Kickstarter

All backers - Kickstarter and Paypal - should now have surveys. These will arrive via email or notifications in the KS interface, and can be filled in right here if you are a Kickstarter backer, or mailed back to us if you are a Paypal backer.

We're crunching hard on the game right now because it's being shown at Rezzed: http://www.rezzed.com/ next weekend. If you can come along to that please, please do. And make sure you say hi!

In the coming weeks you will start to receive rewards if you backed a physical reward tier, but please note not all of these items will arrive at the same time.

Everyone else: early access tiers will receive their access to the Sir, You Are Being Hunted alpha in a few weeks. All other tiers and pre-order folks will receive access a few weeks after that. Please note that all Kickstarter digital deliveries will be made Humble Store, with Steam keys being offered at a later date, when the game gets on to Valve's giganto-service.

There's still a long way to go, and this early access period will enable you to help us begin to refine and balance the experience of play as we add more content. It's a thrilling game right now, but it's going to take contact with thousands of gamers for us to make it a truly great game. 

Backing our project was, of course, just the start.

So excited.

-BR

Here's Jim playing through a bit of the new Mountain biome. More soon!

Hello there!

Update time again, and we thought we'd brew your figurative pot of tea by talking about a couple of the new "biomes" we've been building. 

When you generate your world in Sir, you get to choose the makeup of the five islands in the archipelago, including the type of environmental theme that they exhibit. The one we've shown off at length so far is our core rural theme, which is the biome we used to develop the technology. This is based on British farmlands, particularly the Cotswolds, Somerset and Dorset. But there are other peculiarly British terrains too, and these next two biomes are drawn from those.

First is The Fens, which is based on places like, well, The Fens in East Anglia, but also Romney Marsh and other famed and murky flatlands. It's waterlogged and filled with crumbling ruins and mystery. Oh and robots. Killer robots. Maybe some ducks. We've not decided on that yet.

A flatter landscape provides some interesting problems for you as the player, because there's less cover for you to flee through to make your escape. In some ways, though, it can be an advantage, because if you're careful you can spot the hunters at a distance and keep away, or plan your ambush. Beware, though, because poachers will be lurking with traps. The poacher bots are near invisible until triggered, and lie in wait rather than hunt for you, so your progress will have to be cautious.

Of course we're keen to play with verticality the other way, and this brings us to our mountainous biome, which is based on the highlands and Cumbria. This adds three craggy mountains to an island, and breaks up the landscape with towering cliffs, conifer forests and huge rocky outcrops. The mountains demand more of you as a player than farmland, and not just in terms of navigation: without so many settlements to loot you're going to have to look to the local flora and fauna for food and resources.

So yeah. Full ahead all pistons. 

In related news, we're beginning to spool up the coverage campaign for the game. Tom and James recently swung by an indie event in London to show off Sir, and you can see a bit of shakycam footage of that below. They also spoke (today, actually) at Unite Nordic, the Unity (our game development engine) conference in Malmo, so some of you might have caught that, too! Splendid times.

We are, of course, focused on the target of making a version of the game playable at Rezzed on 22nd of June. We're going to have it set up on a stand on the show floor, so that attendees can try it out. It's our absolute intention to bring the game to the early-access tiers of our Kickstarter backers a few weeks after that. 

Kickstarter people: We're going to need you guys to help with that next stage of development, which will be balancing everything and fine-tuning the NPCs that we're introducing to the game's working systems.

So it's time to get excited.

Oh and there will be some more video footage of Jim playing on the new biomes soon. Stand by!

Two in one week! Yes indeed, it's a bonanza of Sir activity.

Hello!

Jim is putting together a new series of videos to show you what we've been up to. 

This first video (below) is an introduction to the series, so it contains some stuff that'll be familiar to backers, but it also shows stuff that you'll never have seen before. You should definitely watch it.

More soon.