Hello Stalkers!
And here we are. 150 weeks ago the first Weekly Report appeared. Every week we informed you about the progress of work on Chernobylite, when it was released in Early Access. We presented you the backstage of the game's development, the secrets of the development of games in general, as well as numerous curiosities related to Chernobyl. Yes, there's been a lot going on, and we've got some exciting weeks ahead of us. But before we start again, let's take a step forward again, let's take a little trip back in time and see how other milestones from 150 weeks ago fared.
Of course, we have to start with Report #1, which was released on October 24, 2019 - exactly one week after the game's Early Access release. “It's been a long week. Likely the most busy and the most fruitful time in the whole project's history. We've finally released the Early Access of Chernobylite on Steam and GOG and it was just the beginning of the next big stage for the project” - these were the first sentences.
Looking back, this post may not have been visually stunning (did you see that graphic in the header?), but it contained all the necessary information: info about the release, about upcoming patches, as well as upcoming plans for new content, reports and updates to fix this and that. It went pretty well at first.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1016800/view/1663444076996026600
Already from the second entry we started messing around with text formatting and information transfer styles, until we finally reached the point where we are today :) An example of the accumulation of all the changes introduced step by step is report #25, which we devoted entirely to a very important system in our game stealth. Here's an interesting fact: in the gifs you can see the differences between EA and the current version of the game in the way of "taking down" enemies silently. This is just one of many examples showing how deep changes the game has undergone. Even with such small mechanics.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1016800/view/2394174043712874853
Report #50 is also a breakthrough. For a long time, we wanted to provide you with even more interesting content in Reports than what has been available so far, and finally the opportunity arose. We launched a mini-series of conversations with members of our team who talked about their experiences working on Chernobylite. The first one was Joanna, our Tatyana, who talked about what the photo sessions in Chernobyl looked like. Let's add: sessions conducted in extreme conditions due to the prevailing cold. But there were also interesting and funny anecdotes. You liked that kind of posts and it made us very happy. Who knows, maybe we'll come back to this series before the release of Season 4 ;)
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1016800/view/2905348457012939665
"The Heists". The last mission in the game, the most exciting and most requested. Seriously, you've been asking us questions for months about when we're finally going to add it to the game. And we consistently answered: everything in due time. (A little note for those who just joined us: the mission was not available for a long time during EA because we wanted to polish it, and we didn't want to spoil the ending).
However, we didn't want to leave you in constant uncertainty - we decided to show something more than scraps to whet your appetite a bit, as well as calm down the more impatient. That's why in Report #75 we presented to you the main assumptions of the last mission: team selection, ways to complete individual fragments, and what impact the choices we make have.
Patience finally paid off and after some time we released a powerful snippet of the mission, which was a foretaste of what we had in store for you at launch.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1016800/view/3042725371156667779
A few months have passed since the release of the full version of Chernobylite on PC, and in the 100th report (anniversary!) we continue to reach our archives in search of interesting stories. We found a lot of material documenting our recent trips to Chernobyl, where we collected photos and videos needed to recreate this area in our game. Fun fact: half of these photos are from the site of unfinished cooling towers. You can see our sound engineers trying to catch the "sounds of silence". We used almost all the audio materials soon after on the Cooling Towers map, which you can play today as much as you want :)
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1016800/view/3123806002403213849
With Report #125, we continue the little mission we started: we explain the genesis of Chernobylite and the evolution of all core design elements. In this episode we talk about the pros and cons of the open world and why we didn't go for it. This decision has its design and technical reasons, which is why we recommend reading it to those who would like to create such games in the future. But it's not like we're cutting ourselves off from these types of solutions - maybe someday we'll come back to the idea of an open-world game. Who knows, who knows…
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1016800/view/3333239252210456735
That's it for today!
Take care, Stalkers!
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