Hello everyone,

We are one single day away from the release of Dad Quest in Early Access. For those of you who received advanced copies via Kickstarter, we've just released a new build which contains fixes for several issues and a few minor additions.

First up, A new trailer has just been made live, you can check it out here:

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

We've also had some awesome Youtubers play the game, here are just a few:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh2RvbaD1ro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u96C-rPLx8s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgxUu5lsAhI&

There is plenty of other coverage including Yogscast's Hannah who streamed the game via Twitch! Overall, we've seen a lot of people enjoy the game and we're looking forward to developing Dad Quest further.

Today's patch highlights include:
- Fixed an issue where the world would not load textures
- Dad now extends his arm to try and recall child with Left Click
- Tutorial Area now teaches players how to recall the child
- Added a notification which tells players when the current content of Early Access has ended (Don't worry, more stuff will come soon!)
- Some work done to improve some memory issues
- Several Bug fixes

If you come across any issues, let us know in the forums or email us at support@excalibur-publishing.com with as much information as possible.

Hello everyone,

We are one single day away from the release of Dad Quest in Early Access. For those of you who received advanced copies via Kickstarter, we've just released a new build which contains fixes for several issues and a few minor additions.

First up, A new trailer has just been made live, you can check it out here:

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

We've also had some awesome Youtubers play the game, here are just a few:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh2RvbaD1ro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u96C-rPLx8s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgxUu5lsAhI&

There is plenty of other coverage including Yogscast's Hannah who streamed the game via Twitch! Overall, we've seen a lot of people enjoy the game and we're looking forward to developing Dad Quest further.

Today's patch highlights include:
- Fixed an issue where the world would not load textures
- Dad now extends his arm to try and recall child with Left Click
- Tutorial Area now teaches players how to recall the child
- Added a notification which tells players when the current content of Early Access has ended (Don't worry, more stuff will come soon!)
- Some work done to improve some memory issues
- Several Bug fixes

If you come across any issues, let us know in the forums or email us at support@excalibur-publishing.com with as much information as possible.

Hello everyone,

We have recently updated the game for our Earliest Access players (The few folks who get to play the game before the 23rd of February as they were Kickstarter backers). Today has been just a small user interface update which allows you to hover over an item in your inventory to see a small pop up window which has a description of the item.



You can drag these items into your childs inventory and give them new abilities including burn damage or even healing the dad. There is still some more work we need to do on this but if anyone has any feedback, do let us know.

A few other big fixes have also been included in this build.

All the best,
Chris

Hello everyone,

We have recently updated the game for our Earliest Access players (The few folks who get to play the game before the 23rd of February as they were Kickstarter backers). Today has been just a small user interface update which allows you to hover over an item in your inventory to see a small pop up window which has a description of the item.



You can drag these items into your childs inventory and give them new abilities including burn damage or even healing the dad. There is still some more work we need to do on this but if anyone has any feedback, do let us know.

A few other big fixes have also been included in this build.

All the best,
Chris

Hello everyone!

Today, Eric wanted to share some details on another enemy type in Dad Quest:

"Hello, Eric again, coming back to you with some more Dad Quest enemy lore. Pigeons have been a staple of Dad Quest since the very beginning of development. In fact, I made the pigeon art even before the game’s initial conception! Back in the day when I was learning Flash, I made a little game called Bird God in which you clicked to spawn pigeons until the game lagged. You can still find it on itch.io.

I thought these birds had a lot of charm, so when prototyping the early combat system, I figured I’d bring them into Dad Quest as a sort of living punching bag. They’ve been in the game ever since.

The Pigeon Family is one with a long history of violence and oppression. For decades, the pigeons have fought for their right to live amongst humans. Tired of being killed and treated as lesser, a group of pigeons in Mountain City have banded together to form the Pigeon Mafia, a rebellious organization that promises protection for fellow pigeons in exchange for a life of servitude. The Mafia’s violence has stirred controversy amongst the pigeons, scattering defectors across the mainland.



The brute of the family, the giant pigeon is over twice as large as the average bird. These are very dangerous foes, able to easily overwhelm a human and tear them apart. Their gigantism also alters their brain, leading to violent tendencies; they will often attack humans on sight to protect their kin. They will jump up and down as they approach, manically flapping their wings to intimidate. They then stab with their beak and talons to deal damage. The Pigeon Mafia seeks to employ Giant Pigeons and use their strength as a weapon.



Pigeon Wizards are high ranking members of the Pigeon Mafia who possess powerful magical abilities. They have been known to launch surprise attacks on humans by trapping them and spawning pigeons to attack. Their other abilities are unknown, but they should not be trifled with, despite how silly they look. Rumors say they’ve been trying to resurrect what they call the “Pigeon Lord” to spearhead their plan for world domination

.



To stay up to date with Dad Quest, add the game to your wishlist!

Hello everyone!

Today, Eric wanted to share some details on another enemy type in Dad Quest:

"Hello, Eric again, coming back to you with some more Dad Quest enemy lore. Pigeons have been a staple of Dad Quest since the very beginning of development. In fact, I made the pigeon art even before the game’s initial conception! Back in the day when I was learning Flash, I made a little game called Bird God in which you clicked to spawn pigeons until the game lagged. You can still find it on itch.io.

I thought these birds had a lot of charm, so when prototyping the early combat system, I figured I’d bring them into Dad Quest as a sort of living punching bag. They’ve been in the game ever since.

The Pigeon Family is one with a long history of violence and oppression. For decades, the pigeons have fought for their right to live amongst humans. Tired of being killed and treated as lesser, a group of pigeons in Mountain City have banded together to form the Pigeon Mafia, a rebellious organization that promises protection for fellow pigeons in exchange for a life of servitude. The Mafia’s violence has stirred controversy amongst the pigeons, scattering defectors across the mainland.



The brute of the family, the giant pigeon is over twice as large as the average bird. These are very dangerous foes, able to easily overwhelm a human and tear them apart. Their gigantism also alters their brain, leading to violent tendencies; they will often attack humans on sight to protect their kin. They will jump up and down as they approach, manically flapping their wings to intimidate. They then stab with their beak and talons to deal damage. The Pigeon Mafia seeks to employ Giant Pigeons and use their strength as a weapon.



Pigeon Wizards are high ranking members of the Pigeon Mafia who possess powerful magical abilities. They have been known to launch surprise attacks on humans by trapping them and spawning pigeons to attack. Their other abilities are unknown, but they should not be trifled with, despite how silly they look. Rumors say they’ve been trying to resurrect what they call the “Pigeon Lord” to spearhead their plan for world domination

.



To stay up to date with Dad Quest, add the game to your wishlist!

Good day expecting dads!

Today Ryan Huggins shares some details on the process of level design for Dad Quest:

"Hello everyone! I’m Ryan Huggins, the designer of Dad Quest. Today we’re gonna take a very brief look at one of the design philosophies central to my approach to Dad Quest’s tone and humor. This approach is shared with the other members of the team, but this post probably focuses a bit more on my thought process. Hope you enjoy!



OKAY.

Dad Quest is a game composed of weird situational humor, action platforming, and subversion. So with that said, most of what makes Dad Quest, Dad Quest, is not humor, but the approach to the game’s tone. That tone arises not necessarily from the jokes themselves, but from the CONTEXT in which they occur. Context is one of the words that comes up most often when we are discussing Dad Quest and in a lot of scenarios, it is context that makes what might be a truly terrible, sad, unfunny sequence into one that makes the player smile or laugh. As a designer, that context is what creates a space where you can subvert a player’s expectations, and therefore allows you to be funny in a satisfying way.



So, making levels in Dad Quest has been an interesting experience for me. Normally, I wouldn’t really consider myself to be a level designer, ESPECIALLY not for comedy games. In fact, previously I believed that level design, systems design, and narrative design were so intertwined that it would be almost trivial to differentiate between the skills required for the development of small games.

Oh boy, WAS I WRONG.

Here are some examples of just a SMALL portion of the sketches I’ve done just for the first 30-40 minutes of the game. I would say this makes up about 8% of the total sketches and only 1.5 of these images even have any connection to what’s currently in the game.



Level design and implementation is such a huge part of the game development equation that it takes up almost 70% of my development time on Dad Quest. I not only had no idea how time consuming it is, I also had no idea just how difficult it is to get right.



To many outside viewers of Dad Quest, it might appear that our focus might be on what's ‘funny', or what is outlandish and weird (especially because we make so much silly promotional content), but that is not necessarily the case. We learned not to do this pretty early in the game's development, because one question that was asked pretty frequently was, ‘What is funny?' Unfortunately, as we learned, what's funny isn't always what's fun - and even moreso, being funny in a vacuum is not satisfying.



As I grew as a game designer and into my design role for Dad Quest, I developed what I believe is an even better question: ‘Does the context of this situation lend itself to a humorous outcome?' This question changes how you approach the problem in a number of ways and that perspective change (context change, even) means everything to me when I think about how I'm setting the stage for any interaction. (An additional easter egg is that you can replace “humorous” with any type of outcome and the question still works!)







So, how does our comedy philosophy work its way into Dad Quest? As I’ve said, comedy is, in a lot of ways, not something that we meticulously plan out in Dad Quest, but as a group, we laugh a lot and have a lot of fun. We try to channel that into our game’s context, setting and world. Really, we just work quite hard to create that narrative, gameplay, and visual context where a lot of funny, subversive, amusing, or just ridiculous things can happen. This is very much our preferred work environment! Then, as game developers and artists, we let these things happen somewhat organically within the game. The writing, gameplay, art, music, etc existing as a way for us to facilitate the telling of our story. And that story is just a bunch of bad (dad) jokes that we created a whole world for, so that they could exist without feeling arbitrary.

Ryan Huggins

Dad Quest launches on Steam on February 23rd in Early Access

Good day expecting dads!

Today Ryan Huggins shares some details on the process of level design for Dad Quest:

"Hello everyone! I’m Ryan Huggins, the designer of Dad Quest. Today we’re gonna take a very brief look at one of the design philosophies central to my approach to Dad Quest’s tone and humor. This approach is shared with the other members of the team, but this post probably focuses a bit more on my thought process. Hope you enjoy!



OKAY.

Dad Quest is a game composed of weird situational humor, action platforming, and subversion. So with that said, most of what makes Dad Quest, Dad Quest, is not humor, but the approach to the game’s tone. That tone arises not necessarily from the jokes themselves, but from the CONTEXT in which they occur. Context is one of the words that comes up most often when we are discussing Dad Quest and in a lot of scenarios, it is context that makes what might be a truly terrible, sad, unfunny sequence into one that makes the player smile or laugh. As a designer, that context is what creates a space where you can subvert a player’s expectations, and therefore allows you to be funny in a satisfying way.



So, making levels in Dad Quest has been an interesting experience for me. Normally, I wouldn’t really consider myself to be a level designer, ESPECIALLY not for comedy games. In fact, previously I believed that level design, systems design, and narrative design were so intertwined that it would be almost trivial to differentiate between the skills required for the development of small games.

Oh boy, WAS I WRONG.

Here are some examples of just a SMALL portion of the sketches I’ve done just for the first 30-40 minutes of the game. I would say this makes up about 8% of the total sketches and only 1.5 of these images even have any connection to what’s currently in the game.



Level design and implementation is such a huge part of the game development equation that it takes up almost 70% of my development time on Dad Quest. I not only had no idea how time consuming it is, I also had no idea just how difficult it is to get right.



To many outside viewers of Dad Quest, it might appear that our focus might be on what's ‘funny', or what is outlandish and weird (especially because we make so much silly promotional content), but that is not necessarily the case. We learned not to do this pretty early in the game's development, because one question that was asked pretty frequently was, ‘What is funny?' Unfortunately, as we learned, what's funny isn't always what's fun - and even moreso, being funny in a vacuum is not satisfying.



As I grew as a game designer and into my design role for Dad Quest, I developed what I believe is an even better question: ‘Does the context of this situation lend itself to a humorous outcome?' This question changes how you approach the problem in a number of ways and that perspective change (context change, even) means everything to me when I think about how I'm setting the stage for any interaction. (An additional easter egg is that you can replace “humorous” with any type of outcome and the question still works!)







So, how does our comedy philosophy work its way into Dad Quest? As I’ve said, comedy is, in a lot of ways, not something that we meticulously plan out in Dad Quest, but as a group, we laugh a lot and have a lot of fun. We try to channel that into our game’s context, setting and world. Really, we just work quite hard to create that narrative, gameplay, and visual context where a lot of funny, subversive, amusing, or just ridiculous things can happen. This is very much our preferred work environment! Then, as game developers and artists, we let these things happen somewhat organically within the game. The writing, gameplay, art, music, etc existing as a way for us to facilitate the telling of our story. And that story is just a bunch of bad (dad) jokes that we created a whole world for, so that they could exist without feeling arbitrary.

Ryan Huggins

Dad Quest launches on Steam on February 23rd in Early Access

Hello everyone!

Today we're pleased to announce the release date for Dad Quest on Steam Early Access. That date will be.... 23rd of February 2017!

Those of you who backed the Kickstarter will be given a steam code in the coming weeks. It is important to note that it will not be the final version as we will still be completing some refinements and polish to improve Dad Quest when it launches at the end of next month.

Additionally, we have just launched a short competition over on the Excalibur website which will let you win your very own Dad Quest mug. Here it is in all its glory!



You can enter the competition by clicking the link below:

Win A Mug!

Tomorrow we'll have a new blog from Ryan Huggins, the designer of Dad Quest which will talk in detail about level design. So remember to add Dad Quest to your wishlist to stay up to date with all news.

Hello everyone!

Today we're pleased to announce the release date for Dad Quest on Steam Early Access. That date will be.... 23rd of February 2017!

Those of you who backed the Kickstarter will be given a steam code in the coming weeks. It is important to note that it will not be the final version as we will still be completing some refinements and polish to improve Dad Quest when it launches at the end of next month.

Additionally, we have just launched a short competition over on the Excalibur website which will let you win your very own Dad Quest mug. Here it is in all its glory!



You can enter the competition by clicking the link below:

Win A Mug!

Tomorrow we'll have a new blog from Ryan Huggins, the designer of Dad Quest which will talk in detail about level design. So remember to add Dad Quest to your wishlist to stay up to date with all news.