All right! It’s out!

Backers whose payments succeeded in the first day should be getting emails with links to download the first public pre-alpha, build 250.

There is one bug you should know about – sometimes the game starts and the screen is black. To work around this, just move the window a bit.

If your payment was not successful the first time around, you have two options:

• Give up on Kickstarter and just go to rimworldgame.com and get the game there. You’ll get instant access.
• Fix your payment with Kickstarter. I’ll send you the link not long after November 14, when Kickstarter gives me the final report.

If you want to read the changelog, find it here. Discussions, suggestions, and bug reports are always welcome at the Ludeon forums. I’m also on Twitter.

The Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight pages are live! I’ve talked about these at length in previous posts, so for now I’ll just give you the links.

If you want to back the project but can’t do Kickstarter, there are some PayPal widgets here: RimWorld Main Page.

We’re also on IndieDB, with the new trailer: RimWorld on IndieDB

I’m hoping to have the Kickstarter up this Thursday.

The community has hit a minor milestone. On our forums, we just hit our thousandth post today. It’s great to see people coming back and participating over time. Some of the forumgoers are testers, others are interested YouTubers, and some are just players looking forward to the game. It’s a nice mix and we have some really fruitful discussion there. It’s also heartening to see testers playing the game, and playing again, and again. Even in its unbalanced and content-light state the game is proving entertaining. Hopefully we’ll see this a lot more when the Kickstarter opens.

Alistair is just finishing up his awesome sound treatment for our hot new trailer. It’s got a really cool sci-fi/Western mix that makes you think of old Clint Eastwood westerns and Mass Effect at the same time. The guy’s a genius. I put him in our Studio page too.

We’ll also hopefully have a new title logo by the time the Kickstarter opens. I’m working with a (currently unnamed) artist on this, as well as getting the AI Storytellers some portraiture to help characterize them.

On my end, I’ve been fixing up all the odds and ends that have to be handled to run a Kickstarter. There are a lot of them, in the game and out. However, today, for the first time in a while, I got to add a serious new feature to the game: wall-off response. Now, if you wall yourself off, raiders will burn the colony and smash it up wherever they can reach it. It looks sort of like this:

At the last local Dirty Rectangles meeting, I met a fellow named Jim Woolley who is running a nonprofit community-building organization for Ottawa game devs. He was kind enough to interview me about getting into games, RimWorld, and my book, Designing Games. Check it out:

I’m working on assembling a Kickstarter campaign. I just shot all the video for the trailer and sent it to Alistair Lindsay for the audio treatment. It’s going to show a number of things that the first look video missed, and be much better-shot and better-edited. Now it’s time to write the description, get artists to do supplemental art, and ensure financial details are all in order. There’s a lot to do, unfortunately, so progress on the game itself has stalled a bit.

The good news is that if the Kickstarter is successful, I’ll be able to get some help with the game. Al Lindsay is a real find, he’s done audio for DEFCON and Prison Architect, so he knows this kind of game. I’m also in talks with several really pro artists about developing the look of the game and getting past my janky pseudo-placeholder art (especially the characters).

The email form on rimworldgame.com has collected over 750 emails, who I’ll message when the Kickstarter opens. I hoping to get a good amount of momentum on the first day or two from that.

Finally, thanks for the supportive comments from everyone on our forums, Reddit, and YouTube. The first look video was created to gauge interest more than anything. Now that it’s apparent that people are really into the idea, I can make some real investments in it and get the game the professional work it needs to reach its potential.

I discovered some interesting emergent behavior in the game ecology today.

These Muffalo had been grazing in that closed-off area the whole game. So they’d largely denuded the area of grass. This left a lot of open space for the Saguaro cactus (which they don’t eat) to reproduce into, leading to a cactus boom. This isn’t something I ever thought of while creating the ecology, but it’s really interesting to see.

Well, now you know it’s a real game. User BRTD_Y just put up a subreddit for discussions on RimWorld.

Redditors, check it out.

I could use some help on the art for RimWorld. If you are a 2D artist, or you know one who you think could do good work on this game, please email me at [email protected]

Yesterday I put out our first look video of RimWorld and put it up on a nice little landing page. So now all the stuff we’ve been talking about might start to make a little bit more sense.

This video highlights a few key features.

First, pirate raids. Pirates drop from the sky when the AI storyteller wants, hang around at a random area of the map, then come to get you. The staging delay provides time for the player to go out and pre-emptively attack the pirates, or prepare defenses. In the video, the first pirate is shot and then captured. He’s later recruited; you can see him working for the colony later in the video. Out in the RimWorlds, allegiances are pretty weak – people will tend to join with whatever group or community will offer them some safety and shelter.

The second group of pirates is much larger, but the player has time to buy some weapons from a passing trader before they attack.

Second, look for weather. You’ll see overcast days, thunderstorms with lightning, fog, and overcast days. The weather is, like most other things, controlled by the storyteller. If she wants to make a really dramatic fight, watch her kick up a thunderstorm while the pirates bear down on you. Then she’ll strike one of them with lightning just for fun.

Beyond those two, you can also see the day/night cycle and fires on display, as well as colonist work settings, prisoner treatment settings, and the core building/mining gameplay.

In other news, the video has attracted some attention. There’s a great thread going on the Dwarf Fortress forums where I’ve answered a number of questions about the game. Also, testers are  starting discussions in our forums, so there’s more info there if you’d like to look.

Now, a screenshot of a lightning bolt striking a raider. Thanks mother nature!

Here’s just a quick shot of the title screen as it stands. I still need to get an artist to do a real logo treatment for the title. Though straight Tahoma has its charm, I suppose.

I’ve been working on this screen as well as the selection of AI storyteller and starting colonists.

Now you can actually choose your AI storyteller. The starting options are Cassandra Consistent, who tries to keep you on a pre-defined tension curve, Randy Random, who just does crazy stuff, and Phoebe Friendly, who basically makes sure nothing bad happens. Possibilities for expansion are Harry High-Population, who gives you lots of colonists, Negative Nancy, who just starves you, and many others.

The AI storytellers have some new events to play with too: passing travelers, and animal-goes-psychotic. The travelers are cool because you can ignore them, capture them, enslave them, recruit them, or sell them into slavery. Or just kill them and take their stuff (it is still a video game, I suppose). The psychotic animal is more amusing than anything – especially when it’s a squirrel or a boomrat (that is, a weaponized genetically engineered rat that explodes and ignites fires on death).

Starting colonists won’t be created by players any more. The number of options available is becoming too much; it slows down the start of the game to an unacceptable degree. Instead, you’ll just roll up characters until you get one you like. Some of their traits may be hidden, too. Your only direct control over them will be in changing their names.