Hello everyone – very sorry that it has been busy and long time without news. Hopefully that will change as we get closer to release date (this year). We have some news so read on…
After careful consideration it was decided to pull out comic book parts of the game and release it as standalone series. So, we found very talented artist “Fran Strukar” to draw our comic book. As of today “Joe Kowalski Chronicles #1: The golden boy” comic book is out and that will serve as prologue to “Chapter 1: Murder in a flat”, yes we are renaming prologue to fully featured Chapter 1 – will not be too long but well over 1h of approximate gameplay.
Joe Kowalski Chronicles comic book series will follow game closely and “Joe Kowalski Chronicles: #2 Murder in a flat” comic book will be released some months after Chapter 1 with same story so it doesn’t spoil game. After that there will be prologue to “Chapter 2: An old acquaintance” and so on until final 4th chapter has been released. As said before, all game chapters will feature one crime that will be solvable.
You can grab comic book in English, Croatian, Russian, Polish, Spanish and German language (for now). Price is really small donation – first 500 people can put even under $1 – so really as much as you want. You can find the link in footer below [get comic book] button.
You will also be able to chose where does the donated money go towards.
Digital comic book will be released soon here on official website.
Since crowdfunding and Kickstarter campaign takes too much time to organize with our limited resources, donations page was opened where you can support game development. All donated money will go in improving game. At the moment we only accept Paypal and cryptocurrency donations. We do plan to get some rewards in future for people that donate.
NFTs are digital assets that will serve as premium donations. Each one has unique purpose – i.e. Joe Kowalski Comic book series will get you all comic books for free as long as you hold it in the wallet, and Joe Kowalski Chronicles Complete series will get you all future games and comic books.
Donate and more info on NFTs here:
https://joekowalskichronicles.com/donation
Thank you all for interest in Joe Kowalski Chronicles.
Iron Noir Soft team
Hello friends, we have good-bad news for you.
In effort to provide more and better content in demo we have to postpone release of our it for Q1 or at latest Q2 next year. Good news in all this is you will get more playable content than first anticipated. Also need to mention we’re working in parallel on full “Chapter 1: An old acquaintance” so doing our best with limited resources. If you’re interested subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll be getting opportunity to spin game bit earlier as demo beta tester. Some of features that are getting improved – sound and music, gameplay, story, more scenes…etc.
Initially goal was to have just one playable scene – apartment and intro would be done through series of images and we would be close on that one for 31st December. Now it’s been decided that intro will be playable as well. So what does this exactly mean for our players and what can you expect? There will be more player interactions in intro of the game before you actually start playing detective and solving crime. Grabbing few things there will be giving you advantage on some puzzles towards the end of the game – on actual crime scene. We won’t spoil this new part of the game with screenshots yet but trust in “Iron Noir Soft team” we’re putting up good effort on this and I personally love how some of these scenes look & feel.
Initially this demo was intended to be just that – demo showing off Joe’s playstyle some talk few puzzles and crime was there just for the sake of it. There was no real story outlined yet. This will all change with release of demo and whole story is more developed/dramatic and will fit next chapters. You can expect some timeline changes (if you saw calendar from trailer demo videos), but there will be no new characters added, maybe just mentions of some. Oh one big thing is adding few “Easter eggs” that if you manage to get all will unlock big “Easter egg” after credits end. Full list of “Easter eggs” will be listed on website few weeks after demo is released giving you some time to really earn it yourself.
We’ve been closely working with quite a few talented artists that we don’t want to disclose yet but will be on page when it’s time. Our sound effects/music will improve and will fit theme better. Also taking this time to thank David Feslyian and his “Detective Caution” music (you can download it here with many of his other music) which we used as placeholder for our game background. He agreed for us to use it in the game for free since it is free to play demo. This piece of music is absolutely amazing and really fits the game well, but we want to have our own that we can modify to our needs easily. It’s hard to say which one is better but we need a lot of background music with additional scenes added and custom made music makes more sense.
Just as I was writing this article Iron Noir Soft Ltd. got accepted on Steamworks. So you can expect new page about the game on Steam in following weeks. It was also decided to open up Facebook page, it’s happening in next weeks so please follow us there when you see news.
Thank you for your support!
Iron Noir Soft team
Big news everyone, we found voiceover for Joe’s character.
Nick McCallum, actor, director and writer. He appeared in many movies and well known series like CSI, Dexter, Castle…
His latest work is directing/acting in thriller “Before Memory” (in development). It’s a story about a man suffering from amnesia that teams up with a young girl to assist the FBI in solving the serial murders at the same time struggling with flashbacks that suggest he may be the killer…
His IMDB page:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1712534
Before Memory IMDB page:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4894010
Keep an eye during this/next week there will be another short trailer with some Joe’s voiceovers in it.
Finally our website is up, we’ll keep improving it as we go.
It was important to get this up and running to give interested adventurers some information about game development progress.
Our news section will contain all important stuff regarding game. We will still try to keep other pages on Itch and IndieDB up to date but latest news you will be able to see on news page.
Our about section contains generally stuff about gameplay and game story and characters. You will be able to see this on about page.
Our contact details are here please write us email or even send over a letter like everyone did in the old days, we will read it. You can subscribe to latest news on the game on our newsletter. Page is located here.
Please note site is fresh and if you see some bug just mail it to us and we’ll fix as soon as we can. Email details are on our contact page.
You can view our privacy policy here.
It was, a cold winter night, mid of December 2014. in a small dump in a small bar in middle of nowhere when bunch of buddies that loved playing point and click adventure games opened up few beers together.
After a few of those we decided it would be a good thing to do game. Since we all love detective mysteries and both old and neo noir movies it was only natural to create Joe Kowalski Chronicles – story about hardboiled detective set up around mid last century.
Everyone gave their inputs and stories and all of that was base for demo/prologue which will be out in chapters during future years.
Our CEO then ordered concept art for Joe Kowalski and later based on that “Joe’s 3d Model” which is now active model in “Murder in a flat”.
So even though model is quite obsolete now, we keep it for sentimental purposes. Since in 2014./2015. we all had full time jobs it was hard to make free time do make a game, specially with no previous game development experience but we kept doing it.
During next year it was picking between engines, deciding on key factors like 2D/3D and similar. After we decided on using Unity game engine and 3D it was time to study engine a bit. There was so much to learn for newbies like us and we did most of work on concepts and story.
Next two years it was rough and our initial crew of buddies moved around the world, changing jobs and we didn’t have lot of free time.
Joe got even abandoned for a while – there was almost a full year without anything done on game.
Our CEO couldn’t let Joe disappear so easily after so much was done on the game, so he started again around mid 2017.
During that time new Unity’s were out regularly every so it was upgrade time for Joe.
He went from Unity 4 to Unity 5 and then later to Unity 2018 and we managed to get demo in sort of playable shape in late 2018. And of course we keep improving it.
We like what we are building and hope you guys like it as well.
This year was mostly improving “Joe Kowalski Chronicles: Murder in a flat” and discussing future chapters. At that point two new characters and a new scene was built – we called it “Joe 2020” – prototype scene (or actually two scenes) that will be featured in:
Joe Kowalski Chronicles
Chapter 1: An old acquaintance (subject to change)
In 2020. it was decided to give first clues about the game and two trailers were made and put on Youtube in one month.
We started our Twitter, IndieDB, Itch page, released news on GameBoomers and on AdventureGamers where Joe appeared on front page of the site on 19th April 2020.
We wanted to push ourselves in releasing Murder in a flat by end of 2020 but keep in mind we are small team and some delays in game release are possible. Just watch the news we will put them on time if something like that happens.
We’d love nothing more then to commit our time fully to making Joe Kowalski Chronicles and in future other games.
Our real dream is to make game studio with all the initial crew that was involved in Joe Kowalski Chronicles creation so we can gather together again on few beers and discuss our future chapters and games.
With your support and our effort we can try to make this happen…
Thank you all and keep safe.
