talk more about it in the next update (presumably the one for next month). They hope we love it and say that if you've already played the game, it's a great excuse to return to Possum Springs over the holidays. "So that's about it for this update. Like I said, it's a short one. Things are very busy at the moment. Looking forward to everything calming down after Christmas. Settling in and getting work done. So much work. So much. As always, thanks for your patience and encouragement and just generally being great. Hope you're having great holidays, especially if this time of year generally sucks for you. It can be a tough month, but you're good and strong and there's a whole new year ahead with all kinds of promise and possibility. We'll talk about all that next update to as we move away from the NITW release year and into THE FUTURE. Talk soon. Happy Holidays. <3, -scott, alec, and bethany" OCTOBER 2017: Spoiler They started working on the Weird Autumn Edition (and the Xbox One port) as early as May and have been pretty occupied with it for most of the year in some form or another. Scott says it was funny being back in a coffee shop writing all new things for the game in July, like nothing had changed. Alec has been working his entire ass off for months. "Seriously. Like he really deserves so much credit for this one. Not only did we get all the new content in, but Alec went DEEP into bugs and polish with some frighteningly exacting testers. Things you'd love to do if you had an extra year on your game. Alec took the initiative and dealt with a zillion notes. So yeah if you see Alec, give him a high five." Weird Autumn is kind of like a director's cut. "There's some things we had to cut that we wanted to put in, much of which was rewritten or tweaked in some fashion. And there were some little new ideas we wanted to explore a bit, and you'll find those sprinkled throughout." "The story of NITW is still the story, don't expect like us to drastically like retcon stuff, though I will say there are a couple things that might throw a few fan theories for a loop. Those weren't put in in response to those theories, but they just ended up that way." There are new things to do, new townsfolk, new adventures to be had. "It'll be fun. You'll have fun." It's a free patch for everyone who has the game, so you'll all be playing it. The only variance is that PS4 players will have to wait until January for the supplemental games. "Why, you ask? Well, my friends, welcome to the wonderful world of releasing content on multiple competing consoles. You should have seen what the original asks for exclusive content and exclusivity periods were before our publisher, Finji, negotiated for a month to get a better deal. Seriously, hats off to Bekah on that." Teases the Switch release again. "Also, that other home console we haven't mentioned? That's a thing. More info on that when we can spill it." Weird Autumn has been a very big project they've kept secret for the whole year. It's why some backer rewards have been running behind, because fulltime work on the game more or less continued for a lot of months. "As always, thanks for your understand, and I'm back to work on that stuff full time now. I definitely thought that after the game dropped it would be nothing but free time to work on this stuff, but porting and just regular random things post-release really are big ongoing things. This was my first game so me getting things wrong like that is to be expected, but if it's any consolation it does keep me up at night worrying about being late on the remaining backer stuff. Now I know why game projects are regularly pretty late on this stuff. So yeah. I'm working, fast as I can. More updates as that transpires. Thanks as always for your patience. As I've said, the good news is that, especially now with Weird Autumn, a lot of backers will have new NITW stuff coming for a while to come." Talked about mobile, but says that he doesn't have all of the details on it yet, but it's happening and there will be more info as they get closer to it. A lot of "neato technical things" are going on to make it possible. Talks about how the game won a couple Unity awards. "Halloween happened and we for real weren't expecting how much NITW representation there would be this year. In a really dark and weird time in the world, the dozens of pumpkins and costumes really brightened us up. Sometimes you forget that the thing you made exists, like, out in the world in some tangible way. It's like a thing that marks a time and place in people's lives. That's really heavy and wonderful. I think about the things that have been that for me in my life, and it's such a weird honor to be a part of that in someone else's life. To see just a massive amount of that, check out our twitter timeline." He shares a couple of the costumes. Talks about how they have been traveling a lot and might do a little travelogue backer update. Talks about how after his Weird Autumn deadlines had passed, Scott went into a pretty deep depression in late September. It was really rough and was more than just chemical. That he was anhedonic, no vision of the future, no joy in anything. He talked to some friends who were in similar places re: just having completed very big projects and told him it was burnout and that he was massively burned out and needed to get serious about dealing with that. So he made some changes and took some days off and is trying to keep that going regularly. It was part of what inspired this new bout of doing a lot of traveling and hiking and exploration. "What mean to say is that sometimes friends are there to remind you that you're human and that's ok. And sometimes you can take some steps and make some positive progress. That's cool. It's hard to do, but I'm grateful to others for helping me out, and that things have aligned in such a way that I can work on this. I'm feeling better, and I'm truly excited about the future for the first time in a long time." "Honestly these updates are a record of a massive life change with all the messy things that entails. It seems like every other update I'm like "things were recently bad and weird personally but I'm feeling better!" I dunno. It's an awkward, complete not smooth process, and I'm just some grown up punk uncle figuring this out. We've all had to. I think I just landed hardest after this. Oh well. Life goes on. Grab a hold of it as best you can." "Thanks as always for your patience and support. You are wonderful. I hope you're enjoying your autumn, and finding some solace and joy in the really anxious times we're living in right now. Take joy where you can find it. Everything conspires to take that away from you. Drink some cider, enjoy a brisk morning, or a cool evening. Shuffle through some leaves, or- yes- drink a pumpkin spice latte. They're good! They're popular for a reason! Just saying! And if you celebrate Thanksgiving where you are, I hope you have a really great one. I am looking forward to making sweet potato casserole and I think I'm gonna try my hand at a cranberry crumble type thing. Stay well. Talk to you very soon. And, as always- thank you. <3. -scott, alec, bethany" AUGUST 2017: Spoiler Backer Characters: Everyone is getting a nice little artsy print of their characters. Their old printer died on them but a new one is on its way. They'll hit everyone up for current mailing addresses when they're done. Backer Print: Everyone of the print-level tier should have gotten a DM asking for their shipping address. Backer Prologue Game: "Things are happening, progress is being made, not showing much until we're further along." Backer Shorts: Scott got a decent amount done this month. Very exciting. "Animation is great everyone should try animation imo." Art Book: "Special thanks to Bethany who scanned A LOT of stuff this month. There's so much. I'm going to have to start figuring out where the cutoff is on the scope of this thing. Like the other backer rewards just know you'll be getting more than you expected probably. We tend to overstuff. I dunno if you got that impression maybe from the game with 100+ NPCs and more words than the Iliad. That last bit is actually true. NITW is the boss epic poem." Screenshot of the W.I.P Artbook, Scott comments: "hope you're all ready for my intense and beautiful character design process of filling pages with horrible scribbles" Another screenshot from the W.I.P Artbook, "brilliant", says Scott "NITW backer stuff is such a weird full time job. It's just a big grab bag full of things. I thought we were smart when we were setting up the kickstarter, that all of these would be perfectly doable while we were full-timing the game but that turned out to be such a naive assumption. All of this stuff takes time, most of it is large things, and none of it is stuff you want to not do /well/. If I've learned anything from this whole thing it's that things take time. Anyway, thanks as always for patience and support. A lot of you will have NITW stuff headed your way for a while to come. " They talk about PAX West. Alec, Bekah and Chris headed out for the 4-day long event. There was a lot of cosplay. Scott shared some highlight pics from the event (you can see a lot of these shared on the NITW twitter) "So yeah thanks everyone who came out and said hello!!! Please continue to find NITW at like every con forever. Or at least a lot of them Thanks to Alec and Bekah and Chris & co for heading out and doing the work last weekend. It really is work too. Thanks all." Scott then brought up the recent Taylor Swift NITW-ripoff. "To be clear: Mae would not be a Taylor Swift fan. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being a "swiftie" as I've now learned her fans are called- just saying that this would not be Mae's jam. And Mae would never be shilling for Ticketmaster. Honestly that whole thing they're pitching in the video is pretty horrible. I know The Author Is Dead and so forth but I'm gonna go ahead and say Mae is not dead so uh fuck all this. I now join the throng of those who have beef with Taylor Swift. There is an official NITWxTaylor Swift beef now. I am declaring official beef. I mostly took the whole thing in stride. Mostly. At first it was funny but pretty soon after I was just kind of stewing about it. Other team members were graciously there to not take it in stride which is good because I'm way to easy going about this kind of thing. So who knows what'll happen. Luv too be ripped off by zillionaires and shitty megacorps. What a weird weird weird year it's been." "Game's been out for 6 months!!!!!! Holy crap!!!! Still going pretty strong too. For some reason really nice and concerned people keep telling us they're worried we're not selling well or that the "hype" has faded, but they don't see all the numbers and fan/player activity like we do. People tweet and write and make videos about the game constantly. We're drowning in fanart and cosplay pics and just general emails. We've sold a very respectable number of copies for any indie game in 2017, let alone one like whatever the hell NITW is. And sales have been steady. People keep discovering the game and word of mouth is wild. So yeah I mean... don't worry about us. It's a massive hit as far as we're concerned and we couldn't be happier. We're beyond lucky. Thank you all for making this possible. We are eternally grateful. FUN THINGS HAPPENING THIS FALL WILL FILL YOU IN ASAP UNTIL THEN ENJOY YOUR SEPTEMBER WHY AM I TYPING IN ALL CAPS THANK YOU <3, scott, alec, and bethany" He ends the updating linking the free NITW fanzine "with a lot of amazing work in it. the art y'all come up with is so stunning. most of you are better at this than i am. stop that." The NITW Zine is linked here. JULY 2017: Spoiler "Hey everyone! Enjoying summer? Hiding indoors? Well good/bad news, it'll only be here for another month!!! I swear next update will just be me freaking out that fall is coming. Corn maze/haunted house travelogue special edition update this autumn? Ok so, a lot of things are happening, and I'm going to have to keep this extremely brief this month. This is kind of a non-update, which we've only done a couple times in the past few years. I could wait until things calm down but that'll be next week sometime and then it'll be the middle of the month with another update a couple weeks out, etc. Thanks for understanding. Ok, super quick: Backer reward stuff: still working on all of it, will have more specifics next update in a few weeks. New merch: things are being printed. right now. actual real photographs and info next update. PS4 Patch: Alec rolled about a zillion big and small fixes and bits of polish into this beast of a patch. It's currently being ported over for PSN users. We'll announce when it's finally out on our twitter (@nightinthewoods) so stay tuned. And as always, thanks for your patience. Everything else: We'll chat in a couple weeks. We'll have some neat stuff to talk about. It'll all make sense. OK that's about it for the quickest update ever? i think maybe once in the past we basically skipped a month? We'll be back to lengthy substantive update town next time. You know we're good for the word count. As always, thanks so much for everything. -scott, alec, and bethany" JUNE 2017: Spoiler Backer Characters: Just about everyone is in. There were a couple of people who didn't get back to them by the drop date so they will be in a future patch once they get confirmation. As posted earlier, the patch adding the new backer characters is already live on the PC versions. They're doing some last minute bug fixes and tests before pushing the patch to the PS4. This patch will also fix the pesky trophy issue that keeps popping up. So stay tuned. Wallpapers have been released to Backers now. All in total there are 8 backer exclusive wallpapers - four for desktop, four for cell phones, in various sizes. Address requests will be going out for the glow-in-the-dark print within the next week or so. As for the art book. Scott: "Geez. Yeah. We'll talk about that next month" Backer Prologue Game: Same as last month, working on it among all the other things going on. He hopes the backers are jazzed about playing a fresh nitw game a some months after release but more details will have to wait for a future update. Backer Shorts: Scott didn't get as much of a chance to work on them this month with all the other backer stuff going on and being finalized, but rest assured, they are coming. "So this will be a short no-frills update because to be honest not much is going on! Life has returned to basically normal, or whatever normal counts as now. We're working pretty busily on all the extra things we owe you, as well as some fun stuff we'll talk about in the near future that I think you're gonna dig. We're starting to make plans for the fall, figuring out who will be at things like PAX West, wondering if we'll be on any end of year lists, that kind of thing. Amazing to think this bizarre year is over half over." Scott talks about his hatred of the summer due to physical and mental health issues that just get worse during the summer. He says come September he will be so, so happy. This summer him and Bethany have been getting out more, exploring, driving out into the country and finding old abandoned churches and graveyards and the like. "Bethany and I spent like our entire time when we were dating doing this. Just driving backroads through fields and woods and tiny towns, listening to music, and finding things. It's been so good to do that again." A few weeks ago they flew out to Portland to visit their friend Karla, who you might know as one of the founding members of Fullbright, makers of Gone Home and the upcoming Tacoma. Scott says he has already played through Tacoma and says it is brilliant and encourages everyone to try it out when it releases next month. Alex has been, "as always, busy busy busy working on NITW bugs and cleanup and all kinds of other behind the scenes things we don't talk about. He's makin' games, he's takin' names. Honestly dude is just prolific." One of the things that has blown them away since launch is the amount of cosplay there's been. In particular at a recent anime con there was a NITW cosplay meet up and Scott shared pictures of the meetup. He then shared an image of the first intial sketch of the NITW characters he made back when he and Alec were coming up with the idea for the game. "It's just... geez this has all come a long way since this sketch in late summer 2013. It means so much to us that people connected with the game and the characters enough that they actually take time like making outfits and meeting up and stuff. It's wild. Thank you so much, and by all means continue. We are loving all of it." And that's about it for the month. He says this summer is pretty quiet, just lots of working happening with a lot of fun stuff coming down the line. "Thank you, and we hope you're having a fantastic summer. Put on sunscreen, put on some music, and get outside. Unless you're like me. Then please stay indoors. And wait for the days to get short again. <3, -scott, alex, and bethany" MAY 2017: Spoiler Scott apologizes for the late update. He says they are going to try to keep the updates going for a while, and that they are going to aim for the first of the month, but sometimes life and work gets in the way. He then talked updates about the backer reward stuff Backer Characters have just about all been taken care of. Those who aren't finalized have received messages. They are also chasing down the last few missing initials. Once they have all of the characters and initials 100% in, they will be doing a big patch with the last few lingering bug fixes. "It's gonna be neat when that's all in and done". The Backer Wallpapers will be out next week and are "pretty snazzy" he says. The glow in the dark print is done, they are just dealing with a few logistics things. Backers of this tier will be receiving address requests soon. Scott on the art book: "ha ha ha this thing is ridiculous. might do a sneak peek in next month's update. you will all certainly be getting your backer money's worth". The backer supplemental prologue game has a release window further on down the line, but Scott asks that we give them a bit to get further along so they can be sure. Animated shorts are coming along. "it's interesting working with these characters in a non-game environment again. i'd kinda forgotten how much i loved doing animated shorts" He reiterates that a lot of stuff has been happening. That life has been really busy since the game launched and you'd be amazed how much work there is after your game comes out. Instead of one big focal point thought it's more like a dozen smaller things flitting around that you need to keep track of. Alec went to Japan. You can check out his twitter feed for a bunch of pics and vids from all through May. He's back in Winnipeg now and working on all kinds of stuff -- NITW, Oceanheart and "beyond". Scott talks about how for the first time in years he's finally getting back to a regular sleep schedule and isn't having nightmares about the game anymore. His anxiety disorder is a lot better these days. He wants to write something about all of this one day, telling the reality of what making something like NITW took and the lingering effects afterward. Until a couple of weeks ago, he was still having massive anxiety every time he wasnt at his desk and he didn't know how to actually just chill out. All that is going much better now and he is definitely healthier than he's been in years. Scott and Bethany are also doing early pre-work on their next game, which is coming more into focus and keeps getting more and more exciting. "For real there won't be a big announcement for quite a while, but you do have to listen to me mention how excited we are for that entire time" "One of the strange things about releasing a game is that it doesn't end that day. There's patching and, in our case, KS backer stuff to do for a while, that kind of thing. But beyond that there's the fact that people are continuously experiencing this thing, either playing it for the first time, or the fourth time, or making something about it, or writing about it, or getting tattoos, or whatever. It doesn't stop. It's always fresh to someone, and someone is always right at the start of getting hit with it. And that often finds its way back to us, and we're pretty humbled and grateful. Thanks to you all for helping make it possible. We'll be back in a few weeks with some cool stuff I think. Cool stuff. Yeah. In the meantime, enjoy the summer sun. We'll talk soon. As ever, thank you. scott, alec and bethany" APRIL 2017: Spoiler Scott's hand injury has mostly healed. He is still feeling some nerve damage in his hand and thinks it may be lasting damage. It took about 6 weeks to get to a place where he could work with it full time again. Before that he could only really work in 30 minute bursts before the pain would just be too much (and was under orders by his doctor to not work at ALL). This is a big reason why certain updates and things have taken longer than they would have liked. He had immense guilt about not working all the time because of the injury, but supportive messages from fans helped a lot, and now he plans on working double time on this stuff to make up for it. Updates on Backer Rewards: The last of the in-game Backer content will be taken care of this month (aka the Kickstarter NPCs, some of which will have new dialogue). So once that's done there should be a bit of new content patched into the game for people to see. Backer-exclusive Wallpapers are being worked on this very moment. The Backer exclusive glow in the dark print has been sketched. Scott is going to polish it up this week and then talk with their printer. He thinks it's going to be pretty neat. The Art Book has gotten "big and weird, but in a good way". They just got a new printer/scanner so he'll be dumping loads more stuff into it this month as well. It even has stuff from BEFORE the game that lead up to some of the ideas in it, so you definitely won't be wanting for content. People have been asking for a physical version, and while they can't do that as part of the backer rewards, they may do one eventually. Scott worries a bit that most people wouldn't really buy it though and that he will just end up having like a crate of books in the basement. Prologue Supplemental Game now has an outline, a schedule and a TITLE. Scott says it's really gonna be something. As for the Animated Shorts, he got back to work on them a few weeks back and they are coming along now. And that's basically the jist of the NITW Backer stuff. Scott says that this is going to be his fulltime job for the rest of summer, so buckle up for lots of NITW depending on your backer level, and as always he thanks you guys for your incredible patience. The new merch is coming soon (again, delayed by injury). There will be a lot of shirts and apparel, but more than that as well. They had a big meeting last night where they were tossing around some pretty ridiculous ideas (such as a Mae-themed Cat Clock). Tattoo flash will also be out soon, in fact Scott was working on that yesterday when his power went out. He says if you're planning on getting a NITW tattoo you should probably hang tight because there will be some official designs from him, an actual experienced tattoo designer. That's about it for the big Backer and Merch related stuff. The big thing that happened this month was that Scott and Bethany finally moved out of their old two-room basement suite into a small house. This, aside from paying off the immense debt they got into making NITW, was one of their only real "dreams" in terms of NITW's success, so it's heartwarming to see it came true. They touched on some of the stuff Alec has been up to recently, mostly his development on Oceanheart, which you can catch regularly on Twitch: Hi. I thought it might be a good idea to summarize some of the news in the April Backer Update, since it's kind of like, the only real official NITW dev news place. And I thought maybe some people would like to know what's what. A lot of it pertains to Backer exclusive-y stuff, but I figured others still might like to kinda know where things are at. -Scott's hand injury has mostly healed. He is still feeling some nerve damage in his hand and thinks it may be lasting damage. It took about 6 weeks to get to a place where he could work with it full time again. Before that he could only really work in 30 minute bursts before the pain would just be too much (and was under orders by his doctor to not work at ALL). This is a big reason why certain updates and things have taken longer than they would have liked. He had immense guilt about not working all the time because of the injury, but supportive messages from fans helped a lot, and now he plans on working double time on this stuff to make up for it. -To that end, here are some updates on Backer rewards: --The last of the in-game Backer content will be taken care of this month (aka the Kickstarter NPCs, some of which will have new dialogue). So once that's done there should be a bit of new content patched into the game for people to see. --Backer-exclusive Wallpapers are being worked on this very moment. --The Backer exclusive glow in the dark print has been sketched. Scott is going to polish it up this week and then talk with their printer. He thinks it's going to be pretty neat. --The Art Book has gotten "big and weird, but in a good way". They just got a new printer/scanner so he'll be dumping loads more stuff into it this month as well. It even has stuff from BEFORE the game that lead up to some of the ideas in it, so you definitely won't be wanting for content. People have been asking for a physical version, and while they can't do that as part of the backer rewards, they may do one eventually. Scott worries a bit that most people wouldn't really buy it though and that he will just end up having like a crate of books in the basement. --Prologue Supplemental Game now has an outline, a schedule and a TITLE. Scott says it's really gonna be something. --As for the Animated Shorts, he got back to work on them a few weeks back and they are coming along now. -And that's basically the jist of the NITW Backer stuff. Scott says that this is going to be his fulltime job for the rest of summer, so buckle up for lots of NITW depending on your backer level, and as always he thanks you guys for your incredible patience. -The new merch is coming soon (again, delayed by injury). There will be a lot of shirts and apparel, but more than that as well. They had a big meeting last night where they were tossing around some pretty ridiculous ideas (such as a Mae-themed Cat Clock). -Tattoo flash will also be out soon, in fact Scott was working on that yesterday when his power went out. He says if you're planning on getting a NITW tattoo you should probably hang tight because there will be some official designs from him, an actual experienced tattoo designer. -That's about it for the big Backer and Merch related stuff. The big thing that happened this month was that Scott and Bethany finally moved out of their old two-room basement suite into a small house. This, aside from paying off the immense debt they got into making NITW, was one of their only real "dreams" in terms of NITW's success, so it's heartwarming to see it came true. -They touched on some of the stuff Alec has been up to recently, mostly his development on Oceanheart, which you can catch regularly on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/infiniteammoinc He realizes that as they go forward, especially as they complete remaining NITW stuff, that the Backer Updates will become a sort of running report on their lives and future projects. To that end.... Scott and Bethany have basically decided what their next game will be (and that they WILL be continuing to make games) but they won't be making an announcement for a while. They're going to take some months to learn some things and do a lot of research, but that you can, predictably, "expect something with a lot of exploration and characters and a strong sense of place and stuff. I think this is just the kind of thing we make. We'll of course keep you posted. But I think you'll be into it?" By the sounds of it, their next game will likely not be NITW-related, but this isn't confirmed. They also don't clarify if Alec will be joining them again on this new game or not. But presumably we will learn more later in the year. He closed the update by linking to some NITW articles that he thought were pretty great (many you've probably seen linked here) and how thankful he was that this game has touched so many people and helped them through a lot of stuff (especially in re: mental health) ‘Night in the Woods’ Is Soulful, Empathetic, and Too Real Night in the Woods is the Working Class Fiction I’ve Been Waiting For Night In The Woods — Born To Lose, Bound For Glory What Lies Beneath: On the Love and Anger of Night in the Woods What Work Was: Labor and Play in Night in the Woods No Cartridge: Scott Benson Interview The Monster at the End of Capitalism Edited April 3, 2018 by d1l2e3v4 Added 1 Year Anniv. (March 2018) Update Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d1l2e3v4 Posted January 20, 2018 Author Share Posted January 20, 2018 (edited) 1 Year Anniversary (March 2018) update added. Edited April 3, 2018 by d1l2e3v4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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