As promised, more regular updates and also, excitingly, actual progress.

First of all, got our ProTools environment finally set up and all the clips sorted. Also: created 8 unique "telephones" for the audio - set up on each slice you can see in the framegrab from my desktop here on the left. These are the personal phones of each of the main characters plus some slices set up to sound like radio transmissions, plus some tracks for SFX and backgrounds. Characters swap phones or are sometimes calling from each other's phones, so it's not always going to sound the same for each character but each has also been optimized for the actor's voice so they always sound good.

Some of the sound design is being recorded live off of a few synth gadgets I've been rounding up in time with the vocal performances, which is yielding some fun sound effects. Since this game is probably primarily going to be played with headphones on, it's being mixed in headphones, and without going toooooo overboard, we're trying to have a compelling audio experience that you can really picture in your head. 

The clip I'm posting is the tutorial "call intercept" from Vincent. It's more fx-heavy than many of the calls, but it's also largely finished and so you can hear sort of how it's all shaping up.

I sent messages to most of you, but those of you with rewards involving writing a storyline or naming a character should get in touch because once we record those, we're done with recording. In the meantime, there are over 200 clips that we've started on mixing and mastering.

Cheers.

Hello everyone –

First of all, I’d like to take the opportunity to apologize to you all. After all the good faith and the incredible financial support you showed our project last year, you deserved to hear from us much sooner. There’s really no excuse for not keeping you, of all people informed. Your money is still sitting in the account and the project is in fact, over a couple of critical milestones and should be rounding the bend to complete in the next month or two.

A lot of things happened. I’m going to tell you as many of them as I’m legally able to at this point.

Here is what happened:

First, a number of incredibly good things. Partially buoyed by the success of this project and this Kickstarter campaign, our humble dream of having a label for independent games that would fill a  completely different niche in the games ecosystem actually found some incredibly receptive audiences. I’m pleased to confirm that we did, in fact, get a multi-game deal with PlayStation Home to bring a number of games from independent designers to their platform and have been, for the past year, hard at work on that. We had to change our label’s  name to avoid a trademark issue with the console title we didn’t know was going to be released, surrendered the domain, and with it went the email address this kickstarter account was tied to.

There’s really no excuse for it, though, a ball was dropped and it was a big one and it was one that involves a breach of trust that I am ashamed of.

In fact, it turns out that starting a real company and getting all that moving and working and keeping money in the bank to have us stay around long enough to finish those games was ... hard. A couple of balls were dropped and one of them turned out to be our game, FREEQ, the one that didn’t have a deadline with a bunch of scary legal penalties attached to it if it was late or buggy or worse. We lost a cast member or two, had an issue with SAG, and a lot of momentum got lost – we kept the money safe, but the months just slipped by one after another.

As I write this, the 135 page script has been recorded except for a few small pieces that are going to be filled in over the next week or two. The audio engineering on the 2+ hours of audio for the game is underway, the system architecture and the completely new story engine we designed have been coded and actually WORK. The performances are just amazing, I’ll post a few non-spoiler ones as soon as they’ve got the sound effects added. I’m right now posting a photo (seems I can only post one per post) from one of the recording session for the game -  there are a few big sequences in the game that were recorded vintage radio drama style around a big microphone and they’re my favorites in the whole game. No recording studio in our budget would hold that many people at once, so we converted our meeting room at the studio and it actually sounds way better than this photo might lead you to believe. You'll hear soon, promise. 

You all deserve something more.  Your rewards, including the t-shirts, are ready to go out and have been for months. We just got in over our heads and should have asked for more help. We’re going to add some kind of additional rewards for every single one of you who contributed. More on that soon.

But really – I’m sorry and also thank you. It ended up that your faith in FREEQ didn’t help just the three of us make a game, but convinced some pretty important people to let a number I can’t disclose of indie game designers just like us also get their foot in a door and make a dream come true. It’s been a hard journey but I’m grateful for the opportunity every day I wake up.

You deserve better from us in the light of that. We hope to still make you proud of us.

Jesse

You're looking at the new in-progress revision to the look-and-feel of the game, which we have decided is going to embrace the bygone era of radio a little more fully. This decision was informed by a couple of early prototyping sessions where we started to lock the story and characters and how a player will actually participate in the story of the game. This is the rear logo of the t-shirt you people we owe a t-shirt can look forward to receiving. We're placing the order this week and very excited.

In fact, now would be a good time to thank our Associate Producer-level Kickstarter backers, one of whom has already played an early version of the prototype and another of whom is on deck to play it once we reach 50% content complete. -- The game has gone through an exciting evolution over the past two months, namely, it looks a lot less like the video posted here... in fact it looks a lot less like anything at all. But it SOUNDS amazing.

The horrible video shot on my aging cell phone shows our first experiments and excitement with a prototype Mike made that does not use much visual component to surf the signals. Instead, you can just tilt and tune the device and use your ears to find a strong signal. Discovering the phantom transmissions is 100 times more exciting, we've discovered, when you stumble upon them using only your ears and we're so totally jazzed about this that we've redesigned a part of the game to capture this experience.

The end result is that you're going to be able to sit on the subway or bus or in your bed and close your eyes and twirl the device in your hand and you won't NEED to look at the screen until you've locked onto a signal. It's fun, it's cool, it embraces the radio metaphor- we're pumped.

More as it happens. We've hired a kickass engineer to make the prototype going faster. T-shirts are about to get ordered, those of you who are getting a peek at our design notes will be getting some PDFs next week, and it is ALL very exciting.

Thanks SO MUCH for hanging in there with us and believing in the game.

FYI, Jesse is on his honeymoon, and he's the one who does most of the kickstarter updates, so if you're wondering what's up with the radio silence (no pun intended), the wedding and aftermath have claimed him fully.

Meanwhile, the game itself has shifted into high production. We've been refining the mechanic and showing some very early paper prototypes that demo the "the story always changes" mechanic for a few of our major benefactors/backers. Early results are very encouraging, so we're hard, hard at work. If we can work out the LA/honeymoon logistics, we'll post some photos.

Schedule for the next few weeks looks like this:

By the end of December, complete design documentation and script for the entire game should be pretty locked. Production of the digital game will kick off in early January once the holidays are over and everyone's back. Meanwhile, we're working things out with SAG to be able to include our Hollywood talent in the low-budget project (one or two more surprises yet to come in that area, possibly).

Those of you who have T-shirts coming to you: we're also iterating a few new ideas for the overall visual style of the game so we're working something up that reflects that and you should probably watch your post in January for those.

More to come, but I did want to at least let you know it's all happening.

Hey everyone!

This is just a short note to mostly say THANK YOU to every single one of you for believing in the project and kicking in to help make it happen. It's pretty up in the air at this point whether the final 17 hours will cause a rally to get us over the line or not, but we've all got our fingers crossed.

I'm equally touched that friends we know have generously backed the project as I am by the complete strangers who seem to have stumbled on it and thought it was cool enough to back. From the bottom of my heart, truly, thank you.

I just want to say that at this point, the game is happening one way or another. If we don't get funded via kickstarter, we're going to make it happen somehow, and we'll make sure that every single one of you who's backed us so far is remembered when it does.

In the meantime, we've asked you for so much, but if in these final hours you could just facebook us or twitter us one more time to your networks, it would be a huge awesome favor.

Our friends Teddy Dunn and Anessa Ramsey have both given us the go ahead to leak some exciting news:

Namely that both of them are excited about the project and interested in lending their voices to the game.

Being huge fans of their work (and seriously, if you haven't seen Veronica Mars or The Signal GO RIGHT NOW AND WATCH) we're super super jazzed.

Obviously we'd really like to make this happen, so more than ever we'd be super grateful to everyone to get the word out and help us cross that last 22%.

Wooha!

First off:

THANK YOU everyone who's pledged so far or talked about the project. We know it's not a fantastic time when everyone has a ton of extra money sitting around, so the support means a ton. We have not been idle during the fundraising- we're pretty sure we're going to hit the goal and have been working tirelessly on the design process for the game. Some of that stuff is secret, but I thought I'd leak a little of the game flow diagrams from early design sessions.

There are very few spoilers here, and some things have already undergone slight revisions, but since we promised we were going to be very open about the design process and what goes into making the game, this is a good place to start.

Herewith, Acts 1 and 2 (of 5) of FREEQ.

Hello everyone -

We realized we needed to be better about posting a few updates - the team's actually been so busy writing the story and making schedules and budgets that there hasn't been anything cool to show in a bit.

But then I remembered one of the catalysts for wanting to do FREEQ was a mutual love of old time radio, which I became obsessed with in high school and college and continue to have a very special affection for, My very favorites are THE SHADOW, The JACK BENNY PROGRAM, RICHARD DIAMOND, and pretty much any detective series with William Powell, but I also have had the willies scared out of me by both X MINUS ONE and LIGHTS OUT.

A friend of ours wrote a very amusing Bradbury-meets-Aaron Sorkin sci-fi film that he could never find both the time and money to make, and after the script tragically sat unproduced for a few years, he let me adapt it for radio and stage a production. We're all very proud of how it came out and we actually had a great time making the thing. We used modern recording equipment and sound libraries but played by the old time radio rules and conventions for storytelling and that's exactly what we're planning to do with FREEQ.

So please enjoy RED PLANET MARS while we prep a few things to show you in the weeks to come. In fact, probably tomorrow, we're going to announce a few new rewards and a special push to crack 40% by this time next week.

((EDIT - oops, it looks like the video did not upload right the first time. Now you should be able to see it.))