Hey all!
So we're a little over a week away from the launch of TY4 on Steam!
We're busily putting together some final touches, but everything's looking good so far.
There have been a few fairly common questions on the forums and on our Facebook pages about the game, so we thought we'd provide a little information for you…
Price Point
- The game will cost $5.99USD (and equivalent prices in other terriories).
- The game will have a 10% launch discount.
- There are no microtransactions within the game (unliked the Windows 8 version). You use opals that you collect by playing the game to unlock new 'rangs and costumes (similar to how TY2 and TY3 worked)
DLC
- There will be two sets of DLC available for the game, neither of which has in-game content
- There will be a Soundtrack DLC, which will have all the music from TY1, TY2, TY3 and TY4. This is set up to work with the Steam music system (to allow it to be played via the Steam overlay)
- There will also be an artbook DLC, which has some behind the scenes concept art from the making of TY4; as a PDF.
- Price points are still being finalized for these, but expect something like $20USD for the soundtrack compilation and $6 for the art book, with a 10% launch discount for each.
- There will be a couple of different packages for buying everything grouped together, for a discounted price.
Why TY4 or Where Is TY1/2/3?
We've worked to bring TY4 to Steam first for a number of reasons.
- The game never got quite the reach that we were hoping for, from its Windows 8 release, so we're hoping that it will be picked up by a wider audience on Steam
- In terms of time and cost to port the game, TY4 was the easiest for us to start with. These days, Krome is a quite small independant developer, and funds are limited, so this was an important factor for us.
- The plan (the hope) is that TY4 will sell enough units to allow us to port TY1/2/3 over to Steam as the next step, without having a Kickstarter or similar crowd funding efforts. We may look at TY1/2/3 as Early Access, depending on how things go.
- In short though, TY4 needs to sell units to help us fund TY1/2/3.
- Any console HD-ising or handheld ports of *any* of the games are all subsequent to this - again - it depends on the sales.
Why did you make a 2D game!?
[*]TY has a history as a 2D game… both TY2 and TY3 had GBA versions (which were awesome by the way!)
[*]TY4 was made as a 2D game because that's the kind of game that our friends at Microsoft were after; for the launch of the Surface tablets and the Windows 8 store; and it was a great fit for the style of game that TY is.
[*]The focus of the 2D game is on the platforming (and 'rangs of course!), finding hidden collectables, and is actually pretty close to the style of gameplay that was in TY1 - just flattened onto a 2D plane.
[*]Yes, we'd love to make a new full 3D TY game. We wish that we could afford to do so! Again - we'll be watching what happens with TY4 and we'll have to see from there.
[*]Our ideal world would be that TY4 sells well enough to fund TY1/2/3 onto Steam; which sells well enough to fund making a full 3D TY5 - but honestly, we'll just have to see what happens
We're proud of the game we made for TY4. We hope that all the TY fans and platformer fans out there like it.
Cheers everybody! Hope to see you all enjoying the game on release!
Krome