This little one has been keeping me busy…

We knew that the Steam launch would be a big deal, but seeing it actually happen back in April was pretty incredible. The crazy part for me personally was that in the opening days of the Steam release I was in the hospital with my wife as she gave birth to our first baby. The whole memory is now a blur of me frantically working on my laptop to manage the Steam release and holding my wife’s hand as she delivered our beautiful daughter Isla.

At any rate, between learning to care for a newborn and some health issues (see my recent forum reply) I’ve unfortunately been MIA since the Steam release. I haven’t decided whether or not I want to publicly discuss the health issues that have been plaguing me this year, but the important thing is that I’m feeling much better every day. Perhaps we’ll discuss that topic a bit in a future podcast.

Anyway, today I want to announce some exciting news as well as recap where we stand with NEStalgia development:

Humble Bundle Flash Sale: Modern Retro

I don’t think that the Humble Bundle needs any introduction, as it is the standard for charity bundles in the industry. I’m incredibly excited to announce that starting right now (11:00 am Pacific time), NEStalgia will be a part of a “Modern Retro” flash sale that lasts for 24 hours. This bundle includes over $70 worth of games and soundtracks, with a percentage of the proceeds benefitting the American Red Cross and Child’s Play.

NEStalgia is included in the bundle if you pay at least $6. For those of you keeping score, that’s the cheapest price that the game has ever been offered for – and that’s not even considering the other great games and soundtracks that are a part of this bundle.

This is a short term flash bundle that only lasts 24 hours, so jump on it while you can! Check out the bundle page here: http://www.humblebundle.com/flash

Short Term Updates

This week we’ll be releasing the v1.68.5 update, which has a variety of bug fixes and balance tweaks. From here on out the NEStalgia Launcher will follow the same versioning notation as the game itself, so instead of being called “Build 19” the new version of the Launcher will also be “v1.68.5”.

One thing to note is that I’ve managed to track down and fix the map scrolling jitteriness affecting certain users, and that fix will be included in v1.68.5.

Client-Side Saving Coming Soon

We’re working to implement client-side saving as an option for players on both private and public servers. “Client-Side Saving” simply means that your character savefiles will be stored on your computer rather than whatever server you’re playing on. The real goal with this change is to make drop-in drop-out multiplayer much easier for small private games, though public dedicated server hosts will have the option to allow client-side savefiles as well. All of the Official Servers will be sticking with the current server-side saving system.

The First Major Content Expansion

Work has (finally) resumed on the forthcoming “Key of the Exiles” content expansion. For those of you who aren’t familiar with “Key of the Exiles”, here is a quick rundown of what it will include:

• The main quest line will be continued, beginning with the player receiving his or her very own boat. The main quest line itself will branch out at this point and become much less linear, allowing players to complete main story objectives in whatever order they choose.
• Players will be able to use their boat to sail around and explore the entire world, which contains many new towns, dungeons and other exciting areas to explore.
• The level cap for Players and Companions will be increased to 45, opening up new abilities, skill tree nodes and milestone boosts.
• A new end-game dungeon will be introduced for level 45 players, complete with new daily quests and new equipment sets for each class.
• New monsters, music, etc. etc. – everything that content expansions typically come with!

Other Lose Ends

I’m working on updating our server merging tool so that I can begin server merges in the next week or two. I’d love to wave a magic wand and just have a single NEStalgia server support 1000+ players online at once, but until that happens we’ll need to continue to add servers for large population explosions and then merge them down afterwards.

That’s all for today. As always if you have any questions then don’t be afraid to drop us a comment on this post, and don’t forget to spread the word about the Humble Bundle Flash Sale! You’re probably never going to see NEStalgia go for any cheaper than this, and you get a lot of other games as well. Plus, you know, charity.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been exactly one year since NEStalgia went up on Steam Greenlight. It’s even harder to believe that it’s also been about a year since development of the game was inadvertently put on “pause” after I started a new job.

By sheer coincidence, I wrapped up that job this past Tuesday in order to start focusing my own new media production company. When my wife and I went out to dinner to celebrate my career milestone on Tuesday night, one of the things we talked about is how I was looking forward to putting time into NEStalgia again. As you can imagine, the last thing that I expected was to wake up the next morning to find out that NEStalgia had been Greenlit. Talk about serendipity!

What Happens Now?

Getting NEStalgia ready for sale on Steam is going to take some time. It could be two weeks, or it could be two months – I really don’t know at this point. The important thing to note is that NEStalgia launching on Steam isn’t going to affect any current subscriber’s access to the game. Once I have more information about how it’s all going to work, I’ll be sure to share the details.

The game itself is also in need of some updates in the near future. There are a ton of  bug fixes and minor tweaks on my to-do list (a year’s backlog really adds up fast). My biggest concern, however, will be working on the previously announced content expansion, ‘Key of the Exiles‘.

None of this is going to happen overnight. As patiently as all of you have been waiting, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer. New content is what the majority of you are craving, and as of now I don’t have an answer for when it will be released.

Management Changes

In the past, a great deal of my time has been spent in the day to day management of the community and dealing with customer service type stuff. From this point forward I’m going to stay out of all of that as much as I possibly can in order to focus strictly on development. Balzack is now the go-to guy for everything related to community management. That means moderation decisions, customer service issues, questions/complaints, etc. Balzack has always been the official community manager – the difference now is that I’m taking myself completely out of the equation.

Balzack can be reached via the forums or the team@silkgames.com email.

Distribution Changes

Our current distribution model was built to handle a small community. Restricting the game to a handful  of official dedicated servers is how we’ve quality controlled the experience and ensured that players don’t get too spread out over a bunch of small private servers. However, now that a much larger audience is potentially headed our way, things need to change.

What we’ll likely do is transition over to a Minecraft/Terraria sort of model. Players will be able to download the game to play single player or host small private servers to play with friends. People who purchase the game will also be able to host larger public dedicated servers. Last but not least, we’ll continue to maintain a large cluster of official dedicated servers as an option for players to join.

Under this model players will no longer be reliant upon joining the Silk Games servers, and people who don’t like the official servers can host and manage their own servers however they see fit.

Time to Celebrate!

Last year’s Steam Greenlight holiday event has been activated on all servers, so those of you who haven’t played the event before should stop by and check it out. Now that I’m going to be back working on the game around the clock, you can expect to see regular blog updates and the occasional podcast in the weeks and months to come.

Thank you so much to each and every one of you for all of the support so far! This whole Greenlight endeavor was a community effort, and NEStalgia’s success belongs to all of you who were a part of it. I also want to sincerely thank those of you who have stuck around with the game this past year during my development hiatus. You’ve been very understanding and patient, and I’ve really appreciated it.

There will be much, much more news to come…