Modding Tool, book and board game release dates

[Dr. Jones]

Hello devs, I have three questions on mind:

The first one is when the modding tool will be available.

The second one is when the book of "The making of The Curious Expedition" will be available.

And third, I would like to know when the board game adaptation of The Curious Expedition will be available.

You see, I do not have patience

[riadd]

Hello Dr Jones, good questions

1) We just hired a new programmer to accelerate our work on the modding update. He is pretty much exclusively focusing on that, so I think the first release should be ready within the next 4 weeks. Probably together with achievements and general stability improvements.

2) The book is almost ready. All the pages have been layouted and we have super nice opening words but two amazing devs. We're just in the process of finalizing the text. So ETA is in about 2 weeks.

3) We're still heavily play testing the board game version and we want to make sure that it is rock-solid before going into any production or even kickstarter. So that will probably take several more weeks/months if we decide to really go through with production (which we are hoping for obviously).

[Dr. Jones]

It's nice to hear that the modding tool is right in the way! And thinking about it a little question has came to my mind: will the modding update allow the users to change the base game? For example, I suppose that someone would want to change Tim Timster and Luis names and portraits for ones more similar to the real Tintin and Snowy. It would be possible to do that or the modding tool will be only for adding new content and not changing the one already in the game?

And about the book, I'm really surprised by how fast you have finished it! Which by the way, I think that it would be interesting to add a chapter or two about the adaptation and the design of the board game, the creation of the music and the sound effects, the inspirations real or fictitious for the game, and about the gameplay decisions, including the creation of items, perks, companions... and combat, of course. Well, I would at least be interested in reading that. Am I asking too much? Well, I suposse that there's no harm in asking

And lastly, if you are considering to make a kickstarter for the boardgame and/or the book, you should consider adding some strecht goals related to the videogame, maybe adding extra characters, locations, items or something like that. After all, the target of both products are the same

[riadd]

Yes, modding will allow to replace existing components as well.

We've been working the last couple of weeks on the book. It features a lot of art, since it started out as a kind of art book, but we also included lots of notes of dropped features and notes during development. It won't be able to go super deep into detail of every production step because that would require us to work on it for several more months. I hope it will be interesting though. I'm especially looking forward to doing a physical version of it (the digital version will be delivered to all current and future owners of fan editions and special editions).

We're not sure how we'll handle the board game. But a kickstarter is very likely if we decide that it's good enough to actually do it.

[Dr. Jones]

In my opinion, it would be interesting to offer the artbook in digital and/or physical form in the boardgame's kickstarter, either by an strecht goal or by an add-on, cause a lot of us don't have the fan edition. I am looking forward to it, and mostly, I want to see how the game was designed and some rare illustrations of your beautiful pixel art.

Besides, I think that it would be interesting to improve the videogame by adding some content a little before that the launch of the kickstarter, so the owners of the videogame come back to play the new content, they get hooked again and they are more inclined to back the boardgame. It's just an idea that may work.

[riadd]

Yeah, adding it to the kickstarter tiers could work, but we're doing the digital book either way, so even without kickstarter people can get it. Maybe we can add a update tier for people that already bought the regular version on our website.