Deliver Us the Moon developers need help delivering next games

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Announcements by Jack Allin
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Dutch developer KeokeN Interactive reveals five new games in hopes of attracting necessary support

Normally developers announce just one game at a time, relatively certain of completing it or securing the means to do so. Dutch developer KeokeN Interactive has decided to go the opposite route, revealing its entire slate of five new games through a public appeal video in the hopes that it will help attract publisher and/or investor interest.

If the name doesn't ring a bell, KeokeN Interactive is an independent game developer founded in 2013 by brothers Koen and Paul Deetman, who went on to create Deliver Us the Moon and Deliver Us Mars, both of which were critically well-received but not commercially successful enough to finance the next wave of games on their own.

Fans of those sci-fi titles will be pleased to hear that there are several more planned for the series, if the needed support to finance them can be arranged. One is Deliver Us the Moon VR, a fairly self-explanatory conversion of the 2019 original into the virtual reality space to increase immersion and create a better sense for players that they're actually astronauts exploring the lunar surface. The spinoff adventure Deliver Us the Moon: Huygens takes place during the Blackout and promises an "unsettling survival experience" that incorporates player choice in various ways. Similarly expanding player agency will be the next full-fledged franchise sequel, Deliver Us Home. In casting players as a solitary astronaut trying to return home, the game will give players more control of their own destiny, whether by upgrading spacesuit functionality, unlocking new skills, crafting, or offering more variety in terms of where to go and how to approach obstacles, giving the experience more of a roleplaying element than its predecessors.

The two other games revealed in KeokeN's video look interesting too, though perhaps of less interest to those who shy away from mixing action with their adventures. We Are Human will be a "philosophical thriller that emphasizes mind-bending combat and traversal," while the co-op multiplayer Expeditions pairs its rich futuristic narrative set on Pangaea Proxima with frenetic "Soulslike top-down shooter" gameplay.

According to Koen and Paul, they have pitched these five games more than two hundred times to over forty different publishers, and reaching out to the community this way is to them a "last resort." They aren't asking for money, but rather for the gaming community to rally behind them through social media and other online support to show publishers that there's widespread interest in seeing them completed. The Deetman brothers were also at the Game Developers Conference this past week, where hopefully fruitful connections were made to see more great sci-fi adventures delivered in the coming years.