Meri-Making: Anniversary Edition
Today marks exactly one year after the end of our Kickstarter campaign. Since then, it’s been a lot of work, and a hell of a lot of fun. We met up with many of you at PAX East in Boston, the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation meeting in Bismarck, ND, and at various playtesting events around New York City. We are incredibly happy with how the game is turning out. We’re frustrated (though not very surprised) that development is taking us longer than expected. Best of all, we’re excited to be getting close to releasing the game into your hands!
Beta
We know you guys are on the edge of your seat to play a preliminary version of the game, and I know we keep pushing back the date, but we do need a little more time for the Beta to be player-ready. Rather than continuing to burst your bubble with every update, since it’s very difficult to anticipate, for now it’s safe to say that it will be fairly soon. Just know that we are working very hard to make the game the best it can be as quickly as we can.
Website
We’re also starting work on the game’s website. In fact, we are looking for a talented website designer to help us with the graphic design for the website, as well as revising the main Sortasoft website (which still has its original design from way back in 2004!) If you know anyone, please have them email their portfolio to
josh@sortasoft.com.
Post-launch steps
While our effort right now is solely focused on finishing the core game, we are beginning to think about additional work that we intend to do after launch. We are investigating the potential for releasing Meriwether on other platforms, including consoles. We’re also discussing the creation of a guidebook to help assist those who want to use the game in learning environments.
Next Steps
For now, we’re excited to get back to work. This week we’re updating our codebase to work with the latest version of Unity (hopefully this will go smoothly!), which we primarily expect to help improve the game’s performance, particularly the speed at which it renders terrain. We’re also at the point where we are spending a lot of time playtesting it ourselves, with friends, and with other designers. We are creating the artwork for Jefferson and the interior of his office in the President’s House, as well as all Corps’ large equipment like tents, boats, awnings, lanterns, a tipi, and the ubiquitous staple of all expeditions and videogames alike: crates.
Josh & the Meriwether team
