Hello there, readers! Folks, we’ve finally got to the point in our development where you can actually complete the main quest! The ending is still placeholder at the moment, as we haven’t created the final artwork for it yet. Second piece of news: on November 15, 2014 we conceived the first concept for Kalaban. So we’re officially two years into development, yay!

We’re going for this comic book (or rather motion comic) style cinematic, instead of a fully animated movie. We have received a lot of feedback from the silly cinematic that we did for our Steam Greenlight trailer a while back, and we won’t be making a prerendered cinematic for the ending. The trailer really split viewers, and people have clearly expressed that they want to see something less cheesy, and more polished, so we’ll respond to that demand.

We might do a small treat for those of you who actually enjoyed the prerendered cinematic. But more on that later. Right now we’re focusing on the core game, and putting all our time and effort into that.

So, all the key NPCs are now fully implemented in the game, and you can interact with them. We haven’t added the feature to kill any NPCs yet, because that would give us a ton of headache right now.

Making the NPCs die, and stay that way, is easy of course, but we’re constantly testing the game and playing with it while developing the other features. So, you would have to mess with the save games, and restore earlier state every time you’ve killed one off. So, NPC killing will be one of the very last things to be added into the game, just a heads up if you’re one of our Early Access testers.

On that matter, we’ve decided to move out of Early Access at the end of November, and focus fully on the development of the final game. Those who have bought the Early Access version will still be able to play it, and will receive the Steam key for the finished game, once it’s in the store.

We just want to give our 100% for the final parts of the development, and prepare a really kick-ass experience for all of you to enjoy. Right now we’re implementing a bunch of beauty fixes, and stuff that we haven’t got time to implement before. We wanted to have all the scenes finished, before we got into the fine detail and adding those finishing touches.

A few things in the UI will get revised, and we will look at the writing in the game. We will also go through all the scenes and add story flavor, items and bunch of visual stuff, that isn’t there yet.

Our estimated release date is December 20th, and that’s what we’re still aiming for. We’ve been reluctant to give out a confirmed date, because as you know, software development is quite tricky and full of surprises. But we’ll let you guys know the date, as soon as it’s confirmed.

So, if you haven’t tested out our Early Access and want to do so, head over to GameJolt and get yourself a copy. It costs 6 dollars at the moment, which is around 30% less than the price on the finished game. After the end of this month, you will have to wait for the finished game to pop up on the Steam store page with the actual retail price.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading everybody!

• Harri J.