The Path Anniversary: last words

Thus ends our celebration of The Path’s one year anniversary and 11 years of collaboration. Here’s a summary, in case you missed something.

We published The Path postmortem chronicling the making of the game. This was a great way for us to look back on the history of the project, even if it is impossible to describe 3 years of development in a summary fashion!

On The Path blog there were 10 days of posts written from a very personal perspective to supplement the grand postmortem essay. These stories were full of insights about the Red Girls and their Wolves. And we uploaded tons of work in progress imagery, drawings and screenshots covering the entire development, on Flickr on The Path Archive. So if you are curious about the making of the game, have a look at all the Anniversary posts listed there.

We had a very fine sale where all our games were available at 50% off. Even if you missed it you will find everything we’ve made reasonably priced for download.

Also:
The Path translations patch for windows received an upgrade. And these translations are now available for our Steam players as well.

We published 2 new interviews with artists that we consider inspirational and whom we wanted more people to know about.

And we announced the coming of The Path Soundtrack which will be available next month!

So, now, we move on.
To those who celebrated with us, we thank you!!

The Path Anniversary: last days of sale

The Path is 1

Our celebration of the one year anniversary of The Path ends tomorrow. Until then, you can still buy all of our titles at half the price.

The limited Anniversary Edition USB drive will remain available after the sale. Until they’re sold out.

The Path Soundtrack is coming in April

The life of a working musician is even busier and crazier than that of a game developer! (^_^)
Jarboe and Kris Force have been working on extended versions of songs that they made for The Path off and on for a year. All the while Jarboe has been touring practically non-stop and Kris has been balancing sound design for commercial productions and playing in her band and other collaborations.

All their work and all your waiting will pay off next month when the waiting will be -over! We are finalizing things so we don’t want to say too much… BUT What we can say is that The Path original soundtrack album will be published by UK label Paradigms Recordings in April 2010. There will be a specially packaged CD and t-shirt to be had. And we will figure out the best way to sell the album digitally, because we know a lot of you want that.

The tracks are named after the Wolves. This will not be your typical game soundtrack album. And it will blow your mind + possibly your speakers.
Needless to say, more details coming soon!

The Path Anniversary: postmortem 5: conclusion

The final chapter of our postmortem of The Path evaluates the very personal creative process and makes notes about lessons learned. It’s been quite the emotional roller-coaster for us to go over this immense production again. And there’s so many things that we haven’t even touched upon. But the text is long enough as it is. :) We feel older and wiser now. And stronger with experience. The Path is our most successful project to date. But that success came at a price. Six innocent girls found their end in the process -it was unavoidable. And grandmother is always sick.

Read the conclusion here.

The Path Anniversary: postmortem 3

The third chapter of our postmortem of The Path is about what we think went right and what we think went wrong during and after the production. Several items on the list are not so black or white, as they have positive and negative sides. Overall, releasing a game like The Path probably has a similar effect on its creators as giving birth on a mother: the baby is such a glorious thing that you forget -or trivialize- all the hardship and pain that preceded its existence. Still, it’s good to stop for a moment and evaluate the entire project, in the hope of avoiding mistakes in the future, and repeating successes.

Please read on.

The Path Anniversary: postmortem 2

Red Girls models for The Path

The second part of our postmortem of The Path is written mostly by Auriea and explains the design process that went into the game. From the uncertainty at the start of the project, over mixed experiences with collaborators, the inspiration of glitches and the importance of prototyping, to our ideas about 3D aesthetics and dealing with personal emotions in videogames. Illustrated with work-in-progress sketches and screenshots.

Enjoy!

The Path Anniversaire, Jubiläum, Aniversario, etc: translations!

Thanks to the hard work of many volunteers, The Path has been translated in several languages. The following translations are available free of charge as a patch for the Windows version or automatically on Steam when you change your interface settings.

  • Danish translation by Tobias Kosmos and Nicklas Beck Jørgensen
  • Dutch translation by Michaël Samyn
  • French translation by Yann Cossiaux
  • German translation by Susanne Laws
  • Hungarian translation by Kiss Helga, Dékány Csilla and Ország Tibor
  • Italian translation by Matteo Sarnari
  • Portuguese translation by Bruno de Figueiredo
  • Romanian translation by Andra Andrei
  • Spanish translation by Ricardo Oyon

Once again, thanks to all the translators for putting so much effort into making The Path more accessible.

The language patch for The Path is a continuous project. We are working on more translations and will release them in an updated version of the patch as they get finished.

The Path Anniversary: USB Limited Edition & ToT Store Sale extravaganza!

The Path - Anniversary Limited Edition (PC & Mac)

For the one year anniversary of The Path we’ve made a new version of our popular USB stick edition! This time in silver and printed with a picture of Robin. We only have 50, and of those 42 of them are for sale. We will not print this edition again so this is your only chance to get the Robin printed USB drive! This is a whole package too; you also get your choice of poster, a The Path sticker and the 6 Red Girl polaroid cards. You get both Mac and PC versions of the game, and lots of extras! (Yes, different extras than were on the PC only USB stick.) Check out the page in the store for more details!

We are also marking down prices on many of the other store items.

So, if you have been interested in The Path merchandise there has never been a better time to get something! It will be a lot of work for me to put these packages together, I put effort into making each poster unique, but I’m looking forward to it! :)

The store sale runs until March 28th. But the Anniversary Editions will remain available until the last one is sold.

The Path Anniversary: postmortem 1

We have written an elaborate documentation of the production of The Path and will be publishing the article in 4 parts, as we proofread and finalize them.

A first introductory chapter summarizes the history of the project: How the idea started. When we got funding. And how long it all took.

In the next part, scheduled for tomorrow, we delve deep into the design of the game, followed by an overview of what went right and what went wrong, to conclude with a look at reception and sales.

We hope you enjoy the read.