Knee Deep owes a lot of its inspiration to the inherent weirdness of the Sunshine State. Each week, we’re showcasing some of the unusual headlines from Florida:
Knee Deep owes a lot of its inspiration to the inherent weirdness of the Sunshine State. Each week, we’re showcasing some of the unusual headlines from Florida:
Knee Deep owes a lot of its inspiration to the inherent weirdness of the Sunshine State. Each week, we’re showcasing some of the unusual headlines from Florida:
Knee Deep owes a lot of its inspiration to the inherent weirdness of the Sunshine State. Each week, we’re showcasing some of the unusual headlines from Florida:
Knee Deep owes a lot of its inspiration to the inherent weirdness of the Sunshine State. Each week, we’re showcasing some of the unusual headlines from Florida:
Florida woman pretends to fire Kia dealership employees, leads cops on chase
It seems like just yesterday Colin and I walked into the London Tobacco Dock for the first time to share Knee Deep with prospective players at EGX Rezzed.
How has it already been a year since the launch of Act 1 on Steam?
Time flies by like tourists in nondescript rental cars blithely zooming past the rundown teepee tower of Chief Roadside’s Wonderland on their way to happier places.
Of course, once Act 1 launched on Steam, it was like we’d topped the first rise of a rollercoaster and started down toward the loop-the-loop of Act 2. We learned so much just during the first couple of weeks, including:
Character voices matter. In a game driven less by puzzles and more by narrative, we couldn’t just hand players walls of text to read. It became especially apparent when we noticed people like Jim Sterling risking laryngitis to perform their own versions of the dialogue in the 2.5-hour opening segment of Knee Deep.
Untried, unknown indie developers can’t expect immediate trust of players. We ran with advice that we should charge a full “season pass” price up-front for Act 1, with the idea that we’d add Acts 2 and 3 as they were finished. Turns out, players got burned too many times by companies that promised episodic content but either didn’t deliver or delivered very slowly.
We’re our own best cheerleaders. Few people discover your game and make it popular on accident. It’s critical to keep a heartbeat going on social media - Twitter, Facebook, the company home page. And, whenever possible and affordable, share your work at big gaming conventions.
One blessing of Knee Deep’s three-act episodic approach and our small, agile indie dev team was that we could take player feedback, assess it, and then act on it in short order. The in-game voiceover issue is a perfect example of this.
We’d heard some rumblings about the lack of character voices months before launch at EGX Rezzed. Initially, we opted against it - mostly because we thought it would be too expensive but also because, from an artistic standpoint, we thought players should be able to imagine those characters voices on their own.
We were wrong on both counts.
After Act 1 launch, we revisited the issue because so many otherwise positive critiques dinged us for the lack of voiceover. We connected with Krash Creative in Raleigh to help us coordinate the hiring and direction of voice actors for 40 characters in all three acts. We retroactively added voice acting to the first episode and plugged it into Acts 2 and 3 for their launches.
Those few months between Acts 1 and 2 were, suffice it to say, incredibly hectic but rewarding. Now I simply can’t imagine our characters without the voice performances.
We also took some criticism for the high price point out of the gate. We gave it a lot of thought, discussed it, and within two weeks shifted to the approach of simply raising the price of the game as each episode launched. This meant early adopters paid less for the full game, which was a nice perk. But we still struggled to get past the “I’ll wait until it’s done” mentality from many skeptical players. We don’t begrudge them that attitude - we’re gamers too. We get it. However, we’re proud to have demonstrated that Prologue Games can reliably design, produce, and launch a full episodic adventure. The first act launched in July 2015. The third and final act hit Steam less than a year later in March 2016. We don’t promise what we can’t deliver.
Big takeaway from all this: What you say matters, we listen, and we act on it if we can. We also work very hard to remain responsive to people who post reviews or add discussion topics to our Steam community. We’re not some faceless international corporation. We’re a small team of enthusiastic game designers who don’t improve without your feedback.
On the social media front, we’ve kept busy with our Twitter feeds (@PrologueGames and @DougPiranha, mostly), our Facebook page, and the Prologue Games website. We’ve engaged communities at Just Adventure, Adventure Gamers, Rock Paper Shotgun, and reddit. We’ve granted keys to dozens of game streamers, podcasters, and journalists. Yet we’ll still show up at PAX East as part of the Indie MEGABOOTH and hear people say they’ve never heard of Knee Deep. And we’ve barely been a blip on the radar for big gaming news sites such as RPS, Kotaku, and Polygon. Instead, we rely on smaller enthusiast sites to get the word out, hoping against hope that the bigger sites might realize what they’re missing.
The marketing department can never sleep, it seems. It can use your help, though. The game’s done now, so there’s no more waiting for the next act. Help spread the word about a unique experience that combines the drama of a stage play production with a point-and-click narrative adventure/visual novel, without quicktime events or grueling puzzles! Tickets for Knee Deep on Steam are far cheaper and easier to get than a matinee of Hamilton on Broadway - and you won’t see a dog named Monroe driving a bulldozer into a shed in that show!
We’re so grateful to our friends, families, and fans who’ve stuck with us during the first year after the curtain rose for the first time on the Prologue Theatre. We’re looking forward to showing what we can deliver next!
Knee Deep in Strange Florida No. 4
Knee Deep owes a lot of its inspiration to the inherent weirdness of the Sunshine State. Each week, we’re showcasing some of the unusual headlines from Florida:
Knee Deep owes a lot of its inspiration to the inherent weirdness of the Sunshine State. Each week, we’re showcasing some of the unusual headlines from Florida:
Florida man pretends to be country singer, defrauds for sex and cash
Cemetery worker steals wallet from dead World War II veteran’s urn, buys pizza
http://www.fox4news.com/news/163263995-story
Knee Deep in Strange Florida No. 2
Knee Deep owes a lot of its inspiration to the inherent weirdness of the Sunshine State. Each week, we’re showcasing some of the unusual headlines from Florida:
Cocaine falls from Florida man’s cast during police questioning
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what happened in Orlando.
I grew up there. Played at Eola Park. Read books in the downtown library. In high school, I was a stockboy at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. For a big chunk of my life, I worked as a journalist in Florida, covering everything from mundane county government meetings to gruesome serial killings.
Now I make video games for a living. Knee Deep’s a dark, strange little swamp noir adventure that revels in the weird news headlines that usually bubble up from Florida. It delves into the exploitation of celebrity deaths, creepy cult religions, and cultural insensitivity. It’s got nothing to do with horrors like what happened in Florida this past weekend.
Right now, I count my blessings that I don’t have to impose myself on the survivors or relatives and friends of the victims or, God forbid, the lunatic who gunned down dozens of people in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. I don’t have to ask them what they think about the massacre or why they think Omar Mateen turned from abusive spouse to mass murderer.
Yet, like many other people, I want to know why it happened. I want to make sense of it. I’m sick and tired of incidents like this. Not just because of the bloodshed and the heartbreaking losses, but because of the immediate knee-jerk reactions of people turning a tragedy into grist for their ideological mills, whether it’s an anti-Muslim agenda or the drumbeat for gun control. I see too many people willing to blame someone’s religion (covered by the First Amendment) while they cling tightly to their desire to own weapons of mass murder through the Second Amendment.
I don’t think most Muslims want to destroy the rest of us any more than I think the murders of churchgoers in Charleston mean Christians want to wipe everyone else out. It’s not my wish to see all Americans stripped of their precious guns.
You want a handgun to protect your home? Fine. Need a rifle for hunting deer? OK. But does someone like me - like you - really need a gun that’s capable of quickly killing 50 people? I don’t think so, unless you’re a soldier enlisted in the military and shipped off to enemy territory.
I understand we can’t protect everyone from lunatics. I know demented, damaged people left unchecked are going to find some way - the wrong way - to deal with their issues, whether that means hurting themselves or others.
I just don’t know how to explain horrors like this to my son when I can barely grasp the enormity of it myself. Because, at the heart of all this, we’ve got an American citizen whose rage erupted in gunfire from a weapon he apparently acquired through legal means. People who should have seen this coming didn’t. A system that should’ve prevented him from owning that gun didn’t.
And now we mourn a senseless tragedy in Orlando - one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, just miles from the Happiest Place on Earth.
I can’t wrap my mind around it. Perhaps, on a certain level, I don’t want to have to process it, take ownership of it, because that’s one more step toward accepting it as “just something that happens.” Something normal.
What steps can we take to prevent that? What steps are we willing to take? Sadly, we’ve done next to nothing in the wake of Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, and Charleston. So here we are again. Only this time it happened in my hometown.
Whose hometown is next?
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How you can help:
Give to the GoFundMe campaign for victims and families of the Pulse shootings.
