Harry Tuffs looks back on the release of A House of Many Doors last week and mentions the lack of press exposure, so here is some:

So A House of Many Doors launched just over a week ago. I'm still reeling.

I'd hoped for a break after releasing the game, but instead I've found myself working just as hard as before.

Once the hubbub dies down I'd like to collate my thoughts on HOMD into a longer, polished blog post that I might put up on GamaSutra or somewhere. This isn't that. This isn't an official postmortem - you can't reflect on an event when it's still ongoing. These are rougher notes, crumpled and hasty and ill-considered, scrawled from a foxhole as more bug-reports explode overhead.

The Good:

• Art, music, writing, atmosphere, setting and characters: Everyone loves all of these. I knew the first two would be successes, because Catherine and Zach are living gods, but I'm glad my writing has also received a lot of enthusiasm. This is good news - it's much easier to patch out bugs than it would be to improve on any of these!
• The game has a 'Very Positive' rating on Steam, which I'm chuffed about. People warned me that the Steam forums were a strange and hostile place, but my experience has been the opposite - the vast majority of people there have been lovely. Thanks are due to all of 'em.
• I've had a flood of hugely affectionate tweets and emails from people who love the game's story. I've had fanart of a dancing kinetopede, tweets from people saying the game was the first to make them cry, snippets of my writing have been cut out and pasted around with delight... After months of lonely toil, it's been a real treat to see people engage like that.
• It was fantastic to work in Failbetter's offices and get to know them so well. They're lovely, lovely people and I learned a huge amount - much more than I would have on my own. Friends!

The Bad:

• It was a buggy launch. In retrospect I really wish I'd opted for 1-2 weeks of Steam's Early Access program . HOMD is a massive game - it has more characters, locations and quest branches in it than the vast majority of AAA RPGs. That's not me bragging, it's just numbers. There's a reason developers like Obsidian have a reputation for both massively intricate reactive storylines and lots of bugs: One often comes with the other. And those are AAA developers, with a fleet of dedicated QA testers! Given all the different possibilities in HOMD, as a solo dev I was never going to be able to test all branches of every quest without delaying the game for another six months, which I couldn't afford to do. I cut lots of content from the game, but I suspect the best thing would have been to cut more. Another lesson learned.
• BUT: I've released 16 patches since the game launched. The bugs that were present on launch day are gone. If you've been holding off from buying the game or playing it until the bugs were ironed out, now's your time.
• Finally: Lack of media attention. Apart from the always-great Rock Paper Shotgun, who posted a Wot I Think, the press has mostly ignored HOMD. I think that's a shame, and it's not for lack of marketing on my part - I had a specific marketing plan and worked hard on it for the last 4 months. But there's not much I can do at this point, so I need you to help spread the word that HOMD exists. If you happen to be on Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, Steam, any other forums, or your local street corner, and the mood strikes you: Why not post a HOMD screenshot, or open up a discussion, or hold a sign over your head and scream at passers-by?

Here's the story about the developer Harry Tuffs who created the 2D RPG A House of Many Doors in just two years:

A former Ramsgate pupil has created this amazing computer game due for release tomorrow

It has been two years in the making but tomorrow (February 3) marks the launch of a 2D exploration PC game created by former Ramsgate pupil Harry Tuffs.

The 24 year old, who attended Chatham House Grammar School before studying English Literature at Oxford University, created role playing game A House Of Many Doors thanks to funding from a kickstarter campaign that smashed its target three-times over.

Harry originally set a target of £4,000 to help pay for artwork by Catherine Unger and music for the game, which features over 300,000 words of narrative and trillions of 'bad poems,' but hit that sum in just 48 hours and ended up with pledges of more than £12,000.
The game has been produced under the name of his company Pixel Trickery, set up specifically for this project. Its creation involved slogging through thousands of hours of coding and working with a professional graphic artist and composer to ensure the visual impact and atmosphere of A House of Many Doors is intriguing, original and addictive – in the best possible way.

[...]

A House of Many Doors will be released in 20 hours:

Welcome to the House. You are not welcome.

Explore the House, a parasite dimension that steals from other worlds, in a train that scuttles on mechanical legs.

Uncover secrets. Open locked doors. Lead a crew of dysfunctional characters. Write procedurally-generated poems. Fight in turn-based combat. Explore a strange new setting, dripping with atmosphere, crusted with lore. Escape. Escape. Escape.

You are an explorer, poet and spy, launching yourself into the unknown in search of adventure. Rig an election in the city of the dead. Visit a village lit by the burning corpse of a god (careful not to inhale the holy smoke). Sell your teeth to skittering spider-things for a moment in their library. Over 90 bizarre locations await discovery in the dust and the dark.

A House of Many Doors is a 2D exploration RPG that takes inspiration from Sunless Sea, China Mieville, Planescape: Torment and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It features over 300,000 words of branching original story and over 770 trillion bad poems.

WARNING.
Please be aware that this game contains the following romance options:

• Men.
• Women.
• Goatman.
• Ten million crows.
• An oil rig.

A House of Many Doors has benefited from the kind support and partial funding of Failbetter Games, makers of Sunless Sea and Fallen London.

In this update of A House of Many Doors, a design issue related to finding locations in the game is discussed and the new beta.

First things first: A new beta update has been uploaded to Steam for MATRON-tier backers! I'm afraid this one utterly breaks save games, but I'm 98% certain that this is the last time I need to do that. From now on, your save games will be safe.

These last few months before release are crucial. They're the last chance before release to really identify and fix problems with the design of the game. In some ways, that's more important even than bugfixing - a bug can kill enjoyment for a moment, a design problem can stop someone from enjoying the game entirely.  

So far, feedback on HOMD's gameplay is positive, with one striking exception. Several different beta testers have noted that it's too difficult to discover the special rooms in the House. Because of the House's layout, it's entirely possible to pass within one room of a new location, but still miss it entirely - and end up just going around in circles.  

That's a problem. There are 88 of these narrative hubs in the game, each packed with all the stories and secrets I've spent the last year labouring over. They're essential to the experience, not least because they disrupt the rhythm of exploring the darkness.

Currently, the only system that lets you discover new locations before you reach them is tied to the Navigator. When you have a living Navigator in your crew, they will randomly update your Map with nearby locations as you travel - this happens more often in proportion to your Insight stat.  

But it's become increasingly clear that this system isn't as versatile as I'd hoped when I designed it way back in the more innocent times of January 2015. It risks limiting enjoyment of the game only to those who pour their hard-earned Apprehensions into their Insight. On the other hand, though, I don't want Insight to be useless. So what's the solution here?

Acoording to this update for A House of Many Doors, the main story for the game is almost finished, which ends up at 10-12 hours of gameplay (without any side quests).

To advance the main story you need a resource called Apprehensions.

Without going too much into spoiler territory, the way to advance the main quest is by exploration itself. You need to gather a resource called 'Apprehensions,' representing your knowledge of the House and all its secrets and oddities. You can collect Apprehensions by writing poetry, discovering new locations, or completing side-quests.  

(Why did I choose this design? Well, I was fed up of the thing you get in most open-world RPGs, where in order to enjoy all the side-content you have to ignore the main story entirely. Why not advance the main story by enjoying the side-stuff?) 

Apprehensions can be spent on two things: Improving your stats, and advancing the main quest. A player who knows they want to play for 60-70 hours can spend mostly on the former. If you're in a hurry to finish, focus all your spending on the latter. High stats are nice, but aren't a necessity for reaching any of the endings. 

The more you discover about the House and the more Apprehensions you collect... The more attention you will attract, from entities far older and more powerful than you. They will come to you in dreams. They offer you the impossible: an escape from the House. It does not come without price.

The release of A House of Many Doors was planned for this month, but has been postponed to February 2017 now:

This Update Ends With a Rocket-Powered Blimp

I’ve spent the week making a bunch of small changes to the game – UI tweaks, bugfixes, and optimizations. Although each change is relatively minor, it’s made a big difference overall. The alpha build has been updated for Kickstarter backers if you want to see what I mean.

[...]

The Big News HOMD’s release date has been postponed to the 3rd of February. This is a decision I didn’t want to have to make, and I’ve only come to it after lots of discussion with the people at Failbetter,

Harry Tuffs, the creator of A House of Many Doors, added a new update for the game stating that there are fewer updates as he is working hard on the game and also presents us with information about the Stone Circle:

Journey north of the City of Keys, toward to the Chimeric Empire, and you'll have to pass through the bleak Goat-Stones. Blood-spotted obelisks, dead trees. Yellow eyes leer from the shadows. This is where the goatmen hide in bitter isolation.  

If you are unlucky, a shaman might decide you'd look better on a sacrificial slab. They will wake the stones. The monoliths will rise and come for you, carrying a bleating horde with them.

The NPC vehicles can be hostile or neutral, depending on who's at the wheel (or rudder, or tentacle, or whatever else is being used to steer). The goatmen are exceptions -insular and xenophobic, they will always be hostile. At least at first. Perhaps there's a way to change that...

In this recent update for A House of Many Doors more information is provided on the gods in the game and how they play a role.

The gods of the House are very real indeed, and make their existence known. In the Cities, however, ordinary people are only permitted to worship the nine Sanctioned gods.  

Over the course of your travels, as you make your mark on the House, the gods will grow intrigued. When you do something worthy of interest, perhaps by completing a story or simply catering to that god's particular eccentricities, you will accrue their Divine Scrutiny (or, if you displease thrm, Divine Reproach). Earn enough Scrutiny, and you may ask the god for a favour. Attract enough Reproach, and become cursed.  

But what if you actively seek to earn a particular god's Scrutiny, rather than simply letting it accrue naturally? Well, to me that sounds you're on a divine mission.

Here is the new trailer for the upcoming relelase of A House of Many Doors.

The release date for A House of Many Doors has been set to September 24, 2016. This is later than planned and this is why:

So I know, I know, this represents a two-month delay on the original posited release date. I do hate to do the typical Kickstarter thing. You know the thing? The thing where they tell you that they need to release later than expected. 

But I suppose this is me doing exactly that thing. This is an enormous game. It will have over 200,000 words of text (about three novels' worth, or one Game of Thrones book - and we all know how long those take to write). Considering its scope, it is also being made on a rather small budget (although it's still a higher budget than I ever expected, and a blessing - thanks for that!). 

That alone would go some way to explaining the delay! But there are other factors too. Stuff in my personal life, for one, and the unplanned changes to the combat system, for another. 

I'm confident that the release date won't slip back any further (though they all say that). And I assure you, you'll end up with a much better game as a result. I am hoping to blow your socks off, or at least leave your socks thoroughly ruffled and low around the ankles.

A few updates earlier, Harry Tuffs explained how to deal with monsters in darkness, in A House of Many Doors. He now describes two more options to deal with them.

Remember a few weeks ago, when we discussed monsters in darkness?

I implied that the only way of dealing with them was to turn on your Heartlight. Actually, that's not your only option – though the other options will require you to expend resources.

The other two ways of dealing with darkness are to use Flares or Hands of Glory.

...

Every serious intercellular traveller should have a Hand of Glory, although they must use it wisely – it is much more expensive than the Flare. Understandably so, as the production costs are enormous. First, you will need to find a murderer, definitely dead, preferably hanged. Chop off his hand – the left, please – and boil it in wax. Each fingertip will need an oil-soaked wick. Set all five fingers aflame. If the ghostly green glow only makes you nauseous, this is a good sign that you're still human.

A House of Many Doors gets a better combat system:

BIG NEWS:
Major change to combat system, update to alpha build

A couple of months on, I can look back on HOMD's early alpha release with a nice sense of perspective, and all told it actually went very well. There were many reports of instability and poor collision detection, but both of these major bugs were fixed within a week.

One bit of feedback I didn't entirely expect, however, was the trouble that people had with the combat system. It was either much too easy or unfathomably difficult, with no reports of anything in-between. This honestly baffled me for a few days, but then I realized - nobody had much idea what was going on. 

If you have no idea what's going on and then you win, that's too easy. If you have no idea what's going on and then you die, that's too hard.

This could be a UI problem, but I don't think so. It's a design problem. FTL gets away with real-time combat because the player only has 4 characters to manage - but in HOMD, you can have anywhere from 10 to 18 crewmembers! That's simply too much to deal with all at once. And the player in HOMD has no interesting decisions to make - the options are there, but it's simply too chaotic to parse cause-and-effect. (I suppose this is probably a fair representation of real-life combat, but like real-life combat, it just wasn't very fun.) 

There's a rule of strategy gameplay that I strongly believe in - the Sid Meier rule, coined by the Firaxis mastermind himself. "A good game is a series of interesting choices." Sadly, and it pains me to admit it, the old combat system failed this test. 

Luckily, I think I fixed it.

[...]

Harry Tuffs talks about darkness and monsters in this development update for A House of Many Doors.

When you're in darkness, a Noctoscope appears. Keep a close watch through the 'scope. Horrific creatures will slowly fade in, getting closer, extending their claws. If they get too close - well, they can wreak all sorts of havoc.

You can turn your Heartlight back on in order to drive them away, of course. But your Heartlight takes a little while to charge up – and in that time, they might already be upon you. 

Travelling through the House, you should constantly be balancing possibilities. If a scary-looking vehicle starts chasing you, maybe it's worthwhile to slip into shadows and escape. But maybe you'll be attacked by something even worse before you can get your Heartlight back on again, something that can't be fought. Either way, hurry! Think quickly! 

Throughout the course of the game, you can start building towards one tactic or the other. If you prefer to hide in shadows and risk your Sanity, you'll need to increase your Guile and Spirit. If you prefer to fight in the open and risk your life, you'll need Guts and Grit. 

See how deep this rabbit-hole goes? And I'm still at the bottom, digging.

You can meet the A House of Many Doors developer at the GDC in San Francisco:

GDC; Secretive Things; Locked Doors

Hello backers.  

Game details in a minute. First, an announcement: 

I will be at GDC! 

Yes, tomorrow I'm jumping on a metal machine which will fly me through the sky at over five hundred miles an hour. I'll be so high that I'm literally above the cloud canopy, but so comfortable throughout the entire process that I'll probably fall asleep. When I touch down in San Francisco I will be attending a huge conference, where thousands of people are discussing how best to create virtual worlds. Some of these worlds require enormous teams to bring to life, and some of the smaller worlds are being created in bedrooms. 

Despite the miraculous nature of this experience, I will spend a lot of it tired, confused, scared and/or grumpy. This is why the robots will win. 

That being said, don't let the sight of my tired, confused, scared, grumpy face put you off. I will be having a wonderful (and instructive) time nonetheless, and if you're also going to be at GDC, let's meet up! I'd love to have a chat. 

Furtive motions beneath the surface 

Game details, then. Work on HOMD continues apace, and the response to the alpha has been great. 

The game has gone from floaty instability to solidity. Minor bugs have been squashed and larger ones have been battled and slain. The bug reports have been incredibly helpful, of course, but even more useful was the general feedback! 

'Useful' in this context, of course, does not necessarily been positive (though for the most part, it has been very positive). Last week I thought long and hard about some of the most common issues that people had, and the current state of gameplay in HOMD. I came up with some tenuous solutions, solutions that make me really excited. Solutions which might also scupper my schedule slightly, so I'm approaching them with caution. 

Sorry to be so cryptic, but none of this is cast in iron yet – I don't want to announce anything that I ultimately decide against. I only mention it now because this (along with bugfixing and story-writing) has been what's occupied most of my waking hours over the last two weeks. 

Locked Doors 

There are a bunch of unannounced features floating around in the game right now, and it's about time I started pulling back the curtain! This update is long already, so I'll be brief. 

The edges of the House are represented by locked Doors. In-fiction, the House is an infinite dimension of architecture, and while (a long time ago) it was actually infinite in-game, this turned out not to be very interesting. Why would I want to trap the player into travelling endlessly through endless nothing? 

So instead, there are locked Doors that block your progress when you reach the end of the map. But where there are locks, of course, there are Keys. [...]

In an update for A house of Many Doors information is provided on the alpha that was recently released:

Last week, the House of Many Doors alpha was released to MATRON-tier backers and above. The game is still very much unfinished and very much an alpha, but enough of the code is complete that I felt alpha testing would still be really helpful.

To those brave testers who have played the game over the last week and submitted bug reports: a heartfelt thank you! I’ve been working to address the issues you found, and it’s been indescribably helpful. The two main issues which cropped up over and over again were:

• Crashes. This was to do with the game hogging too much memory. 
• Collision. The kinetopede had a distressing tendency to get stuck. 

Both of these issues have now (I hope) been largely fixed, although I’m sure there are still edge cases that need to be rooted up. I also fixed most of the other, less common bugs that were discovered. 

So if anyone has given up testing, the Steam build has been updated with these fixes & now would be a fantastically useful time to start again!

And there is a video with the game's combat.

The alpha release of A House of Many Doors is not too far way, according to the latest update. In this case it is not later that scheduled, but earlier.

The release of the House of Many Doors alpha version to MATRON-tier backers and above was originally scheduled for April 2016. 

But it's been pointed out to me that the game's in an alpha state already, and I'm going to need as much helpful feedback as I can get! So the release of the alpha has been moved forward to next week, on Friday 19th of February.

Catherine has been working hard over the last month on assets and UI for the game's combat mode. The end result? Combat mode is looking fresh. It's looking plump. It's just about ready to be consumed.

The changes aren't limited to a facelift: 

• Enemy AI now works much more efficiently, thanks to a bunch of minor improvements and bugfixes.
• The Sanity mechanics were great, but crewmembers only lost Sanity when they witnessed a fellow crewmember die. This didn't happen often enough to justify such a complex mechanic. So I've added the ability for you and your enemy to damage each other's Heartlights! A broken Heartlight means darkness, and darkness means a slow crew-wide descent into insanity.
• Distance between vehicles is now represented in a much more intelligible fashion. Distance is really important! It determines the accuracy of your shots, your ability to flee, and whether you can be boarded!

The first development update for A House of Many Doors talks about sound, shops and sanity. This part is about the (in)sanity in the game.

've also added a bunch of insanity effects to the game, which I'm hoping will seriously mess with your head! 

I don't want to give too much away about these little touches, since their efficacy will depend on you being caught off-guard. When your character loses enough Sanity a lot of things both big and small will start to go very slightly askew. Ideally, I want some of the effects to be so subtle that an unobservant player might not even notice them at first.

A video was made for A House of Many Doors, showing the latest state of its user interface.

GUI isn't something that gets people very excited, I suppose. It's no “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.” But it's integral to the user experience, and will be on the screen almost continuously while playing, so I'm very pleased that we've got it looking and feeling so good in-game! 

Catherine's going to be working on the combat GUI next, which is a whole different satchel of cats, but I expect her to do something equally fantastic with it. 

And what have I been doing? Well, mainly writing out spreadsheets and word docs, designing and balancing the game's shops, trade and economy. I can sense your UNBEARABLE EXCITEMENT at this prospect! Maybe you should go and watch “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens” in order to calm down.

The latest update for A house of Many Doors, brings us a sneak peek into the game's soundtrack.

I've been writing, designing and implementing the game's questlines over the last few weeks, and it's all coming together quite nicely. I also coded some gooey blood splatter effects for combat, because videogames.

The UI changes that Catherine has been working on are looking brilliant, and I can't wait to show them to you - they're not quite game-ready yet, but when they are, you'll be the first to know. I see you shiver with antici....

Soundtrack: Sneak Peek Video!

So what can I show you? Well, music maestro Zach Beever has been working on the House of Many Doors soundtrack. Here's a sneak peek video of the game's opening theme:

A House of Many Doors has been Kickstarted a short while ago, but is now also going to Indiegogo, for those who missed the Kickstarter.

Yep. A House of Many Doors finished its Kickstarter campaign at the beginning of October, raising more than 300% of its goal (I'm still both flabbered and gasted). I've been contacted by a few kindly folk since then who missed the boat and want to pledge - which is fantastically nice of them, but who I hadn't been able to accommodate. Until now! Hurrah.

Everything pledged here will be spent on the game in one way or another, but there's no pressure. The game is already funded and getting made. If you're skeptical, probably best to wait until launch date. This is just to accommodate those people who have already contacted me and want to send me a little extra funding, which might allow scope for a little bonus bit of non-essential art or something. Or it might just be enough to buy me a few cups of coffee. (Coffee is a key part of the development process and a non-negotiable expense.)

Thanks Eye.

Here is a short development update for A House of Many Doors.

I described the last update as a “quick little update” and then proceeded to write somewhere in the region of 1000 words. This time, I'm afraid, I'm going to stick to my promises.

Here is a condensed list of what I've been working on over the last couple of weeks: 

• Adding dozens of new areas to the House – writing in-game descriptions, adding random events, and writing news bulletins for the cities to describe their changing political landscape; 
• Optimization – getting the game to run at a decent framerate even on my cheap laptop; 
• Working with Catherine to improve the game's UI with her formidable artistic skills; 
• And, most of all, writing. I've started writing character journeys for your crew, as well as fleshing out what I suppose we should call the game's 'main quest.' I've written 30,000 words this week – all in need of heavy editing, of course, but I'm still quite pleased. My aim was for the finished game to have between 100,000 and 200,000 words of story content, and at my current rate that looks eminently achievable.

In this update for A House of Many Doors we get to see new artwork and learn more about boarding and melee combat.

In combat, I always intended the Distance between the battling vehicles to be a big deal. Neither you nor the enemy can flee combat unless you're over 200M away from each other.  Similarly, neither you nor the enemy can board each other's vehicles unless you're under 50M away from each other. 

But if you do get too close, enemy Guards can fire their grapnels and leap onto your speeding train. And, of course, the player can send their Guards to do the same. 

Only the Guard Captain and the Guards in your crew can board, but it can be extraordinarily effective, and it's completely changed the way that combat plays out. After boarding, you send your Guards to sweep through the enemy vehicle, kill everyone inside, and take it intact – which means more loot, because less is destroyed than if you were to blow the enemy into smithereens via artillery fire. 

The trade-off, of course, is that when you're in Boarding range the enemy can also board you – and it might be a bad idea to send your Guards over to the enemy vehicle when your own has been invaded and the rest of your crew will need defending! Another trade-off is the risk of blowing up your own Guards, so be very careful with where you're aiming your artillery. And finally, you can't send your Surgeon over to support your Guards when they're boarding – making combat riskier and deaths more likely. 

It's a gamble, and it has the potential to greatly reward the gambler, but also to punish them. My intention is to allow various different types of playstyle.

Harry Tuffs has been working on the combat system in A house of Many Doors and presents one element of it now.

So what's been added? Well, over the next few weeks I'm going to fill you in on the new details of combat and how it works.

To be honest I could tell you everything right now, as the code is feature-complete, but I'd prefer not to – it would make for an interminably long update, and besides, I'm going to be entering a period of heavy focus on narrative over November and December, much of which I don't want to spoil, and combat is far easier to talk about without ruining player experience. 

So forgive me for feeding you tasty morsels, rather than a banquet. Banquets are overrated anyway, and tend to end in massacre or nausea.

This week's Exciting New Combat Feature is....  

Insanity

The House's laws of reality are tenuous. Dreams and thoughts can have minds of their own. And figments are not always entirely of the imagination. 

This makes madness both dangerous and contagious, which is expressed mechanically in combat. Various traumas, particularly witnessing the death of a friend, will lower the Sanity of both your own crew and your enemies. This can be turned to your advantage – the enemy crew will tear each other apart in the right circumstances – but can also spiral out of your control.

Those of you who are familiar with Dwarf Fortress might be familiar with the term “tantrum spiral,” where a stressed dwarf will punch the nearest dwarf, making them stressed and causing them to punch a third dwarf, and so on until everyone is murdering everyone else.   

This can happen in A House of Many Doors, if you don't manage combat right – low Sanity can manifest in various ways, one of which is that the affected crewmember goes suddenly berserk. A murderous swabbie might not be too much of a threat, but if your intimidating Guard Captain goes on a rampage, you're in trouble. Did I mention that inter-crew melee combat is now a thing? I'll be talking about that in a later update.

With the extra funding from Kickstarter, Harry Tuffs has been able to hire a composer named Zach Beever for A house of Many Doors.

Things are going swimmingly here at Pixel Trickery HQ, so here's a short but sweet update! It's the opposite of me – I'm tall and sour.

First of all, the eponymous exciting announcement – thanks to your generous funding, I've been able to hire amazing games composer Zach Beever to compose the soundtrack for A House of Many Doors!

This is an exciting moment for me, as I've been a fan of Zach's music for a long time. He composed the soundtrack to indie game Project Zomboid, which has some of my favourite music of all the games I've played!

Why not take a listen to some of his tracks?

And there is also an art update.

Harry Tuffs explains what happend in the period after A House of Many Doors was funded.

Just thought I'd clue you all in on the Important Events that have occurred in the week since the Kickstarter wrapped up! I can't believe it's been only a week - things have been proceeding at a breakneck pace.

The success of the campaign was featured on Rock Paper Shotgun, much to my happiness and surprise. 

And I've been splashing my own words all over the internet too. At the start of the week I posted a post-mortem of the Kickstarter, which examines the data and has some of my thoughts on why the HOMD Kickstarter was a success. 

I have also written a guest post on the Failbetter Games blog, talking about their incubation scheme for small indie developers, and how much I and A House of Many Doors have benefited from it.

And

I’ve been working solidly on the kinetopede upgrade system, and it’s now feature-complete, which is nice. The kinetopede, as you probably know by now, is the train-with-legs that you crawl around in while exploring the House.

Over the course of a playthrough, you will be able to upgrade your kinetopede’s Engine, Armour, Weapons, Trophy, and Legs. Some of the upgrades can be bought, some can be stolen, and some are given as a reward – you know, the standard logic of acquiring things in games.

Let me take you through the different upgrades, one at a time. This will be a fairly bare-bones overview, using only one or two examples each, as I want most of these upgrades to be discovered organically through gameplay!

Pixeltrickery Games looks back at the A House With Many Doors Kickstarter:

“Oh Good, Another Kickstarter Post-mortem”: The ‘A House of Many Doors’ Kickstarter Post-Mortem

So I got over 300% funded on Kickstarter! Here is the post-mortem. It was inevitable.

My initial goal was very small (£4000), and even 300% of that is still a quite tiny budget on which to make a quite large game. But the Kickstarter can still only be described as a success, and all thanks to the goodwill of a bunch of amazing people.

The result

I asked for a very specific amount of money because I knew I would be able to make the game with that amount – I wasn’t making a lowball estimate and hoping for a 300% response. That would have been madness. I genuinely expected to only get £4000, or perhaps as high as £6000 if everything went very well, and I planned my tiny budget accordingly.

Now that I have three times what I expected, I can do a lot more than I thought possible. Even better, the Kickstarter has been a success in other, less immediately obvious ways. It’s raised the game’s profile in places that I never dared hope for – with articles in RPS, PC Gamer and Eurogamer, no less – and it helped to bolster my confidence, confirming that there are people out there who are interested in weird exploration RPGs with procedurally-generated poetry and trains that crawl.

Best of all, though? I reached over 1000 people. If you go on Kickstarter and look at other Games projects, you’ll realize that this is a very respectable number – many projects which raised much more than I did actually have a similar number of backers, or sometimes fewer! Perhaps they designed their reward-tiers better than I did – I avoided physical rewards for the most part, as I didn’t have the time, money or inclination to ship t-shirts around the globe, and I’ve noticed that other Kickstarters with physical rewards have definitely been able to entice people to higher tiers. But this wasn’t an option for me.

On the other hand, though, my low reward-tiers might have been what helped bring more people in. And I think having evidence that over 1000 people interested in what I’m doing is its own reward, to be honest – I’d rather have 1000 people pledging a fiver each than 200 pledging twenty quid each. The raw economics is the same, sure, but creatively there’s a huge difference when you know your work will be reaching a lot of people. And there have even been some familiar names among the backers – some writers whose work I’ve respected for years! It’s all a little daunting, to be honest, but also tremendously exciting.

[...]

Thanks Eye!

Congratulations for a successful Kickstarter campaign!

-> here's the last update:

WE DID IT. One thousand, one hundred and three thank-yous are in order!

The campaign has come to a glorious, expectations-shattering end. A House of Many Doors has just been funded!   

Let's review, shall we? 

A House of Many Doors was covered across the PC gaming press, from Rock Paper Shotgun to PC Gamer to Eurogamer. 

We reached £12,866 in funding. 

That's over 300% of our funding goal. 

And most importantly, 1,103 people pledged. 

I am outrageously grateful to every single lovely one of you. Actually, I've had so much gratitude recently that I'm running out of ways to express it, so I'm just going to proffer a traditional “Thank you.” 

Thank you, all of you. 

What next? Well, I'm going to attempt to celebrate, which means I actually stop developing the game for a day! Hopefully this will mean I can interact with humans, consume non-coffee beverages, and experience this thing called “a sun” that people keep talking about. 

After that, of course, there's a lot of work still to be done. I'm looking forward to it. (And I'll be providing you with regular updates along the way, of course.)   

Let me say it one final time, okay? Thank you. 

Now the House will rise from the dark, as terrible as it is vast. And it is infinitely vast. 

It awaits you.

Two more Kickstarte updates are available for A House of Many Doors, which has been quite succeasful in its own way.

In both updates Harry Tuffs tells how happy he is about how things go, provide some informaiton on how things go and in update 8 the artwork of Catherine Unger is placed in the spotlights while in update 9 she is put in the spotlights as well.

Cliqist got the chance to play A House of Many Doors, which is currently on Kickstarter.

Thanks Eye.

The Kickstarter campaign for A house of Many Doors has 3 more days to try and gather more funds for the development of the game. With this update we are informed of some new art and a new character.

Hurrah! We now have over 800 people who have pledged to A House of Many Doors, and I couldn't be more grateful to you all! This is a completely arbitrary milestone, but hey, it's a milestone, isn't it? So let's party. 

Without all your love, help and support, this game would be a shadow of the brilliant thing it's evolving into. Now there are just 3 days left of the campaign, and we don't have much time before it's all over!

With that in mind, it's time for the unskippable social-media-enthusiasm part of the update! Get to your Tweetmobiles and Facebookcopters! You keep pressing X, but you can't skip the cutscene where you log onto Twitter and start posting about A House of Many Doors. “My character wouldn't do that,” you say, throwing your controller away, but it's too late. It's canon now.

For the meat of this update, I wanted to let you in on some intrigues. Your ragtag crew has always been one of the tentpoles on which HOMD's story will hang, and it's incredibly exciting to see Catherine bring them to life in her art! Today she sent me a couple of rough early sketches which are bursting with personality, and I want to share them with you over the next few days :)

Hit the link to see one of the sketches.

Here's update #6 for the already funded Kickstarter project A House of Many Doors:

Hello, lovely backers!

We’re over 200% funded now, with only 5 days left of the campaign! Please, please, tell any friends who might be interested! Tell your enemies, even - maybe your shared love of pledging to small indie Kickstarters will finally end your bitter, pointless rivalry! Tweet and Facebook and head to Reddit! The time for action is now! 

If you want to post something on social media about HOMD, why not go do that right now and read the rest of this update later - it can wait :)

...

Okay, maybe that worked on at least one person. I have no way of knowing!

I wanted to update you on what I've been doing. As well as working on writing/story stuff that I don’t want to reveal quite yet, I've been continuing to knuckle down on the proc-gen poems. Last week, backer Brian Auriti suggested a system where the game can choose from various word associations for its subject matter. He was being remarkably prescient, because this was already in the plans – and it has now been implemented! And I’m very pleased with the results, as it's really helped the poetry come alive.

This means that when you've written a poem about (for example) vomiting cats, it will be full of descriptions of not just vomiting cats but also “puking felines,” “spewing moggies” and “kittens, yea, that retch eternally into the void.” Beautiful.

In all seriousness, though, the way that these word associations have panned out is very interesting. The game starts by generating a cluster of words in various categories – plural nouns, singular nouns, abstract nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc – and the poem's title is built from these. Then the poem itself is built from various things associated with these words – not just synonyms, but things with similar thematic connotations (so a poem about a “King” and “Death” might start talking about crowns and grief).

The effect is to create a poem which actually has a continuous subject matter and theme woven throughout. The poems still aren’t any good, but that’s okay – I only ever wanted them to be funny, interesting, and completely unique for each player, and that’s certainly the case. At the moment I think there are – just doing a quick calculation – over 157 billion possible poems which can be generated? (Holy shit, that's surprised even me.) [...]

Thanks Eye!

Entering the last 9 days of the campaign for A house of many Doors, we are shown mock-ups of what the game will look like.

Hello, lovely backers! Just 10 days to go, and the campaign is looking very healthy – but let's not get complacent. As always, your Tweeting and Facebooking and Redditing are going to continue to make all the difference - the last 10 days are our chance for one final boost before the finish line! 

For now though, I have some exciting things to share. First, I've been working with the A House of Many Doors art-queen Catherine Unger, and she's sent me a mock-up of what the game will look like when the game's current art (drawn by me) is replaced by her original sprites!

She sent me a few mock-ups, and I had trouble deciding which style was best – so for now, I'm going to share my two favourites with you! Both are surreal, sinister and ominous in exactly the right quantities, which is great because getting that atmosphere right is crucial. I'm going to have to decide between these two over the next few days. 

Option 1

Option 2

(Remember that these are super-early mock-ups. They're first drafts and completely subject to change! The game might not look like this at all. But I think it's a reasonable approximation - and the more funding I get, the more of this we can have!)

For more of Catherine's art, see her Tumblr and website.

A House of Many Doors is already funded - IndieGames has asked Harry Tuffs about his game:

[...]

How will this RPG feel like? Could you give us an example of its prose?

Here's a description of Jacob's Mill, one of the first locations a player can discover:

"Partly a town, and partly a fortress, and partly one vast tavern. A creaking wooden monument built in defiance of the truism that crime doesn't pay.

A shanty village, mostly composed of rusting kinetopedes converted into houses or brothels, surrounds the great building at the centre of the room. Lopsided and absurd, Jacob's Mill is huger than a cathedral, belching smoke and spinning a dozen blades. It bristles like a porcupine with heavy-duty artillery, though you suspect that any one of these great cannons going off would cause the whole edifice to collapse.

The journey to Jacob's Mill is a pilgrimage for thieves, pirates and bandits - here they can sell their misbegotten wares in the open. They can also drink and fight and kill without comment or consequence. In the Mill itself, liquor flows eternal; although Jacob Canker himself is rarely seen in public these days."

What kind of stories and locations should we expect?

As broad, strange and interesting a variety as possible! I don't want you to be doing things in A House of Many Doors that you can do in other games. So you'll be rigging an election, or stealing the corpse of a god, or taking drugs and wandering into a giant sauna-labyrinth in search of steamy, heat-addled enlightenment. The main story involves trying to solve a mystery about the nature of the House itself - so random exploration isn't a distraction from the main quest, it's an absolute necessity.

[...]

Thanks Eye!

The latest Kickstarter update for A house of Many Doors shows us that the game has been greenlit.

YES! Just a quick update today, to share the wonderful news that A House of Many Doors has been Greenlit, and will now be coming to Steam in July 2016!

So many thanks to all of you - for pledging, for voting, for believing in the game, for making this happen. 

If you have time, I'd hugely appreciate anything you can do to spread the word about the Kickstarter. A link here, a Tweet there, a post on a forum - it all helps, more than you might suspect! More funding will go on even more art and music, enhancing the game's look, sound and atmosphere and helping us make something truly fantastic!

I love you all! (Platonically.)

Donald Seburn (The Gamer Scene) has interviewed Harry Tuffs, developer of A House of Many Doors. The game is already funded on Kickstarter with 16 days to go.

[...] After playing through the Alpha it is evident that there is still much to do before the game is finished, and equally evident that Tuffs is the man to do it. His writing is entertaining, the combat is promising, and the atmosphere of the game, which he described as inspired by “that feeling you get when you’re very alone in a big dark house” is established, even at such an early stage of the game. Harry Tuffs took some time out of working on his masterpiece to answer some questions.

The Gamer Scene: The primary protagonist is described as an explorer, a poet and a spy, but little else is stated. Does the protagonist have a story of their own?

Harry Tuffs: On character creation, you will be able to choose several things about your past – for example, you could decide to have been an Orphan who became a member of the Clergy, and who dabbled in the Occult in their spare time. These choices will crop up to haunt you throughout your journey, and will be reflected in your stats.

Apart from that, though, you’ll make your own story. The game assumes that you’re a poet and journalist, and these qualities help push you into exploration. While exploring, you’ll come across all kinds of problems, situations and mysteries, and how you deal with these – and with the characters in your crew, who have their own agendas – will shape the story you make for yourself.

TGS: What made you decide on using poetry, rather than prose, for the character’s journal?

Tuffs:  Poetry is something that I’ve always loved, and written a little of. I wanted to make a game about being a writer, in which coming across something unusual doesn’t need an immediate mechanical benefit because it is its own reward – after all, it’s something you can write about later. And really, the game focuses on journalism as much as poetry, so non-fiction prose is also at the forefront. The one thing the player doesn’t really produce is fiction prose. I don’t know why I made that decision. Probably because a lot of the game is conveyed through prose and I didn’t want to cross the streams. Also, I’m proceedurally generating actual lines of poetry, which would be much harder with prose – because we demand a kind of logic and cohesion from prose which poetry can get away without. [...]

The Kickstarter campaign for A House of Many Doors does not have any stretch goals, for which the developer gives this reason:

“Even if it means I could get more funding, I don't want to over-promise now and disappoint people later. […] I do have plans for what I want to do with extra funds - lots of plans! - but I don't want to reveal them now in case they fall through or turn out to be impractical, leaving me scrambling to fulfil a promise. 

At the end of the day, the game is the important thing, and I know that with the funding we've already raised I can make my complete vision of A House of Many Doors! More funding will just mean I'm making that same thing, even better than before. 

I can promise that any extra funding now will be a massive, massive help and will hugely improve the final game in some way. I may reconsider my stance on stretch goals down the line, but right now I don't want to promise more than that.”

The update also talks about the poem generation of the game and that the game is on Greenlight.

Last week A House of Many Doors reached its goal of 4.000 GBP on Kickstarter. No word on any stretch goals at the moment. Perhaps he didn't think about them yet?

I'm stunned, astounded, gobsmacked. The title says it all – A House of Many Doors has been fully funded in less than 48 hours thanks to YOU. Amazing.

So what next? We still have a whole 28 days to gather more funds, and any extra funding will go towards making the game as good and polished as it can be! We're going to build a House together, and it is going to be truly fearsome to behold.

I'm just beyond grateful. THANK YOU to every single one of you. Now let's see how much further we can go, shall we? 

The kickstarter for A House of Many Doors has started today. The goal is 4.000 Brittish Pound and they are almost halfway there. A digital copy of the game is only 5 GBP, which is somewhat less than $8 if I'm not mistaken.

A House of Many Doors is a 2D exploration RPG coming to PC in July next year. I want to make the kind of game I love to play: a game with narrative depth, compelling characters, and branching, nonlinear storylines.

In A House of Many Doors you are an explorer, poet and spy, traversing and mapping the House – a vast parasite dimension that steals from other worlds.

You explore the House in a clanking train with mechanical legs. You will discover bizarre civilizations, assemble a dysfunctional crew and level up your poetry, while clinging to life and sanity.

There is also a comment from the creator about the differences with Sunless Sea, which was a game he was inspired by.

PCGamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun have covered the game already.

I’ve been waiting for A House of Many Doors [official site] to arrive on Kickstarter for a while now. Developeres Pixel Trickery are asking for £4,000, which will be added to savings and £12,000 of funding from Sunless Sea makers Failbetter Games, it’s an exploration-based RPG set in a bizarre world in which you play a poet/journalist.

The list of influences includes Planescape: Torment and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I want it.

There is a pre-alpha demo and it feels like a pre-alpha demo, which is to say it feels more like a proof of concept than a slice of game. The text on the campaign page is a more convincing sales pitch than what is playable at the moment and I’m fine with that – this is a game, like Sunless Sea and Fallen London, that will be thick with words.

Thanks Eye.

A game I have not heard about before, A House of Many Doors, is coming to Kickstarter next week on September 2nd.

A House of Many Doors is a new game by indie microstudio Pixel Trickery. It’s a 2D exploration RPG which takes inspiration from Sunless Sea, FTL and Planescape: Torment.

Mount an expedition to explore a vast dimension of procedurally-generated nightmare architecture. Assemble a dysfunctional crew, build their morale, uncover their secrets, and try desperately to keep them alive. Travel in a train that walks on mechanical legs, and upgrade it with fearsome armour and weaponry.

“The House is a parasite dimension. It steals from other worlds, and can contain almost anything within its endless walls,” says Harry Tuffs, the writer, coder and founder of Pixel Trickery. “The player’s journey is a process of constant discovery – there’s always something strange around the next corner.”

The game also features real-time combat, a sanity system, and procedurally-generated poetry. Every character and location is illustrated in gorgeous detail by artist Catherine Unger.

A House of Many Doors is coming to Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight on 2nd September 2015. Follow its progress on Twitter or read the devlog for more information.

Found on AverageNobodys.