Hey everyone! Today, we are really happy to announce that 10,000 copies of the early access version of Kona have been sold! This includes all backers who claimed their keys on Steam as well as copies we sold on the Humble Store, GOG and our own website.

Steam Statistics

For those of you who like numbers, here are some raw Steam Product Data from Kona: Units Over Time
Units per country
Special mention to our Canadian friends for their support! For a country with a relatively small number of inhabitants, their share of the pie really is impressive! Anyway! This is more than just numbers we are talking about here. Thanks to your support, the game has improved a lot since we released the first beta version. Here’s a glimpse about what we accomplished since the beginning of the beta:

Wolves

Players could see wolves passing by sometimes, but we decided to add some encounters to spice things up a bit.

Lee Enfield 303 & Other Items

With wolves around, you need something to defend yourself! There are many ways to deal with them, but adding a Lee Enfield 303 rifle in the lot can help… a lot.

Flow Improvements

We added a few puzzles and tweaked many areas to introduce players to some of the game mechanics without using boring tutorials or dialog boxes.

UI Styling

One thing we changed progressively during Early Access is the color palette and general look and feel of the UI. It is now more contrasted and can be seen on subtitles, location titles and so on. The UI has improved since we first posted this image and we will continue to work on it until the full release.

Stress Gauge

The stress gauge was already there upon release, but the mechanic was only introduced a few weeks after, which adds a bit of difficulty to the game.

Visions

The first version did not have any goal. This quickly appeared in the reviews and in the forums, so we introduced something that was already planned, but just not anchored in the game yet: the visions and frozen inhabitants.

The Journal

Although it is still work in progress, it is now a lot easier to know about the areas you visit and what you can/need to do next.

Interaction System

While keeping the same game mechanic, we were able to change the interaction system to make it less confusing for players.

Optimizations

We managed to optimize performances a lot! Sure, it’s not perfect yet, but a few months ago, the game would take several minutes to go past the initial loading. It even crashed on some computers.

Bugs and Suggestions

So many bugs (like the missing cutters) were fixed during Early Access thanks to all the feedback we’ve had! We also received suggestions that we were able to add in the game, like the stash in the back of the pickup.

Behind the Scene Changes

Obviously, we’ve worked hard on stuff that will only be unveiled in the final version of the game, so you can expect many surprises in a few months :) So that’s it! Again, 10,000 times thanks for your support! Let’s get back to work now, and we hope to say thanks a lot more times upon the full release! Cheers!

[ 2016-07-05 15:04:04 CET ] [ Original post ]