Quick Update
over 6 years ago – Mon, Oct 07, 2019 at 12:09:46 AM

Thanks everyone! We're continuing to do well. Five days in, we're over 52% of the way.

At this point, all of the $500 reward tier packages have been taken. We're adding a new $520 tier that features a custom-drawn "toon" from your photo to go in the game's closing credits.

For backers already at the $500 level who want both, or for other backers who don't care about the physical rewards, we will also have an add-on for the credits toon. 

We're working on some additional add-ons to be announced in a few days. These will likely include coins or key-chains, boxed games, t-shirts, and possibly a plush toy. 

Livestreams

We had a lot of fun livestreaming the original Hero's Quest on Twitch on Saturday. I posted the video to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A2Z_aLOYxM. We averaged almost 100 viewers for the entire six hours. We gave out a few excellent prizes including an original boxed Hero's Quest game, Jim Ferguson artwork, Bruce Brenneise art, and more.

We're going to do more live streams weekly, and a special Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness event on Halloween. Subscribe to our channel at https://www.twitch.tv/transolargames to keep up with all the livestream action! We'll have more cool prizes donated by us and by our wonderful fans!

Book About Sierra On-Line

Ending in 11 days is a campaign for a book about the glory days of Sierra. It's by Shawn Mills, who worked on Quest for Infamy. Check it out at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/klytos/the-sierra-adventure-the-story-of-sierra-on-line. We aren't directly involved in this, but did an interview for it, and will be signing some autograph stickers. It should be an excellent book of interest to our backers and fans.

Two days in, and doing great!
over 6 years ago – Thu, Oct 03, 2019 at 11:32:34 PM

Hi, fellow students and alumni of Hero-U.

The Summer Daze campaign is off to an amazing start! We started with $29K from 445 backers in the first 12 hours. We’re now two days into the campaign and nearly halfway to our goal - over $45K in pledges from more than 700 awesome backers!

Let’s not stop here! If you’ve already backed, please share to social media. Let your friends know that Summer Daze at Hero-U is going to be both a fun adventure and a great read. You’ll have lots of choices to make... and opportunities to replay the game with different choices. But this game is also an extended visual novel that should appeal to fantasy fans who get frustrated by arbitrary adventure game puzzles, mapping, and such.

Upcoming Event - Quest for Glory 30th Anniversary Party

Sierra released our first adventure RPG, Hero’s Quest, in October 1989. To celebrate the 30th anniversary, we’re doing a livestream on Twitch this Saturday at noon PDT until 6 p.m. Hopefully that schedule will let fans from around the world catch at least part of the stream. Our Twitch channel is https://www.twitch.tv/transolargames. (NOTE: There might be some delays at the beginning as we get used to using Twitch for the first time.)

We’re going to have all sorts of fun games and contests, plus some exciting giveaways. Note that Kickstarter does not permit raffles, so the contests do not require backing Summer Daze, nor any monetary contribution. The prizes were donated by many generous artists and fans.

Please tell your friends and social media contacts about the livestream. We’d love to have as many Quest for Glory and Hero-U fans there as possible.

We’ve made a Facebook group for the 30th anniversary - https://www.facebook.com/groups/417597882218896. Come join us there! Joining the group requires permission to keep out spammers; we’ll try to get everyone in reasonably quickly.

Campaign Notes:

A backer pointed out that we list a “digital coloring book” as a reward at the $35 level, but it’s missing from some higher levels. This was an oversight. The coloring book is included at all levels $35 and up.

A question came up about collectible boxed games. Currently they are only included in the $250 and $500 tiers. Originally we were not going to have any physical rewards in this campaign at all in order to simplify fulfillment. The issue is that printing the box, manual, DVD, and CD, putting everything together, and shipping boxes is a big deal. Those higher tiers are important to funding this campaign and the game development, and we want to provide something special for our higher backers, so we opted to include boxed games.

There’s a complicated tradeoff here between the much higher cost of short print runs and the value of our time in fulfilling hundreds of physical reward shipments vs. working on the games. Last time the process we used didn’t work very well - There was so much lead time that we ended up shipping an already-obsolete version of the game, and some backers were dissatisfied either with the box or the fulfillment house. We want to minimize those problems this time by treating boxed games as a “boutique item” rather than a commodity.

Will there be add-ons? Yes, we will add them to the campaign page soon. You’ll be able to choose additional add-ons on BackerKit after the Kickstarter campaign closes. Add-ons we’re pretty sure we’ll have include t-shirts, lucky coins, and meeps (limited availability). We’ll likely announce more later.