What ho, Bog Shroomers!
And at long last, Serpent in the Staglands is complete. We are extremely proud of the result of one adventurous year of learning and development. You helped us make this happen, and we are thrilled with how the game shaped up. You need but look at the original Kickstarter video to see how far the game has come. We think it’s pretty remarkable.
I would have said there really isn’t an opportunity for a 2-person team to make a niche game like this beyond being a hobby project, but with Kickstarter and you all wonderful folks that was made possible. We’re so grateful to have had the opportunity to make this game and we hope you get a sense for the type of experience we were trying to make the moment you start to boot it up. We’ve said Serpent in the Staglands is a 90s CRPG in everything but the release date, and we meant it. No handholding, fun puzzles, and we tried to make every element and feature in the game fun first and foremost — we think you’ll love it.
Alright, lets get to it: LAUNCH UPDATE.
A special thanks to all our backers who provided their mugs for the game — they brought a ton of character and atmosphere to the game.
As we’ve mentioned before, do read
The Manual prior to playing. You start the game proper right out the gate, so your tutorial is in that text. We’ll be getting it packaged up for GOG and the folks with Accounts with us a standalone soon, and Steam folks will be able to download it from the link above.
DEMO
We’ve included the first couple areas of the game for folks to slaughter some wildlife and explore a temple to get a feel for the gameplay! If you know someone that may be interested, pass it along!
What’s Next
We have some patches planned to smooth out some skill and enemy balancing, as well as some economy balancing, and will continue to push hard to support and polish up the game so it’s tip top in time for the free expansion! We have a dedicated
forum for any technical issues or bugs, and if you find anything please let us know! We will strive to make the game as perfect as it can be, and while we did a lot of thorough testing ourselves with the help of the beta testers for early areas, we’ll need your help finding anything we may have missed.
If you haven’t already received a Kickstarter message or email from us, you will throughout the coming day. We’re drinking some cafera and continuing to go through the list through tomorrow— Steam and our DRM-Free releases early afternoon, GOG early morning (US Central Time). This is a manual process for us, as we're sending a key to each of you line by line, so we appreciate your patience and hope to have this wrapped up today!
Helping us out one last time!
One last thing you wonderful folks could do for us is talk about the game. With just the two of us wearing all the hats needed for development, we haven’t had the opportunity to spread the word as much as we would to have liked to. While the game is being distributed to various journalists and You-Tubers, we really think the word of mouth will be the best driving force behind letting more people know about it.
Whatever social media thing you’re on we’d be so grateful if you gave our game a shoutout. If you enjoyed the game and are inclined to leave a review on a distributor like Steam, that would be immensely helpful for getting traction. We’d also love to hear about what you think about it, so always feel free to let us know in email or on the forums.
Making of/Art Book
We’re currently finishing up this digital book and will have it out soon! Everyone who has a package including it will be getting an email containing account info, and will be able to just download it from the link provided when it’s available. The book turned out real fun, and is full of design decisions, tons of art, how to live off butter-coffee for a year, and plenty of small little easter eggs or things a lot of folks may have missed playing (lots of spoilers, so take heed). We’re so appreciative of everyone who continues to purchase the upgrade for this package, and we think you’ll all get a kick out of it!
Soundtrack Available!
The game’s wonderful music artist has the soundtrack available on his
Bandcamp and also available on
our site (all proceeds will go straight to him)! It’s a really terrific OST for the game, full of atmospheric tracks. Definitely worth your interest!
Thank You!
This was our first Kickstarter campaign and our first game of this size, and while this was a moderately sized campaign compared to a lot of games we’ve had an immense amount of support from everyone, and we really appreciate all the words of encouragement over the past year. We’ve tried to run a fun and honest campaign with our updates, and hope you’ve enjoyed the look inside development as the game was in progress. We’ll continue to post any big updates of patches or other news. Thanks again everyone.
Remember to bring a notebook and some mead, and enjoy your time in Vol!
Cheers!
Joe & Hannah
