Greg here, creator of Toejam & Earl! Okay so, first off… thank you thank you to all of you for being so patient for so long. I’m happy to say I can finally share some news and answer some of your pressing questions. Woohoo!!
I’m going to jump right in ...
So...we ARE going to be releasing the game this year!, and we are also going to be opening a closed beta within the next couple weeks for our early-access backers, and we’ll be looking for your feedback! Also, the Nintendo Switch version of the game is just about ready to be submitted for certification by Nintendo, and the other console versions are not too far behind. I’ll give you more details about all of this before this update is done.
You may also find this interesting... going forward Adult Swim Games is no longer going to be our publisher. Instead we are going back to self-publishing, Indie-Style! Adult Swim Games has some other big titles they plan to launch this summer so when Back in the Groove pushed back, we both agreed that it made sense for them to hand us the reigns, rather than taking a chance on this getting pushed back any more. Also I’d like to say how deeply grateful I and all of us here at HNS are to Adult Swim Games. We wouldn’t have gotten this game to this point without them… seriously. Thank You Adult Swim!! (round of applause).
Self publishing….(a moment of contemplation…) ...exciting and a little scary. Thankfully I’ve been in this biz as an indie longer than many of you have been alive (ouch) which means I am fortunate to have ton of knowledgeable and experienced friends in this biz who have been helping with learning and connections. We totally got this!
KickStarter Updates: For our amazing and loyal Kickstarter backers, we will be doing regular updates once a month and mini-updates with fun tidbits and blasts from the past every week up until launch …. As well as special updates whenever there is news or announcements. These updates will also eventually make it onto this dev blog as well, but backers will always get the chance to see them well ahead of time.
The Forum: www.hyperfunk.club We’ll be reading and responding to this more. If you’re not on here yet and want to be, drop us an email (greg@humanaturestudios.com) and we can add you.
Discord: We have one now! Here is our invite link --https://discord.gg/x8xy67e come join us! We’ll be creating a special backer role for people who backed the KS too, so we’re excited for that :)
Social Media & Streaming: We're now on twitter in addition to our usual facebook activity. And hey! We're gearing up to do some regular streaming on twitch and maybe youtube too! You can find those here...
A little more about what you care about most….
We ARE releasing this year!! Right now we have our sights set on a fall release. We will be making a specific release plan announcements in regards to dates as soon as we have that nailed down. You’ve been waiting so long, we don’t want to give you wrong information until we’re 100% sure. We’ll know these details within the next month or two.
Swapping for Consoles: Many of our Kickstarter backers have asked about this from the beginning and a lot recently (yes, we do hear you!). It does cost us money to swap (we have to pay platform holders) and we need to make sure we can at least break even - that said we will revisit this question very soon and try to come up with something. I plan to send out a separate update about this.
Closed Beta!!: We plan to have a 2-week long closed beta VERY soon. (July 5th to July 19th). We will send out Steam codes to everyone who pledged at the Early Access level and up… that’s the $60 tier, which is about 2500 of our backers). We’d love to give you a first look and also need your help with debugging and feedback for game balancing. Any and all comments will be welcome and appreciated. We will be sending another dedicated KS update with all the details on this. We will be asking you to not stream or do Youtube play-throughs etc. just yet so we can make a bigger splash when we release. There will be an opportunity for our backers to stream the game before launch.
THANK YOU: Thank you again... to all of you, for your patience. We know how crazy late we are compared to what we said in the KickStarter campaign. Thanks especially to those heroes among you who have raised your voice with positivity and support, and kept the faith. Game development is a rough biz. I’ve been doing this for 34 years and its still hard to predicting how long things will take. Well the good news is we’re almost out of the tunnel and into the light... and in the end I do think you will be happy with the results. I feel funny saying this, but this game has turned out to be everything I had hoped it would be and even more. It may not be the greatest single player game out there - but I can’t think of a multi-player game that makes people laugh and shout as much as this one. Of course the proof is in the pudding and you are the pudding eaters… so…. I’m looking forward to you getting your pudding and hearing from you. (I managed to say “pudding” 3 times in one sentence! Beat that!) I’m also looking forward to your help and support as we make this final pudding push.
As always...if you have any issues, problems, or requests, feel free to email us, our email door is always open. Nathan is our community manager so he will field email questions and comments in our other media channels. If you don’t hear back just email again…. And if that doesn’t work try my email and shout at me. :)
Nathan@Humanaturestudios.com
Greg@Humanaturestudios.com
Whatever@Humanaturestudios.com