Hello, stalkers!
It’s only one week until the anniversary of our Early Access launch. We’ll summarize and celebrate it a bit later this month with the delivery of our last Mega Patch, which will be the conclusion of new content pushed to Steam before the final game release.
For now, let’s just pretend that we’re working as always (what’s not necessarily true, because some of us already entered the finalization-craziness-mode where you know, that it’s the last moment to add something to the game before the beta testing starts and the producer tells you “no more changes until new patches”). And this is why the Weekly Report is being written on Saturday because believe me, even chernobylite-driven creatures like we, need to sleep for a few hours per week.
Then what happened last week?
Chernobylite blaster almost done
Yes, soon you’ll be able to shoot the chernobylite-driven energy projectiles into your opponents. As you may see, the gun utilizes the original parts of the Portal Gun that Igor is using constantly throughout his journey. But what are all these crafting workshops for, if you couldn’t turn the portal-opening device into the monster-smashing armament? This is just one of our tributes to classic hard sci-fi books and movies of the 80s, where crazy scientists build the nuclear-powered tools to fight for their salvation. And Igor seems to be a bit crazy, right? Well, that’s not that simple, but you’ll figure this out after you finish playing the main storyline. And most likely you won’t finish it without using this terrific device.
The Heist mission under construction
Believe me, I’m 20 years in the video game development and I have never been working on something so complex as this part of the game. I’m not saying this is the most complicated thing ever designed for a video game. But for sure, with the non-linearity and branching of the previous game sequences, comparing the Heist mission with our previous projects, it’s likely 20 times more sophisticated in design than the whole gameplay loop of Painkiller, 10 times more difficult than the plot of Deadfall Adventures, and at least 5 times more difficult than the design of Get Even endings.
Is it worth all these efforts? We’re very strongly convinced that it is. But it’ll still take quite a time and hard work before we polish it enough to let you enjoy it with the final release of Chernobylite. And before it happens, let’s just focus on facts that we can share without spoiling the juicy story twists.
First of all, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant location is growing every day to let you explore it on your way to the truth. We’ve added many sections of both outdoor and indoor environments, and at top of it, we’ve improved the look of existing objects and added a lot of details to the previously presented Power Plant buildings. Famous Golden Corridors are now having new rooms and windows, letting you see outside of the building, the underground sections are way bigger and more detailed, and many new sub-locations are places all around. To not let you get lost, we’ve taken care of giving you better blueprints of the Power Plant.
No more “no name/no face” stalkers in the Zone
When you were playing the Early Access versions of Chernobylite, for sure you’ve noticed that most of the characters you meet in the Zone look basically the same, differing only in the colors of a jacket or texture of pants. Unless it’s the Star Wars franchise, the existence of the army of clones is never good for the immersive story, but from the game development process point of view, it’s reasonable to use so-called “placeholder” models as long as you have your story designed and you precisely know what kind of character you want to present here or there. However, Chernobylite above all is a story about human beings and their fight for survival and redemption. Our intentions were always the opposite of this cloning frenzy - we wanted to give EVERY character in the game the specific personality, backstory and emotions. And now, getting close to the design and writing conclusion, we could define all the visual qualities of each character, to let you finally know if Anton is more handsome than Olivier, if Little Stalker is cute or if Semonov has any charm in his eyes. Our 3D department is working to deliver all secondary character models and at the same time, our scanning and photo artists work on the depiction of characters faces presented in the game during dialogues. Just yesterday we’ve made the photo shooting sessions to prepare the final material for this.
Last but not least - optimizations, improvements, balancing
But it would be absolutely not fair to say that we’re happily building the remainings of the new content and enjoy the creative process. Most of the team is pushing for countless changes and adjustments to all aspects of design, balance, environments, sounds, optimization, and bug-fixing. Usually, it’s much harder to show here such a spectacular picture as the new weapon or new character renders, but just imagine that every day we’re making literally hundreds of alterations to textures, sound files, animation setups, dialogue lines, and tiny straw of grass placements on the locations. As for examples: last week we’ve done very strong optimization of the audio system, quality improvements for dozens of environmental objects, proofreading of text for more than a thousand dialogue lines, fixing the interface issues, and fine-tuned some of the weapons reload animations. High five for all members of the team doing this!
And that’s all for today. Take care, stalkers, and wait for the cool stuff coming next weeks.
Wojciech Pazdur,
Creative Director