Hi, I'm Patrick, the Director of Tavern Keeper and I wanted to write you a little letter, shortly before release (and sprinkle a few screenshots from the development throughout).
Soon, you can finally get your hands on Tavern Keeper 🍻
(No, NOT this Tavern Keeper - the modern version - This is the earliest screenshot of Tavern Keeper (June 2014), written as a webpage, using placeholder graphics. It looked very, very different.)
For more than 11 years* our small team has laboured over every detail of this game. Every polygon, every sound, every animation, every word and every piece of code was handcrafted with purpose by a human. It is our love letter to simulation management games 💚 and our bid to add a genre-busting entry, combining deep sim systems, a witty magical-audiobook-RPG and a decoration sandbox to the world of sim games.
We hope it will be a delightful experience for you!
*Before I say anything more, I want to clarify that we are not necessarily proud that it has taken us that long (we really wish it hadn’t) but we do feel a sense of fulfilment to have made it this far - I think anyone who has worked on a long project can relate. It’s tempting to say that we could now do this in half the time but this would gloss over the countless prototypes and iterations. For the past 11 years we didn’t just develop the game you get to play, but six different versions of it.
13 years ago
When my brother (and co-founder) Daniel and I released our first game “Game Dev Tycoon” 13 years ago, we celebrated with our family for about 20 minutes before a game-breaking bug was reported 😅. I still recall huddling over a laptop frantically coding and delivering a hot-fix while our parents and girlfriends (now wives) celebrated in the room nearby. Now, 13 years later, we are releasing our second game. Hopefully it will not require a hot-fix within 20 minutes 🤞. We did our darndest to avoid this, but whatever happens, we’ll be ready.
(Early version of Tavern Keeper (April 2015), running in Unity)
This time, we share this moment remotely with our small international team across the globe. And of course, at home with our families and our kids, some of whom are nearly as old as Tavern Keeper! Before the inevitable craze of release day, I want to say a few things.
To the team
First and foremost, thanks to the entire team and their support groups (partners, family and friends) that made this game what it is. For all of us, this is the longest professional project we have ever (and are likely ever to have) been part of. I'm truly grateful that we all somehow, miraculously, stuck with it for so long.
Thanks to every one of you for your countless contributions, patience, talent and determination to make this game a reality.
Thanks also to all the external partners, the sound wizards at Cedar Studios UK, the amazing voice actors, the translators at Lionbridge Games and everyone else contributing to a game like this. You should check out the Credits in-game: we are a very small team but had a lot of help along the way.
It's been an immense privilege to work with everyone on this game.
A special thanks to the private testers, the translation testers, our small but dedicated (and very patient) Patreon members and everyone who is looking forward to Tavern Keeper. Your enthusiasm, your feedback (in particular those amazing Demo reviews 🥹🤗 and all the incredible in-game reports) have given us strength and motivation in this last stretch to Early Access.
Lastly, thanks to every single person who bought our first game “Game Dev Tycoon”, whether that's all the way back at the initial launch or more recently. I'm convinced that any (sane) publisher would have cancelled this project long ago or forced a release early when it definitely wasn't ready. Without you, Tavern Keeper would simply not exist and we could not have developed and self-published it as truly independent developers. We hope to have your support again this time around - we'll definitely need it!
Art Direction test of Tavern Keeper (a very long time ago)
The mists of time are uncertain
It's a supremely odd feeling to be this close to release. We try to keep our expectations neutral, a lot of things could happen and it's never been a more competitive market for games. When Game Dev Tycoon released in 2013 on Steam, we were one of 507 games released that year. This year, 593 games released on Steam just last week(!) with over 10K so far in 10 months. It is a scary time for devs but I feel it’s also never been a better time for PC gamers.
We did our best to make a game that can hopefully compete and, with your help, find its audience. We hope it's a remarkable one-of-a-kind bespoke experience. Fingers crossed indeed💚
(one of the many fun bugs encountered along the way, this patron (incorrectly) used the bar as a bed)
A glimpse of what it took
I thought it might be fun to share a few stats from the development of Tavern Keeper! Here we go:
11.5 years of development
3 engine changes (2D HTML -> 3D HTML -> 3D Unity (and several unity versions)).
~50K commits (individual work packages contributed to the project).
220K lines of handwritten code (~6M characters).
~6K models
2K sprites
11K prefabs
~7K animations
120K words of English text (similar to a large fantasy novel!)
~1.6 million words total given we have translations into 14 more languages.
~900 tooltips
~6K nodes in our campaign / story graphs.
~7K sound files
~4.5K character emotes (sound-bites of the fictional language you hear when you zoom in and observe characters).
~50 music files (over 2 hours of music)
~3K voice-over files (over 10 hours of audio, that's only the Early Access content, lots more to come!)
67 major versions (builds)
6.8 years of combined play-time testing (together with our private testers) saw us serve 1.1M patrons and gain 23K tavern stars and fire 5K staff
100% human made - no generated code, art, sound, voice or anything else.
Some of these stats are more meaningful than others but I'm just listing them to give you a sense as to how big this game is under the hood. It's also worth mentioning that this only counts the things that made it to the end and doesn’t count the many discarded prototypes along the way.
(one of the earliest uses of the Design Mode - we knew immediately this feature was worth investing more time - you can have so much fun with it!)
Onwards to V1.0 we go!
This is a pivotal moment for the game. Finally, we open the doors for you to experience what Tavern Keeper has to offer and invite you to be part of the journey towards the full release (for details please check out our roadmap on the main page). 
(a more recent screenshot of Tavern Keeper)
We believe Early Access will ultimately lead to an even better experience for everyone and we are so ready to see how you engage with the game. Please let us know on the Steam forums, through the in-game tool (press F3) or on our Discord.
Here's to a great journey together. Welcome Inn!
Patrick Klug
Director
Greenheart Games 💚