Newsletter

Cardboard Computer has sent out irregular newsletter updates to the private mailing list. Instructions to sign up are in the installation folder. Newsletter mailings are summarized below.

February 10, 2014

Act III Progress Update. Available online in full here.

May 6, 2014

We're excited to let you know that Act III of Kentucky Route Zero is available now! […] A lot of love and attention went into Act III, and we sincerely hope you enjoy it. In an upcoming newsletter, we'll have some details on aspects of the production we think you may find interesting.

Thanks for your support! More soon!

September 24, 2014

We hope September days are kind to you. Ours are occupied by work on Act IV, and secret distractions. We're writing to ask your help spreading the word about a sale, and to share some new and old printable artwork with you.

KRZ is on sale for 50% off at Steam right now, until Thursday morning. These sales can be a potent draw for an audience who may not otherwise give our weird little game a second thought, so we appreciate you sharing the link around online, with friends over spirits, on restroom walls, etc.

We're often asked about making & selling prints & posters of the game. That's something we still hope to do at some point, but for now we're sticking to sharing high-res printable artwork via this newsletter for you to print yourself if you like. Here are a few. Tamas prepared these three images for the opening exhibition of Chicago's VGA gallery, and Aron Gent of Document made high-quality prints for display and sale. We wanted to work with VGA & Aron to have some really nicely-made prints available, but didn't want the only publicly-available KRZ prints to be as expensive as these ones needed to be, so we decided not to let them be sold them online. Instead, the Gent prints are sold only in-gallery at VGA, and we're sharing the high-res, printable digital artwork with you here.

These next four images were created and printed as backer rewards during our Kickstarter drive, but we're not sure if we ever shared the full print-resolution digital artwork. Some of the imagery may still be familiar to those of you who've joined us since!

April 6, 2015

The Real Xanadu.

We've been pretty wrapped up working on KRZ in all its motley permutations & extensions, and neglected this here newsletter. We have a few process-and-background things we've been wanting to share for a while, along with some general progress & happenings. So! Here's an update on where we've been & what we've been doing, followed by a closer look at some of the research & process behind the "Xanadu" scenes in Act III.

Our biggest occupation has obviously been working on Act IV. We're happy with the direction it's taking, but it has been a longer road than we anticipated. So, thanks for bearing with us. We hope it's worth the wait. Here's a teaser from a scene we're just wrapping up (click through for the full image). (mirror)

We've also been carrying on with the transmedia weirdness in & around KRZ's latest interlude, "Here And There Along The Echo." So far we've held three performative auctions for handmade, weird telephones. The first was on eBay in November. The second, in December, was auctioned over a live video stream. We sold the third weird telephone just a few weeks ago in a live auction at Chicago cinema The Nightingale, at an event organized by the Video Game Art Gallery. The VGA / Nightingale show was a really fun event. We gave a little play-through and informal talk, Chaz from VGA played auctioneer, and then Ben gave a performance. Here are some photos taken by Tony Rabit of Tiny Missile. Our other big endeavor recently has been adding gamepad support to KRZ. We dove pretty deep and ended up rethinking a lot of our code & design around movement & interaction. Maybe we'll write another newsletter on that topic somewhere down the road.

The PDP-1 – The computer used to run Xanadu in Act III is based on a real machine from 1959 called the PDP-1. The PDP-1 was host to several important moments in the history of computing -- maybe most notably here, Steve Russell's "Spacewar!," which is one of a few games people like to name as the "first" videogame. We chose the PDP-1 as a reference primarily because of that *gorgeous* display, but it works well thematically as a ruined monument to the colossal scale and expense on view in earlier computer moments. A PDP-1 in its heyday cost over $100,000, so early hackers working on the PDP-1 would only have had access to it through an institution like the university where Donald, Lula & Joseph worked. The vulgarity of this spending wasn't lost on them -- the PDP-1's text-editing software was called "expensive typewriter."

The EMU Modular Synthesizer – Here are a few excerpts of the music Ben composed for the Xanadu sequence:

About this work, Ben says:

"Often while working on audio for KRZ, I will receive a build of a scene or environment from Tamas and Jake and then populate it with audio as a response. A lot of the material that I was pulling from for the Xanadu audio was made over the course of my last semester in school, when I was able to spend about four hours a week with the EMU modular synthesizer there. Built in the late 70's specifically for the sound department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the EMU has been maintained over the years and is both a relic from that time as well as a source of vibrantly new and interesting sounds. Over the course of a few months, I amassed a large library of raw material. It was a fun challenge to use analog synthesis to construct all of the sounds, which involved sifting through long stretches of audio while listening for interesting moments to collage together, and supplement with another old synthesizer I stole (temporarily) from a roommate."

Here's a video of Ben playing the EMU system at SAIC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BVkqFzlxac

May 2, 2015

'Last week, we traveled to Berlin for "A MAZE.", where Kentucky Route Zero was featured. It was great -- a games show with the heart of a DIY new media art festival. We felt very much at home! While there, we gave a live performance of a new video snatched from the airwaves of KRZ, called "Microwaves." We'll be doing a video stream of that piece soon & will let you know in advance, via this here email newsletter. It looks a bit like this:

We also did a short talk, thrown together at the last minute to fill in for a speaker who had to cancel. The talk, titled "The now Now NOW" was about digital typography and text as a time-based phenomenon in Kentucky Route Zero and other projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBHq56hB3BU

November 24, 2015

We're getting close to wrapping up Act IV. It's been a long road, but we feel good about the work & we're excited to share it with you. Here are a couple high-res versions of Act IV's banner/teaser art:

We want to thank you again for hanging in there while we quietly spent the last year or so (since "Here And There Along The Echo") working on this episode. It's important to us to embrace the uncertainties of working on a project like this, and so valuable+gratifying to have an audience who respect that. We're eager to transition from thanking you for waiting into thanking you for playing!

May 15, 2016

Progress! And wrongles.

It's been a while since we checked in with you by email, so we just wanted to say "hello" & share some progress and art. Last time we wrote you was in November. We were feeling pretty confident about the way Act 4 was shaping up at that point. Then some personal and creative curveballs tripped us up a little & we didn't get it done as quickly as we thought we would at the time. Now we're feeling confident & "almost done" again ... but let's be a little more concrete this time: We have basically one-and-a-half scenes left to make in act four. Those 1.5 scenes are on the smaller side of the KRZ spectrum in complexity. Ben has some recordings to edit together into a piece. We have a final pass of dialog proofreading & editing left to do. And we have to play through the whole thing a few more times looking for bugs.

So that's where we're at! We are still learning how to balance making work and communicating with you, our audience, especially as a three-person team spread pretty thin as it is, so, thanks -- as always -- for your patience. Cool. Here's some art in wrongle format:

A new character from Act 4. Cate is a tugboat captain, birth doula, and mushroom hunter: http://kentuckyroutezero.com/cate.wrongle
A wrongle from an older scene. This is one of the sites along the Zero in Act 3, Phil Morton's van: http://kentuckyroutezero.com/farout.wrongle
Here's another wrongle from Act 4 we posted on our twitter account a while back: http://kentuckyroutezero.com/phonebooth.wrongle
Another Act 4 screenshot: ‎http://kentuckyroutezero.com/images/nadias-apt.png (mirror)

July 19, 2016

Howdy! We're happy (and more than a little relieved) to let you know that Act IV is done & ready to play. This has been a challenging process for us, but we're excited about the work and eager to share it with you. Here's an observational trailer for Act IV.

Thanks for playing!

August 30, 2017

Notes on the TV Edition. Available online in full here.

April 21, 2018

A little spring refresh.

Hi y'all! Hope you're doing great. First off -- we are working on Act V, we're excited about it and eager to share it with you & wrap up this weird journey together, it'll be out sometime this year, and thanks as always for your patience & enthusiasm.

While building the most recent KRZ interlude, "Un Pueblo de Nada," we were also making some important updates to the codebase. We'll go into much more detail about what those updates were & why they were necessary in a future letter -- for now, here's an overview:

Accessibility improvements (adjustable text size, support on-screen captions for important sound cues, a bunch of other stuff).
Updated our engine (Unity) to the latest version, after trailing behind for years. This gets us the latest bug fixes & was a requirement for preparing the console version.
Adding support for localization.
Bundling all the interludes in with the rest of the game.
Other fun stuff that we will leave for you to discover ...

A lot of these changes meant going deep into code we wrote at the start of this project, when dinosaurs walked the earth. If you have some time and curiosity, would you mind checking out the beta of this new version of the game & let us know if you come across any issues? This update also includes localization for Act 1 in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and Korean. Damn that's a lot of languages! It's like the Rosetta Stone of artgames. Thanks to Annapurna Interactive for hooking that up. If you read one of those languages, we'd love to hear any feedback you may have about the localization so far. We also plan to do a full localization QA process with the team closer to launch of Act V.

Thanks! More soon!