The team and I (Adriaan) are proud to release the On Tour areas as a free update today!! Watch the trailer:
[previewyoutube="wFFx6MUPn1c;full"]
I'm especially proud of Celine and Sylvain for once again coming up with hundreds of funny stories and interactions. For this update, Celine took over pretty much all level and interaction design from me and, I hate to admit it, probably came up with more inventive interactions than I did! Playing Sylvain and Celine's first draft of the new areas was perhaps the first time I played Hidden Folks without knowing every little detail about it - the closest thing to being a player of the game as opposed to the developer - and I was blown away and laughed out loud all the time. You folks are lucky to be on the player side of this game and I'm super jealous!!!
Pricing changes
As announced a few weeks ago, we decided to include all areas in your original 'Hidden Folks' purchase, including the Beach and the new On Tour areas, for no additional charge. To justify the 3+ years we've been working on Hidden Folks since release, we've increased the price of the game only for new players.
Yeah, to be clear: making the On Tour areas took a team of 3 people and a few part-time others an entire year to make. After the last free update, I got hundreds of comments and emails from folks saying they would have gladly paid for the update. We really, really appreciate that people want to support us, and if you feel that way, here are two things that help:
leave a review on the store page.
tell a friend about Hidden Folks.
<3
The On Tour areas
I won't spoil too much here but you can be sure to see and interact with all kinds of instuments, bands, weird objects, animations, and, weirdest of all, you'll get to hear the mouth sound music that Martin put together!! It's weird and wild that it kind of works and the tunes are totally stuck in my mind. Some screenshots of the areas:
While illustrator Sylvain Tegroeg drew all those cute little characters and instruments and objects, game designer and artist Celine Veltman did nearly all level and interaction design for the On Tour areas. Martin Kvale made mouth music with our mouth sounds, Bram van Dijk helped us write all the kind-of-funny clues, Mitty Venbrux made the On Tour trailer, and Aran Koning did some nerd stuff for Hidden Folks on Android and Nintendo Switch. I (Adriaan de Jongh) improved the game's interface, fixed bugs, set up store pages, wrote this newsletter, and did countless of other small things. And last but not least: the incredible Hidden Folks community translated the game to 21 languages! I'm so grateful.
New areas in the future?
It's possible that On Tour is the game's final content update. We know you want more; some of you remind me of this every week! But after five years of making Hidden Folks, we also want to make different, weird, new stuff! We hope you can savor the On Tour update. Maybe you can even replay parts of the game you nearly forgot! Regardless, thank you for playing and for enabling our incredible journey!!!
See you around, folks.
Adriaan
Announcing Hidden Folks: On Tour... and pricing changes.
Hey folks!
The team and I are super proud to announce a major update to Hidden Folks, launching on June 4th, called On Tour. The update will add 6 (!!) new music themed areas to the game, with more than 70 things to find, new mouth sounds (we even made weird music), new interactions, and plenty of new clues with mildly amusing or straight up bad jokes.
A couple months after the release of the Beach DLC, we agreed that the pricing model we slid into (a base game with DLCs) didn't feel right. After much discussion and consideration, we decided that we want to come back and unify all areas into a single 'Hidden Folks' purchase while increase the price of the game to justify the 3 years we've been working on the game since release. This means that:
today, the game's price will on average (because currencies are weird) increase by 50–60%.
today or tomorrow or very soon (depending on how fast I can arrange this with Valve) there will be no more DLCs aside from the Mouth Sounds DLC, that will continue to exist.
on June 4th, all players who own Hidden Folks will gain access to both the On Tour and Beach areas with no additional purchases.
Price and business model changes are hard to communicate clearly, so if you have any questions, ask away in the comments or on the forums. It took us a little detour through DLC land before we understood that a single purchase structure is a simpler value proposition, less of a technical hassle in the background, and a couple of emails by really confused customers per week less.
I hope that's clear! Now please feast on these screenshots from the On Tour areas:
Hidden Folks: On Tour - June 4th.
Talk to you soon! Adriaan
ps: we're still looking for a few folks who want to contribute to translate the new On Tour areas in Hidden Folks! If you're native to Arabic, Vietnamese, Swedish, Finnish, or Czech, please reach out to me! You'll get access to the game before anyone else. Sign up here.
The Hidden Folks team is working on something...
We're taking a break from making Hidden Folks
Hey folks.
The release of the new Beach areas and game's release on Nintendo Switch mark the end of the fourth year of making Hidden Folks. Before I started working on Hidden Folks, I had designed a few games and programmed several prototypes, but I had never programmed an entire game. When I met Sylvain and jokingly told him we should make a game together, I did not imagine we would then proceed to spend four whole years making a game to be released on 7 platforms!!
I learned so much from making this game. About game design, playtesting, iterating. About community, fans, communication. About programming, scalable interfaces, different input devices, and localization. About business, marketing, and dealing with (my) mistakes. About finding motivation, or having too much motivation and working overtime because I wanted nothing else. I learned a lot about teamwork, finding the right collaborators, and being a producer as well as a creator. Making Hidden Folks was very hard at times, and wonderful and fulfilling at other times. I am still learning today!
With the Beach areas out and the Nintendo Switch version released, I (and I think the rest of the team) need a break from our adventure. It has become hard for me to think about anything else besides Hidden Folks and that bothers me. I fear I have become boring at parties! For the foreseeable future, I want to take a step back from creating new Hidden Folks content and let my mind drift and linger. Maybe come up with a new game or two, make some prototypes, test some ideas. And, of course, figure out what else I want to get out of making Hidden Folks. I will continue giving support to the game, fixing bugs and whatnot, but there won't be new areas in the foreseeable future. But when the energy returns to me (and the rest of the team), you will hear from us again!
Thank you so much for your continued support, and talk to you soon!
Adriaan
The Beach areas - out now!!
The team and I are proud to release an update to Hidden Folks today!! This update includes a Beach DLC that contains 5 beach-themed areas with 60+ more things to find. Watch the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npFg7P14xe4
We also added some of the new sounds from Beach to the mouth sound pack, and we heavily optimised the game to run even smoother on your computer! You can read the full changelog here.
This massive content update was never possible without you, the community, the people who playtested and translated the new areas, and who stuck with all my ramblings on Discord!! We are so grateful for your support and the response and the fact all of you bought the game uugggghhh it means a lot to us you know
QUICKLY some art form the new Beach areas before I get too emotional:
And I just wanted to take one more moment to put the whole team on a pedestal. Sylvain and I were at the heart of Hidden Folks but without the contributions of the rest of the team we could have never made Hidden Folks the game it is today. So... here they are:
You'll hear again from me soon! First I sleep for many days
- Adriaan
The Beach DLC - October 24th
Hey folks!
Announcement! The new Beach DLC will be out next week, Wednesday October 24th!!
The Beach DLC will have:
- 5 new areas with 60+ things to find.
- a price of around USD 2.99 in your local currency.
- pirates.
* H Y P E *
And as if that's not enough, I'll also update the Mouth Sounds Pack to include the funniest sounds from the Beach areas, some of which in my opinion are the funniest sounds we ever recorded.
* H Y P E H Y P E *
See you next week!!
- Adriaan
Mouth Sounds DLC + Controller Support + New Area
You read that right: multiple new things today!!!
Mouth Sounds Pack We packed 71 of your favourite mouth sounds together, and you can buy them right here! As long as it's not commercial, you can do whatever the heck you want with these sounds: notifications, ringtones... you name it. The pack includes the much requested Roar03.mp3, Pling01.mp3, Toot04.mp3, and even Klaxon06.mp3!!
Dual-stick controller support I listened to your feedback and spent a whole month rewriting the input code to support playing the game with a controller! I tested my code with a PS4 controller, an Xbox One controller, and some cheap knock-off controller, and I believe I have covered most dual-stick controllers. That said, I've never added controller support to a game before, so let me know if improvements are needed. I probably can't guarantee support for all controllers, but I'll do my best to support as many as I can.
The City Road We couldn't let this idea for a small and simple puzzle area for the City theme pass. We know it'll be over too soon and you want more mOre mORE MORE areas, but rest assured: new areas are coming!
Join the Discord community In full secrecy, I've been talking to the people who've helped us translate the game on Discord for a while now. Today, I'm opening up the chat for other people to join the conversation! I regularly post sneak previews of new areas, talk about design issues, ask for advice on clues, and give out beta access through Discord. It's fun :D Talk to you there?
You said ""new areas""?! We have some really fun ideas for small puzzle areas in existing themes, which we want to make and release (for free) this year. We have already been working hard on a new theme with 5 areas that will become Hidden Folks' first DLC. There's a preview of that new theme in the game! But don't hold your breath: it's still a lot of work and won't be out in the next couple months. We just couldn't keep it to ourselves, that's all :)
Enjoy the sound pack, controller support, and the new area, and talk to you on discord!
- Adriaan
Interface Upgrade - out now
What's up everyone!
Adriaan here, the game designer behind Hidden Folks. While Sylvain (illustrator) and Celine (new addition to the team helping with level design) are working hard on a set of areas in a new theme, I spent most of the last few weeks rewriting the interface of Hidden Folks! You now have the ability to position the panel with targets at any side of the screen:
And, a much requested feature: you can now reset single areas! Go to the settings inside one of the areas and hit the reset button:
The menu now scrolls horizontally, because... it's prettier.
And there have been a number of other improvements, such as the interface scaling depending on your screen size, being able to zoom in more, and the game trying to tight-fit the level in the view when you open it up for the first time. The full change log can be found here.
If something doesn't work as intended, of you have suggestions, let me know in the comments or on the forums and I'll take a look at it!
What we are working on next: some secret content that will be hilarious!!! And I'm not even talking about the new areas. Hang on tight :P
- Adriaan
Hidden Folks is 1 years old!!! What's next? (micro update)
We are working on two new themes, a few surprise areas, and thinking about rewriting various internal systems to allow for features like controller support, resetting a single area, and a more dynamic interface.
More details as we work on these things!
Snow update - available now!!
Sylvain and I (Adriaan) are proud to add three new Snow areas to Hidden Folks as a free update available right now!!! Check out the new Snow trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3hLyHhuCi0
In this update, we are also changing the way you unlock areas in the game. Instead of having to play the game from start to finish, you can now start playing from every first area in a theme. So for those who were overwhelmed by the massive factory in the last update: you can dive into the new Snow areas regardless, which I promise will be slightly easier! We added / changed a bunch of other small things too; see the changelog for a good overview.
As Hidden Folks is currently #22 best rated Steam game of all time (browse all products > sort be user reviews), Sylvain and I couldn't be more proud. We want to thank all of you a thousand times for the heartwarming reviews!!
