Hello there! We are happy to announce our participation in the Steam Halloween Sale! This event will last only for 5 days, from October 29 to November 2 . So hurry up to purchase Wait! Life is beautiful! with a 20% discount and celebrate Halloween with us! Have a fa boo lous Hall
Hello there!
We are happy to announce our participation in the Steam Halloween Sale!
This event will last only for 5 days, from October 29 to November 2.
So hurry up to purchase Wait! Life is beautiful! with a 20% discount and celebrate Halloween with us!
Hello there! In this weekly update, we share with you the latest news of the game development. Thanks to your feedback, reviews, and suggestions, we have successfully updated the game build and fixed some minor bugs. For example, all strings in the game are now displayed correctl
Hello there!
In this weekly update, we share with you the latest news of the game development.
Thanks to your feedback, reviews, and suggestions, we have successfully updated the game build and fixed some minor bugs. For example, all strings in the game are now displayed correctly and do not overlap! :)
Besides, to ensure that nothing prevents players from all over the world fully and comfortably enjoy the gameplay, we have added localization of game achievements on Steam in the following languages:
Russian;
French
German;
Japanese;
Simplified Chinese.
Speaking of gaming achievements on Steam. It's been a week since the game release, and we’d love to share with you the statistics from the Top-5 achievements of WLIB players!
What achievements have you managed to earn? Which statistics of the died/saved were achieved? Share your impressions and successes in the comments!
And thank you for being a part of the project and contributing to its improvement. We do appreciate it.
The long journey of WLIB is finally reaching its destination. It wasn't easy, it wasn't fast, but we finally got here! I've tried my best to put all my experience, all my knowledge, and all my heart into this game. Perhaps it is far from being perfect, but it is at least the most
The long journey of WLIB is finally reaching its destination. It wasn't easy, it wasn't fast, but we finally got here!
I've tried my best to put all my experience, all my knowledge, and all my heart into this game. Perhaps it is far from being perfect, but it is at least the most sincere and most honest thing that I could have done. WLIB is all about emotions, about mine, and yours, and I really hope that you will be able to genuinely feel what I tried to say. It is a big step for me and I'm really happy that I have finally completed this journey.
Thank you to everyone who reached this point with me, thanks to everyone who has been here from the beginning, and thank you to everyone who has helped this game see the light of day, and finally thank you to everyone who will play it.
If you have something to say or something to share you are welcome to write to me at [email protected]
Hello everyone! We're one step away from the release of the game! In this weekly progress update we'd like to share with you the most interesting content pieces you might have missed during the preparation phase of Wait! Life is Beautiful! Firstly, you can try out the free Prolog
Hello everyone!
We're one step away from the release of the game! In this weekly progress update we'd like to share with you the most interesting content pieces you might have missed during the preparation phase of Wait! Life is Beautiful!
Firstly, you can try out the free Prologue of Will's story if you hadn't done so already. This short gameplay demo will help you understand what this game is about and how it feels to save lives on the Suicide Bridge.
Here's a short part from the article: Let’s talk about the suicides themselves. The theme, of course, is not for everyone, but it should be for everyone. Public taboo on this topic provokes artificial isolation of those affected by this phenomenon. What to do when someone close to you is thinking about suicide or has already decided to end their life? This is not something you discuss with your friends at a bar over a beer. What if you start having destructive thoughts? What will you do? Most likely, you will withdraw into yourself and be silent. But even if you dare to speak up, will people listen to you? You can easily find a bunch of stories about how people openly declare that they can no longer endure life, and they are not taken seriously. This is the result of just one problem: the excessive taboo of the topic, which gives rise to an acquired fear of the unknown and the lack of social experience / pattern of behavior in such situations.
One of the most powerful pieces of visual content we have is the animated trailer. It sets the tone of the game's narrative and catches everyone's attention in just a few seconds. Try for yourself if you haven't seen it yet! ;)
Lastly, the research with animated gifs we made, plus more about the reasoning of why this game exsits and its connection to the real life.
Thank you for being with us in this journey to making the indiegame about suicides, loss of hope and the attmept to find the meaning of life in helping others!
Hello everyone! In this weekly news post we'd like share with you a couple of small events that happened this week. GameJolt We'd like to boast a bit about the featuring we've on Game Jolt, an indie-oriented website. In just three days our followers count increased x20 times due
Hello everyone!
In this weekly news post we'd like share with you a couple of small events that happened this week.
GameJolt
We'd like to boast a bit about the featuring we've on Game Jolt, an indie-oriented website. In just three days our followers count increased x20 times due to the spotlight on the main page.
Instagram
We finally made a page on Instagram! If you didn't know, we're almost everywhere we can be: from the Russian social network VKontakte (VK.com) to Facebook and Twitter... but only now, at the time of the 13th progress update and two weeks from the game's release, we've finally made it to Instagram!
Hello everyone! Have you played the Prologue of Wait! Life is Beautiful!? This is the most important news we have in this weekly progress update. Make sure you give the demo a try! Follow the link to download the Prologue: Once again, W!LiB! is not just a game. Here's a short int
Hello everyone!
Have you played the Prologue of Wait! Life is Beautiful!?
This is the most important news we have in this weekly progress update. Make sure you give the demo a try! Follow the link to download the Prologue:
Once again, W!LiB! is not just a game. Here's a short intro from the developer that is show to everyone who downloads the demo version:
I started developing Wait! Life is Beautiful! while I was going through one of the roughest periods of my life and perhaps I’m still here precisely because of this game. I never aim to bring you down, I just want to tell you a story about something that may affect everyone. That nearly happened to me, and may you never be that close to the edge. I don’t really hope to save someone or to make any global impact, but I do hope that you will simply enjoy my game and maybe learn something for you.
Suicide is one of the most common causes of death worldwide. If you or someone you know is depressed and/or suffers from suicidal thoughts, the best thing to do is to seek professional help. In such a situation, even the closest people (who do not have the proper training/preparation may - and often will - only make things worse). There are signals that can let you know that your friend or relative is in a crisis and needs help. I hope that maybe Wait! Life is Beautiful! will remind you to be attentive to your loved ones. Even if they seem doing perfectly fine, they may be going through rough times.
We are glad to see that we have 95% positive reviews of the Prologue so far. If you played it and liked it, you can help us spread the word about the game by sending a notification about W!LiB! to one of your favorite streamers/youtubers. Tell them about Wait! Life is Beautiful!, maybe they'll be interested to check out the game ;)
Hello everyone! This week we finally finished the work on the animated trailer and announced the date of the demo version release. The Animated Trailer Do you remember this picture we showed in the Progress Update #8? It's finally finished! We'd posted no long ago, but, in case y
Hello everyone!
This week we finally finished the work on the animated trailer and announced the date of the demo version release.
The Animated Trailer
Do you remember this picture we showed in the Progress Update #8? It's finally finished! We'd posted no long ago, but, in case you've missed it, watch the trailer here.
The Prologue
Get ready to visit the Suicide Bridge yourself! On August 6 we're releasing the demo of W!LiB! in which you will be able to live one day of Will's life and save people that are on the edge.
Learn more and add the Prologue to your wish list here!
Hello everyone! This week we are finally ready to present to you the developer's article we'd been mentioning several times in the previous weekly progress updates. How I developed a game about a theme that is usually silenced. You will not find any shocking content here, but I w
Hello everyone!
This week we are finally ready to present to you the developer's article we'd been mentioning several times in the previous weekly progress updates.
How I developed a game about a theme that is usually silenced.
You will not find any shocking content here, but I want to be clear right away: my game is about suicide.
How did I end up making a game about such a controversial and complex topic? Is it really that difficult? What is the connection between collecting bottles and my game? What mistakes did I make while developing and what was done right? What was my plan, what has come of it, and what should you expect in the future? Those are the sort of things that you can expect me to talk about here.
How I ended up in “suicidal” Gamedev
We were at a bookstore with my mother and on that day we were there to buy school supplies. The weather was hot, I wanted to go home, my mother was on edge, tired after a long working day, and I simply followed her around. The study books were so hideously colorful (who makes kids' books look so sleazy?). The shelves arranged in endless rows that were almost shapeless. We went around in circles while “elevator music” played from the speakers.
I think it was that sort of melody that could be playing in an elevator. But don’t ask me how I know it – in my elevator there is no music. And sometimes there is no light.
When I almost started to decay into mold I could only think about going home, then I saw THE BOOK! I took it in my hands and looked into its soul, it was big, heavy, white, and had a toy car on the front cover. Black letters radiate with magical glow: “How to make a 3D game”. I had been dreaming my whole life about this particular book and at that moment my mental decay stopped. The air became clear and the world gelled, my heartbeat was so loud that I could feel it pulsating in my head muffling the elevator music. I could hardly breathe, but I got a grip and showed the book to my mother explaining that I’d found my dream. My reason to live. My way. Mom looked at the book, then at me, then at the price tag, again at me. Her voice was tired: “No.” We took the notebooks and left.
As you can understand from this small digression, I thought about making games 15 years ago. During these 15 years I did nothing even slightly connected to gamedev, due to various reasons. Then 2016 happened and I made my first step: I downloaded Unity. I drew pixel art for the first time in my life and I had my first experience of clicking somewhere just to make stuff suddenly disappear forever. I ended up watching hours and hours of video guides.
...After creating several things that will never be published and gaining some experience (or it’s better to say, getting an idea of what game design, storytelling, and programming is), I started my search for inspiration to find the theme of 'The Game'.
Gamejam “7 deadly sins”
While surfing the Internet and reading through numerous gamedev forums, I stumbled upon a tiny hackathon that had a catchy topic and thought: this is it! (the “it”). So I worked on the idea of a game about suicide when I saw the title. Well, technically, killing yourself isn’t on the list of deadly sins, but in religious teachings, it guarantees that you would go straight to hell, doesn’t it? So there you go: suicide equals deadly sin, right? Well actually, no. My over-broad interpretation invoked the wrath of one of the event judges. Though wrath is a deadly sin, so I had that going for me!
Short indie film “Lime-blossom tea”
The best fuel for your own creativity is someone else’s art, but don't get me wrong, I do not mean stealing. So, I went to a local short film festival in Saint Petersburg and was deeply impressed. I personally think that it is a tragic loss that the event will never happen again due to some laws that prohibited it. However, it doesn’t stop me from sharing with you the short film that I’ve taken my concept from:
During that time I was also playing this game (Life is Strange) and after mastering my skill of searching through garbage (in-game), I stole an interesting idea from LiS. At some point in the game, a girl wants to jump from a roof, the main hero tries to talk her out of it while having no possibility to rewind time and safely pick proper words. It’s the only scene in the game when you can’t just rewind to choose the right option. You say something wrong – the girl dies.
Personal motives
This point is intentionally the last because I don’t like to talk about it. But you’ve probably already guessed that no one thinks about these themes just for fun. Unfortunately, depression and a suicidal tendency was a part of my life. I had a close friend who took his own life, I too live with depression and have to admit to several suicide attempts.
But it was these things that helped shape my direction, as I thought: why not put the thoughts of self-destruction to good use and create something meaningful out of it?
So when I got the subject, I had a strong desire to do something that would make people talk. There is almost no discussion on this topic in our society which is insane as suicide as a phenomenon is tightly intertwined in our lives. From Anna Karenina from the compulsory literature course at school (Yesenin and Mayakovsky are also here) to a huge number of mass culture figures, news of those suicides already seems to have become the norm. Not to mention the culture of generation Z, which is literally based on depressive humor, nihilism, and the unwillingness to live.
So I’ve got a theme and felt an aching need to make something that people would speak about. To put it short, it hooked me, I felt a burning desire. I knew in advance that it would not be a masterpiece, but even in the worst-case scenario, I could definitely do something really meaningful, and socially significant, if I may.
The first prototype and a couple of tips
To think everything through is almost impossible. The ideas that you have in your mind are surely awesome and adequate, but as soon as you start working on implementing them, you’ll start seeing plenty of technical limits and inconsistencies. Allow me to reiterate this wisdom for the thousandth time for you: prototype! Add in your core mechanics and features, the earlier – the better.
In 2 weeks, I had a barely working prototype with 1.5 suicides and a bunch of grammatical errors in the texts. It was nice that one of the judges mentioned I had an interesting concept. However, others couldn’t launch the game at all, and some even condemned me for incorrectly choosing the topic. Overall, the experience was positive, the gameplay seemed solid, and I, of course, liked it.
The first screenshots of the prototype — minimum details and only basic mechanics
In case you dream about making a game or already are making one, here’s a useful development trick: plan your resources. Especially if you don’t have much. I had absolutely no skills so I’d chosen to do it in pixel art, moreover back when I started it was trendy. The output is okay and if you are not a skillful artist I would recommend that you start with the easiest art style and make it your own by coming up with a few unique features for your game. The best examples of this approach are: The Beginner's Guide, Slander and SCP (legendary games made out of almost nothing). The rule “less means better” is virtually fail-safe. When you have very limited resources you have to be creative as it helps your project stand out. Ironically, limits help makers finish projects, while also maintaining emotional balance and preventing from going minus on production costs.
The concept of the prototype was simple: every day, the main character comes to the bridge that is a suicide hotspot, then he tries to deter people from jumping.
Mini-tip: never underestimate the power of color. If you can find a suitable color scheme, even the most minimalistic game will look SOLID. Here is the article, and you can just use ready-made palettes. The general knowledge about colors will help you in almost everything (you can make a beautiful card to your mother so that she does not drive you out of your home for a longer time ― I can prove it)
The Message, the main character and the name of the game
When I thought about what emotions people should feel from my game, I also realized that I needed a real emotional experience. The focus of everything ― the focus of attention ― was suicide. As it is. And nothing distracting.
The image of the Golden Gate bridge (popular among suicides) immediately came to mind. I didn't want to reference it directly, instead, I wanted to use an aggregated image. It was decided to make a no-name bridge in an average city in the States. I found this info by accident, but many countries have such bridges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bridge.
Then you had to come up with a character that would fit into the basic mechanics (to come to this bridge and save suicidal people). I focused on making sure that his motivation was not too personal, that is, that the motivation of the main character was logical enough to justify his presence on the bridge, but at the same time a little blurry, so that there were no conflicts during the game. As a result, I got a character who did not find himself in life. One day he freaked out from the monotony of life, sent everything to hell, and ended up on the bridge where he saves his first person. Since then, he started visiting the bridge every day and now lives thanks to people’s handouts. Mostly, its gratitude from the families of the rescued, but sometimes people offer him money to fall behind and not interfere with them in deciding what to do with their lives.
Meanwhile, the game title was born - Wait! Life is beautiful! How? First of all, I immediately imagined what it would look like in the store. To make the name stand out and catch your attention just a little bit. It hooks you emotionally.
Secondly, I am a fan of minimalism and functionalism, so "Wait! Life is beautiful! " — not only the name but also the phrase that begins each dialogue. It's also ironic, because, in fact, this is the most popular, but also the most incorrect phrase that can be said to someone in an unstable emotional state. This is a part of the main message of the game as a whole.
So we have smoothly come to what we are all here for: THE MESSAGE. I wanted to do something provocative, but not immoral. In addition, I have formed an opinion about games as media, that is that the most important feature and the nature of games is to allow the player to find meaning on their own. Often it is not the one that you want or think to be present, but some kind of meaning is always going to be found. The best thing a developer can do is to create a playground and give a theme for the player, so that they can do everything without your further participation. It was important for me not to yell about some meaning and not to push my own views, at least in the mechanics (in the game you will not be punished for not saving lives).
Videogames as media ― why make them? If you suddenly want to say something or show something, games are the most accessible and optimal media. Only Twitter is easier than that, by the way, subscribe here: https://twitter.com/Wait_LiB. At the same time, games are also super flexible media.
Here I would name This War of Mine as a counter-example. Although the game turned out to be worthy, and it won the hearts of many players, my experience with it was very monotonous. Yes, this was the idea ― to show the horrors of war. But when everything screams the same idea, and every choice is built on Escobar's axiom (it’s a Russian meme that means: “when all options are shit”), what ideas should I supplement, ponder about or understand? War is bad. Period.
Let’s talk about the suicides themselves. The theme, of course, is not for everyone, but it should be for everyone. Public taboo on this topic provokes artificial isolation of those affected by this phenomenon. What to do when someone close to you is thinking about suicide or has already decided to end their life? This is not something you discuss with your friends at a bar over a beer. What if you start having destructive thoughts? What will you do? Most likely, you will withdraw into yourself and be silent. But even if you dare to speak up, will people listen to you? You can easily find a bunch of stories about how people openly declare that they can no longer endure life, and they are not taken seriously. This is the result of just one problem: the excessive taboo of the topic, which gives rise to an acquired fear of the unknown and the lack of social experience / pattern of behavior in such situations.
At first it seems that everything is very simple. Well, that person is going through a rough patch right now. Say good things and they'll get better; say bad things and they'll get worse. That’s it. According to this scheme, the dialogues would look not only monotonous, but also super boring. There would be absolutely no effect. So how do I solve this? I decided that I should add a few variables to the equation: first, the people on the bridge are obviously nervous and most likely unstable, so you need to talk to them more on the principle of "do no harm". I also added a few non-obvious outcomes, so that the player does not relax in the dialogues. Some absurd dialogue choices can lead to salvation and some to death. Most cases will have to be thought through separately. Second guess conclusions won’t work.
As a small feature, I added the option to choose to just move away and not save a person if you do not want to.
Here is a small game designer digression:
I love the keyboard as an interface for interacting with the game (I even made a whole game just about it). Of course, in shooters, you do not reassign the buttons. The experience of playing shooters is propagated from generation to generation through DNA, and fingers instinctively lay on WASD.
But when there’s something interesting with the buttons to do, I do it. There is an option in which you just allow the suicide to jump, without entering into a dialogue. To do it, you use the "DELETE" button (it was intentional, if you know what I mean).
As for the gameplay in general, I wanted to make it casual enough that running the game doesn't seem like doing some work, essentially the game shouldn’t require huge mental investments. You may have noticed the effect that you don't want to launch The Witcher, because you feel that you need to collect your thoughts and play hard for an hour or two. By the way, this is why we see the rise of session media (as an example, games of the match-3 genre and popular TV series). In a short session, the brain has time to adapt to the rules, whether it is the game mechanics, the specifics of the characters or an intriguing beginning of a new episode of the series, less effort is required. Аfter all, we live in the era of ADHD being a norm, so every extra effort and every extra minute that you force your brain to do something that it does not like (except for simple Skinner boxes) naturally causes rejection and a feeling of fatigue. That's why our brain loves conditionally infinite content (in the case of competitive games) or just very long content, like a TV series, because it requires little effort for a win-win strategy.
I tried to solve this problem as best I could. The gameplay starts immediately from the very beginning and requires minimal effort. The only thing is that there is quite a lot of text, but I tried to break it up in the format of a messenger chat (1-2 sentences at most). I did everything I could to make the gameplay go smoothly and I hope it worked.
One of the first polished backgrounds.
The first creativity crisis
So far, the only place where I'd shown my game was a themed gamedev bar. That was an event where you could show your game and to observe others. We were even given a monitor in a small hall! We split up with friends, I showed the game to those who were in that hall with the screen, pulling people one by one while my friend were showing it on the big screen. There was no negativity and people more or less liked my project. I felt elated, watching how people experienced different emotions when they failed to save their first suicide. In the end, everyone was interested and pleased, we drank rum cola, I defeated some personal complexes and over all, it was a very useful experience.
And then... the crisis hit. Creativity crisis. From programming and drawing, I came to writing dialogues. I honestly thought it would be easy. I mean, you just sit down and start writing it, what's the difficulty? It must be no harder than speaking, right?
So, about mistakes that could have been avoided. I really didn’t foresee the hardship of writing and, as a result, I spent too much time and effort on it. I almost abandoned the project at that point. To sit down and write a few more lines seemed like agony. At the same time, at the end of each day, you look at everything that was written with blood and sweat, and it turns out to be complete nonsense.
For dialogues, I searched through an awful lot of content on the topic. Suicide line memos, real people's stories, news reports, articles, etc., etc. I tried to reproduce this in dialogues as realistically as possible. That said, I do not claim to have the dialogues in the game of absolute similarity to the reality of life. I urge you not to consider the game as a guide for communicating with people in difficult situations.
I had to come up with a lot of little stories and then come up with development for them. I followed this format so that I didn't have to strain myself by studying the whole life story of the person who came to the bridge. (I don’t want the players to fall asleep). Therefore, I wrote in a limited and concise form, varying it a little for every character. The biggest difficulty was to make the main character's responses and reactions different. As a result, writing turned into a torment and I was overtaken by procrastination.... And at some point, I actually abandoned the game which was almost completely finished. Obviously, I needed a distraction, so I made a small game project.
After the release of the first game(which was supposed to be the second) and ONE positive review, I got a second breath. How little was required, huh?
At the same time, I found the strength to continue development of “Wait! Life is Beautiful!”. I polished it a little here and there, updated the release date, and made a little cover art...
Then, suddenly I got contacted by a publisher. Btw, my publisher is a Russian company GameNet. They just recently started publishing indies and W!LiB is one of the first games in their roster. It's funny that initially the publisher didn't know that I was from Russia and we agreed on the first details in English.
To be honest, Russian game dev causes very mixed emotions, although it can most likely be called successful. You probably think that we are in the deepest decline, although this is absolutely not true: every year a lot of quite popular games are born (especially in the world of post-indieapocalypse) Black Book collected 143k dollars ― even with the deduction of the kickstarter share, this is more than an impressive budget for an indie. Not to mention Stoneshard, and one of my favorites – Jet Lancer and Please, Don't Touch Anything. These are all products of very, very high quality. Make Russian gamedev great again!
But many things are also quite bad. Here, as they say, there is always the other side of the coin.
On one hand, there is the money-choking mobile industry, where there are a lot of successful studios, but at the same time, how many developers already have a nervous tick from the MATCH-3 genre?
On the other hand, we have several large studios, but, mostly, they are engaged in outsourcing or mobile games (probably with the exception of the recently arrived LARIAN with an office in Saint-Petersburg and World of Tanks). Why we don't have our own AAA projects is hard to say. It is clear that you can launch another hyper casual project and close the mortgage on your second palace in a day, but I think a strong sensational AAA would help the prestige of the entire game development industry in Russia.
Of course, without the language barrier, the cooperation is quite brisk. It is too early to draw conclusions, but, in general, we do not have any negative moments yet. The team I work with is even more excited about the game than I am, which, of course, warms my heart. There is only one point: the game is still considered risky because of the theme, it is difficult to uniquely determine its genre. It is also not easy to find relevant competitors for analysis. Which, of course, is great for me as a game designer, but it can negatively affect sales.
In any case, with the publisher, the game has a thousand times more opportunities to find its place in the wild world of indie games.
Now we are finally on the finishing line to release and there is very little time left before the game sees the light of day. By the way, it was very nice to find that even before the launch of any activities, several people wrote to me in steam and on Twitter that they were already very much waiting for the release. So far, I think it has turned out to be a strong project, and whether it will find its place in the world is not for me to decide.
There will be a summary of the results after the release, I hope-good results. Thank you, friends, if you have finished reading it.
Unobtrusive link to the game's Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/680830/Wait_Life_is_beautiful/
And our Twitter — https://twitter.com/Wait_LiB
We hope you liked the article written by the W!LiB! developer!
Hello everyone! In this week's progress update we'd like to share with you another piece of the research we've done. While we continue working on the infographic, let's take a look at the data we already have more in depth. Differences in suicide among men and women In case you'v
Hello everyone!
In this week's progress update we'd like to share with you another piece of the research we've done. While we continue working on the infographic, let's take a look at the data we already have more in depth.
Differences in suicide among men and women
In case you've missed it in the last week's progress update, there are more suicide attempts made by women than by men. Although, men’s attempts are more often “successful”. This GIF represents the stats from the USA, taken from 2016.
Here's info on gender in suicide death rate from Europe, also taken from 2016. As you can see, there is a small difference in proportion comparing to the USA, but the general correlation is still true according to this data. Males are much more likely to take their own lives.
In Russia males death is more than 80%.
The differences in attempts and completed suicides in women have led many people to believe that suicide attempts in women are a way of getting attention rather than a real risk. This is far from true. All suicide attempts need to be taken seriously.
Why do you think there is such a paradox? One of the most probable reasons for the difference between suicide attempts and completed suicides between men and women is the method of suicide used. Men tend to choose violent and lethal methods, such as firearms, hanging, and asphyxiation. Women are more likely to overdose on medications or drugs.
Cause-specific mortality
Suicide is among the leading causes of death in people among 15-29 y.o. globally.
P.S.: Suicide is one of the most common causes of death worldwide. If you or someone you know is depressed and suffering from suicidal thoughts, the best you can do is seek professional help. In such a situation, even the closest people without proper skills can only make things worse.
It's often difficult to imagine what led a close person to commit suicide. Most people make the decision to attempt suicide impulsively. there may have been no clear warning signs. It's often an act made during a storm of strong emotions and life stresses rather than after careful consideration. Be attentive to people around you.
Hello everyone! In this week's progress update we'd like to share with you another part of our upcoming dev article. This time we’re looking at pixel art and we have two pieces of advice for those who plan to make a game one day. This material is already finished in Russian, so w
Hello everyone!
In this week's progress update we'd like to share with you another part of our upcoming dev article. This time we’re looking at pixel art and we have two pieces of advice for those who plan to make a game one day. This material is already finished in Russian, so we won’t make you wait for too long before you can read it yourself.
Infographic
But first, here’s an infographic that we’re working on. Did you know that there are more suicide attempts made by women than by men? More interestingly, men’s attempts are more often “successful”. This GIF was made using Unity and represents the stats from the USA, taken from 2016.
Animated trailer
One other thing that we mentioned in the previous progress reports is the animated trailer. Want to take a look at the color palette and the characters? Here you have it!
Article
This week’s article is about the making of Wait! Life is Beautiful! The developer shares his ideas about game development and gives some useful advice:
To think everything through is almost impossible. The ideas that you have in your mind are surely awesome and adequate, but as soon as you start working on implementing them, you’ll start seeing plenty of technical limits and inconsistencies. Allow me to reiterate this wisdom for the thousandth time for you: prototype! Add in your core mechanics and features, the earlier – the better.
In case you dream about making a game or already are making one, here’s a useful development trick: plan your resources. Especially if you don’t have much. I had absolutely no skills so I’d chosen to do it in pixel art, moreover back when I started it was trendy. The output is okay and if you are not a skillful artist I would recommend that you start with the easiest art style and make it your own by coming up with a few unique features for your game. The best examples of this approach are: The Beginner's Guide, Slander and SCP (legendary games made out of almost nothing). The rule “less means better” is virtually fail-safe. When you have very limited resources you have to be creative as it helps your project stand out. Ironically, limits help makers finish projects, while also maintaining emotional balance and preventing from going minus on production costs.
Hello everyone! In this week's progress update we'd like to share with you another part of the article that was mentioned before in these regular progress reports. This time a part about the inspiration and references for Wait! Life is Beautiful! ...After creating several things
Hello everyone!
In this week's progress update we'd like to share with you another part of the article that was mentioned before in these regular progress reports. This time a part about the inspiration and references for Wait! Life is Beautiful!
...After creating several things that will never be published and gaining some experience (or it’s better to say, getting an idea of what game design, storytelling, and programming is), I started my search for inspiration to find the theme of 'The Game'.
Gamejam “7 deadly sins”
While surfing the Internet and reading through numerous gamedev forums, I stumbled upon a tiny hackathon that had a catchy topic and thought: this is it! (the “it” - http://forum.hellroom.ru/index.php?topic=24029.0). So I worked on the idea of a game about suicide when I saw the title. Well, technically, killing yourself isn’t on the list of deadly sins, but in religious teachings, it guarantees that you would go straight to hell, doesn’t it? So there you go: suicide equals deadly sin, right? Well actually, no. My over-broad interpretation invoked the wrath of one of the event judges. Though wrath is a deadly sin, so I had that going for me!
Short indie film “Lime-blossom tea”
The best fuel for your own creativity is someone else’s art, but don't get me wrong, I do not mean stealing. So, I went to a local short film festival in Saint Petersburg and was deeply impressed. I personally think that it is a tragic loss that the event will never happen again due to some laws that prohibited it. However, it doesn’t stop me from sharing with you the short film that I’ve taken my concept from:
During that time I was also playing this game (Life is Strange) and after mastering my skill of searching through garbage (in-game), I stole an interesting idea from LiS. At some point in the game, a girl wants to jump from a roof, the main hero tries to talk her out of it while having no possibility to rewind time and safely pick proper words. It’s the only scene in the game when you can’t just rewind to choose the right option. You say something wrong – the girl dies.
Personal motives
This point is intentionally the last because I don’t like to talk about it. But you’ve probably already guessed that no one thinks about these themes just for fun. Unfortunately, depression and a suicidal tendency was a part of my life. I had a close friend who took his own life, I too live with depression and have to admit to several suicide attempts.
But it was these things that helped shape my direction, as I thought: why not put the thoughts of self-destruction to good use and create something meaningful out of it?
Hello everyone! This week we’d like to share what we have been working on and give you some fun work-in-progress teasers. If you follow us on our social media pages, you've probably seen some of these, but we're freshening things up with some new content, as well as some explanat
Hello everyone!
This week we’d like to share what we have been working on and give you some fun work-in-progress teasers. If you follow us on our social media pages, you've probably seen some of these, but we're freshening things up with some new content, as well as some explanations on what you're seeing!
Animated trailer
First of all, let us start with the animated trailer's storyboard:
In this trailer, we aim to dive deep into the soul of the game’s protagonist (Will) to show you his feelings and thoughts. We started work on this quite a while ago, so you can look forward to seeing more in the near future. If you’d like to get an idea of what direction we are working towards, our main inspiration was this video: https://vimeo.com/267392220
Demo
We’ve already introduced you to several characters that you’ll find in the game. Here’s the police officer who’s very suspicious about Will’s endeavor on the Suicide Bridge.
This gif is taken from the early on in the game, so here the policeman simply warns Will, then leaves.
But what if the deaths continue and Will is almost always the last person to see them alive?
Looking to the future
Also as it was mentioned in the previous weekly update, we’re working on an article that interviews the developer. That is still being worked on, but stay tuned as it is shaping up to have a lot of interesting information in it!
Hello everyone! We know that you’re hungry for more details about our game, so how about we do a review of what we’ve been doing in the last few weeks and also tease you with some previously unseen content? First of all, our main priority during the last month was localization (R
Hello everyone!
We know that you’re hungry for more details about our game, so how about we do a review of what we’ve been doing in the last few weeks and also tease you with some previously unseen content?
First of all, our main priority during the last month was localization (RU and EN) and the things that we wrote about in the previous progress updates. This would have been things like the gameplay trailer and our brand new website. What’s been hidden from your sight until now is that a lot of work has been done on fixing small bugs in the game, and we’ve been hard at work preparing a new animated trailer! This new video is going to be a piece of art, believe us - we’ve even invited a wonderfully talented artist to work on it.
And, of course, the most important asset that we continuously enhance the Wait! Life is Beautiful! demo. This free demo of our game is planned to be released at the end of next month, roughly 20-ish of July, until then the developer is working on the endings of the game, here’s a teaser of one of them!
Can you guess what’s going on here?
We’ve been keeping you updated about the week-to-week development news, but we’ve never told you about how it all began. One last piece of work we’re busy with is an article telling more about the idea of the game and how the project started.
Here’s a preview from the development insight material we are working on. The amount of information we wanted to share with you is pretty big so we decided to split it into several separate articles. Besides that, it still requires some more work to really finish up. We’ll invite you to read the full text later, but for now, here are the first few lines of the first article:
“You will not find any shocking content here, but I want to be clear right away: my game is about suicide.
How did I end up making a game about such a controversial and complex topic? Is it really that difficult? What is the connection between collecting bottles and my game? What mistakes did I make while developing and what was done right? What was my plan, what has come of it, and what should you expect in the future?”
Well, you'll need to come back in a couple of weeks because we’ll be answering all of these questions then! ;)
Hello everyone! Last week we teased you with a screenshot of our website and showed you a WIP GIF from the gameplay trailer. Now we’d like to present to you the final versions of both projects! You might wonder: “Why is this important? Every game has a trailer and/or a website. W
Hello everyone!
Last week we teased you with a screenshot of our website and showed you a WIP GIF from the gameplay trailer. Now we’d like to present to you the final versions of both projects!
You might wonder: “Why is this important? Every game has a trailer and/or a website. Why making such big of a deal of it and writing about it for several weeks?” From the point of view of a game developer, these are the assets that will be used during the next several months to introduce a game to a new audience. Imagine you’ve spent months of work on a project, and when it comes to an end, you don’t have the means to show it to people for whom it was designed - and its release goes unnoticed. The website and the trailer will be our words to tell a story of Will and his quest to save lives on the Suicide Bridge.
With the help of the website and the trailer, we will be able to reach potential players and present to them Wait! Life is Beautiful! in a concise manner. That’s why finishing the trailer and the website is such an important milestone for us – we will need these assets later.
We decided to tell more about it to you, a person who regularly checks up on our progress every Friday ;)
Next week we will go more in-depth and prepare a special article providing insight into the development.
Hello everyone! It’s Friday, which means that it is time for our weekly progress update, giving you an insight into what we’ve been doing. For this week’s edition, we’re looking at what we are currently working on. Naturally, the game is getting a lot of attention, with a special
Hello everyone!
It’s Friday, which means that it is time for our weekly progress update, giving you an insight into what we’ve been doing.
For this week’s edition, we’re looking at what we are currently working on. Naturally, the game is getting a lot of attention, with a special focus on the game text, but we’re also busy outside of the game itself. We have two major projects that we are working on.
Website
The first is a special website for Wait! Life is Beautiful! Though we’re not done just yet, we’ve got a teaser image to show you what the page looks like.
Game Trailer
Making a trailer for a game like ours is a unique experience, with challenges coming from both the sensitive genre and the issue of the game being heavily reliant on the in-game story and texts.
We did want to have the trailer ready for today, however in the end we decided that we needed a bit more time to make things perfect - after all we did not want to rush this one.
However, we do have a short teaser for you to enjoy!
And that’s it for this week. This was a rather short report, but we hope that you enjoy reading about what we are doing. Don’t forget the important news from last week - we’ll have a special demo for Wait! Life is Beautiful! scheduled for mid-July this year.
Hello everyone! Here's a short update on what we are planning for the coming month. We're finishing the demo of Wait!Life is Beautiful, and you will soon be able to play it yourself. English localization is almost done; just a few tricky places are left to tackle. We also need to
Hello everyone!
Here's a short update on what we are planning for the coming month. We're finishing the demo of Wait!Life is Beautiful, and you will soon be able to play it yourself. English localization is almost done; just a few tricky places are left to tackle. We also need to give the game a round of QA tests to ensure it runs smoothly before giving it to you.
That said, we have some exciting news for you:
We are planning to release a demo of Wait! Life is Beautiful! mid-July.
In the W!LiB! demo you will:
Live through one day of Will’s life after he decides that he needs something more from his life.
Talk to those that visit the suicide bridge. Sometimes Will manages to talk them out, and sometimes he doesn't.
Get introduced to the main characters of the story.
And in the end, you will see the results of your decisions.
But before you can get your hands on W!LiB!, there will be some more news from us next week.
We have some exciting things to share with you, so stay tuned!
We set out to create this game for two main reasons. The first is that we wanted to bring a voice to this mostly unspoken part of life, and secondly to give those that are blessed with never having to deal with these thoughts a glimpse into what it is like to live with them. That
We set out to create this game for two main reasons. The first is that we wanted to bring a voice to this mostly unspoken part of life, and secondly to give those that are blessed with never having to deal with these thoughts a glimpse into what it is like to live with them.
That said, it is important to know that ultimately Wait! Life is Beautiful! is still a game, and not a guide on how to handle difficult life situations.
Though we do our best to base the text and encounters in the game around our personal experiences, the game's dialogue is not a guide on how to communicate with people in a crisis.
Remember, every being is unique. What works for you and me, or what we personally do to cope with difficult situations, may not work for your fellow person.
So in the end, all events and characters in the game are fictional, please do not try to project the game onto real life.
What's more, the goal of W!LIB! (game goal) is actually not to save everyone, the goal is to survive, and get a glimpse into how even those that are out there helping others can fall into depression, anxiety, and ultimately suicide.
If you know someone that helps others, don't ignore them, or automatically think that they are ok, be sure to let them know that they are valued and that as much as they are there for others, others can be there for them.
P.S.: Suicide is one of the most common causes of death worldwide. If you or someone you know is depressed and suffering from suicidal thoughts, the best you can do is seek professional help. In such a situation, even the closest people without proper skills may make things worse, even if they have the best intentions.
Hello there everyone, It’s been quite a while since we last wrote here, but that’s because we’ve been really busy securing the future of Wait! Life is Beautiful!. Now that the dust has settled, we’re happy to go into a bit of detail into what has been going on. A Publisher Picks
Hello there everyone,
It’s been quite a while since we last wrote here, but that’s because we’ve been really busy securing the future of Wait! Life is Beautiful!. Now that the dust has settled, we’re happy to go into a bit of detail into what has been going on.
A Publisher Picks up W!LIB!
We are very pleased to announce that GameNet has picked up our game and will be our publisher. By teaming up with them, we have been able to secure a lot more opportunities for our game such as:
Translation to multiple languages
A full polish of our existing languages (we know that some of you have pointed out that our English was not always the best).
Lots of help with the QA side of things, finding and squashing bugs
Some very skilled hands to help us with the text in the game (more on this below).
If you have any concerns about this partnership, we’d like to assure you that this is a hugely positive step forward for us.
Other than simply helping us with the quality of the game, GameNet have proven to be extremely understanding, and even enthusiastic, about the genre that Wait! Life is Beautiful! is in, and are fully supportive of our efforts to bring awareness to this traditionally-less-spoken about genre. When you are dealing with sensitive topics like we are, it is vital that everyone that you work with really understands it.
New Release Date
The only downside to this all is that we had to push our release date back. Instead of launching in February like we wanted to, we are now working towards a launch in August 2020.
As we mentioned earlier, this extra time will allow us to sort out any lingering issues/bugs, translate the game to multiple languages, and really bring the written aspect (texts) in our game to the best level of quality possible.
Looking Forward
Now that we have settled with GameNet we will be doing our best to be a lot more active, engaging with you (our community) where you may be.
Thank you all for your patience, we now have a bright future and are looking forward to seeing our work come to fruition!
UPD. The release of W!LiB! is delayed until August 2020 Hello. Happy to announce - Wait! Life is beautiful! Will be released on Feb 20 2020 ! Few things still have to be done but I feel confident about finishing them! Wow, it's really happening. Quite excited about it (: Also an
UPD. The release of W!LiB! is delayed until August 2020
Hello.
Happy to announce - Wait! Life is beautiful! Will be released on Feb 20 2020!
Few things still have to be done but I feel confident about finishing them! Wow, it's really happening. Quite excited about it (:
Also an important question about localization. Now planned only eng and rus. But If you want my game on your language - contact me (email or twitter there links on game page)
