Hello again! I tried to find a good title for today's update that encompassed all the topics covered herein, but as you can see, I gave up.

Generous backer cpt_freakout suggested that we post a sample of our soundtrack to show people why they should pledge $30 or more. We think that's a splendid idea, and a great excuse to show off how excellent our composer Leonardo Badinella is. Please scroll to the bottom of this update to enjoy the first ambient music track from Expeditions: Conquistador.

Now, let's talk about some of the press coverage we've received so far. We've been sending out the press build all week, but everybody needs a little time to play it and formulate their opinions. In the mean time, a few people have got head starts from Gamescom or from getting in touch with us earlier. BenNiGeLing had a chance to sit down with the game at the expo and has been kind enough to give us a write-up over at ScrewAttack after he got home. 

The French site Historiagames has been nice enough to translate our whole Kickstarter page into French. None of us in here can read French, so we're hoping they didn't just run it through Google Translate! In Germany, we got a write-up on Gamers.de as well as a mention in a Kickstarter round-up on Buffed.de (despite the fact that Buffed seems to be an online games portal, and Conquistador will be a single-player game).

Finally, the ever excellent RPG Codex took the time to interview us about what we're doing, with a special focus on our gameplay mechanics and how the world layer of the game is going to work. That should give you a good idea of how the world layer of our game works, but we also plan to put together another Let's Play style video over the weekend, focusing on that part of the game, as we know we haven't shown much of it so far.

Beta access and mod tools

The last two things I'd like to mention today are our plans for beta access and mod tools. I'd like to make it clear that the beta access mentioned on the $30 reward tier will begin as soon as our Kickstarter successfully concludes. At this point we'll send out a download link for our latest build to everybody who pledged $30 or more, so you can immediately try the game for yourselves. We'll then keep updating you regularly at our major milestones so you can keep an eye on how the game is progressing and give us valuable feedback on the backer forum.

Secondly, we've been talking about putting out mod tools. Since we're making the game with Unity, our options for giving you access to our source files are somewhat restricted, but if we reach the $100,000 stretch goal, we can guarantee that we'll release our editing tools and implement a way for you to add to our original XML files or even replace it with your own, essentially allowing you to put your own content into our game world. Even if we don't reach the stretch goal, we'll do our best to make this happen, but it's going to take some time to set up, not to mention polishing our currently somewhat unstable editing tools, and we can't guarantee that we'll have the resources to do it without Kickstarter.

Thank you for your time and support, and please do keep spreading the word as always :-)