After 2.5 years of development including a Kickstarter campaign, Greenlight campaign, private alpha, and private beta, Distance is available for everyone on Steam Early Access! The reaction to the current beta build has been phenomenal, and in our first day we somehow found our way into the Top Sellers list! Thanks to everyone that took a moment to help us spread the word yesterday!
Reddit AMA: TODAY at 1pm PST / 4pm EST
Today at 1pm PST / 4pm EST / 10pm CET a few of us will be answering questions about Distance on Reddit! Visit the link below to be redirected to the AMA (ask me anything) page when it goes live at 1pm PST! Until then it'll redirect to the Distance subreddit (r/Distance).
Reddit AMA (1pm PST): http://reddit.survivethedistance.com
Twitch Stream: TODAY at 4pm PST / 7pm EST
Following the Reddit AMA we'll take a break and then we'll be streaming community levels and multiplayer for a while on Twitch! Follow refractstudios on Twitch to be instantly notified when we go live!
Refract Twitch stream (4pm PST): http://twitch.tv/refractstudios
Pre-ordered and looking for your Steam key?
In August, we released the private beta to all Kickstarter backers and anyone that had pre-ordered up until that point. For all of those details you can read that post here.
Long story short, all backers can now use Humble Bundle's key resender to access your download page for DRM-free builds and a Steam key. To be clear, you'll never have to buy the game again as your Steam key will work for forever and we'll continue to update the DRM-free builds!
Use this Humble key resender if you need a key: http://humblebundle.com/resender
Creation of the PAX arcade cabinet (album)
I also finally posted a breakdown of the creation of the arcade cabinet from PAX if you'd like to check it out! This was just the prototype for the two cabinets we'll be building for the two $10,000 tier backers. When we build the next couple I hope to take even more photos/videos.
DIY music-synced arcade racing cabinet: http://imgur.com/gallery/Ut07z
Going Forward
Right now we're incredibly busy with all of the small details of the release like responding to all of the emails/messages we've received, but we're keeping an eye on everyone's feedback for the latest build. There are a lot of directions we could go for our next update so we'll be looking for what sounds exciting and go from there.
Now that the big release is somewhat out of the way I'm excited to write more about actual development (feature/content creation) in future updates again. This has been the craziest ride of our lives, and the train isn't stopping for a while. Since I can't say it enough, thanks as always for the feedback, encouragement, patience, and passion that has fueled this development!
We hope to see you at the Reddit AMA and Twitch streams in just a little bit!
- Jordan (with everyone at Refract)