Hey everyone! My name is Alex Nichiporchik, I’m the producer of games like SpeedRunners, Party Hard, Punch Club, and Hello Neighbor. Today I bring some good news to the backers of Pathologic. I’ll be producing the game from tinyBuild’s side, as we’ve partnered up with Ice-Pick Lodge to help finish this gem.
This has been a while in the making, and we’re finally ready to take the curtain off from where Pathologic is heading as a franchise, and what this means for the game you’ve Kickstarted.
First, the drill-down:
- What we referred to as Pathologic is now Pathologic 2 to avoid confusion between the original game, Pathologic Classic HD, The Marble Nest, Mor. Utopia, and so on
- tinyBuild partnered up with Ice-Pick Lodge to bring Pathologic 2 to market in 2018
- All original pledges are still in effect
- We’re changing the development methodology to become more open, similar to what tinyBuild did with Hello Neighbor — allowing in-development access to game builds to fans who support the development
Full game is coming in 2018, alphas are coming sooner
In the good old days of game development, typically you’d get a publishing deal in place — receive funding from a publisher, and lock yourselves in for a couple of years until you ship something. Repeat every few years. It’s clear this work method no longer works, not for us or for the industry as a whole. Releasing The Marble Nest gave Ice-Pick Lodge an insane amount of feedback, and after seeing what tinyBuild was able to achieve while being completely open with their fans about games like Party Hard, SpeedRunners, and Hello Neighbor, it was clear the dev process needed a change.
To be clear: tinyBuild is coming on board to help produce Pathologic 2, acting as a publishing partner.
Being Kickstarter backers, soon you will receive the first Alpha build of Pathologic 2. The build will have a slightly smaller town and a few systems in place to demonstrate the atmosphere and some of the upcoming gameplay mechanics. We will gather feedback from fans, and adjust the direction of development based on this feedback.
In the old structure, we would spend months on getting complicated systems in place, and hope everything comes together in the end.
Today we spend shorter sprints on accomplishing smaller tasks, and playtest what we’ve accomplished — figuring out if the direction is still the right one. This empowered us to come up with a few fun mechanics that’ll be playable this weekend at PAXWest in Seattle.
If the reception of the PAXWest demo is positive, that’ll be the first alpha we release to you guys. Stay tuned.
Take a look at the PAXWest demo in action. This is all live gameplay.
Thank you for following the development of Pathologic 2.
Alex Nichiporchik
CEO @tinyBuild