Silk: Wilderness Adventures

Introducing... the Silk Manual and Almanac

It gives me great pleasure to announce that, following the victory of 'verbose and detailed' over 'clear and compact' in a recent Twitter poll, I have completed work on the Silk Manual and Almanac. 

You can find it in the usual place for the Silk manual (it's always available via a link from our Steam page).

If you wanted a clear and compact manual, the old concise reference manual is still at the beginning in just two pages (plus two pages of hints). But if you wanted detail, you'll find the Almanac just what you wanted. Written in the style of the first century BC text Parthian Stations by Isidore of Charax, The Stations of the Silk Road is a traveller's guide to the "Overland Trade Route between the Levant and the Orient."

Check it out!

Kushan Ritegiver

Silk v1.4 Out Now and Other News

It gives me great pleasure to announce that v1.4 of Silk has just shipped on Steam! This is the first non-Beta build... we're not quite releasing the game (controller support for PC is still missing for instance), but this version is the foundation of the Switch release and is very close to Master.

Our grateful thanks to everyone who has contribute to the Beta testing of the game! Truly appreciated.

And in other news:

• I've been running a series of Designer's Notes for the game on my original blog, Only a Game.
  • Part One of the Designer's Notes is called Silk is about... 200AD
  • Part Two is called Silk is about... 1984, and is about the debt I feel as a game designer to Mike Singleton.
• There is a slightly updated manual for the game in the usual place...
• ...and there is also now the The Unofficial 1986 Retro Manual, by DarkBlueMonkey, one of our stalwart Beta Testers. This is a huge document that reimagines the game manual in the style of the 1980s - you have to see it to believe it!

We are on the home straight for the game now - thank you all for your support!

Nomad Guide

Parthian Rider

Han Noble

Prepare for Version 1.3

We're very close to shipping v1.3, which includes a Control Summary on the pause menu and a How To Play tutorial (like the image above) on the start menu, plus a huge number of minor map and script bug fixes. We have also fixed the last of our major bugs, which included one related to the Unity compiler that we're especially proud about tracking down (if you've ever been in a settlement that didn't behave like one, you've fallen prey of this bug!). 

Thanks to everyone sending their thoughts and bug reports to the QA Report link we sent you all with your Steam keys - these all get read, but we can't act on everything reported because we're so late in the project. However, everything we can fix without delaying our Switch launch we have fixed, and every viewpoint raised does get discussed by the team and considered for feasibility.

I'm away next week on a much needed (but badly timed!) vacation, but I'll be back in time for our Switch Master Candidate submission which is getting very close now. Until then, expect v1.3 to appear on Steam sometime in the next day or so - and keep travelling the Silk Road!

Nomad Warrior

New Manual

The Silk manual has been updated, including the map of the seventeen key cities, and an explanation of the goods bar. The latest version of the manual is always available from the Steam page.

Check it out!

Han Noble