It's been a while since our last post, so we thought we'd give a quick update about the latest development progress on Arctic Awakening. The exciting news is that we've nearly completed all of the gameplay, level design, art, etc – which means the game is just about fully playable from start to finish in our internal builds!
Episodic Structure
There are obviously other games that have influenced us, but it's safe to say an even bigger influence has been the episodic format of some of our favorite TV and mini-series. We especially love how this narrative structure allows for more of a focus on character development and pacing. It's also just a lot easier as a player to tackle a 1 to 1.5 hour episode rather than the open-ended nature of many story games – we're busy too, we get it!
This is why we decided all the way back before the pandemic to make what would become Arctic Awakening an episodic game – not in terms of a release schedule (all content will be released in a single download from day one), but in terms of narrative and gameplay structure.
It's taken a lot of work to get here (4+ years! 🤯), but that's why it's so exciting to finally be able to play through all five episodes as we enter the home stretch of the development cycle – we're excited for all of you to do the same soon, too!
What Comes Next
There's a lot of work that goes into games outside of the obvious gameplay and visuals – it's a wonder that any game ever sees the light of day! The bulk of the work is now behind us, but here's a few areas that we're still chugging away at:
Bugs & Polish
The biggest area remaining is around QA testing, bug fixing and overall polish. This isn't the sort of game that really makes sense for an "Early Access" release, so we're committed to releasing a game that's as polished and bug-free as possible. With such a large world and so many branches to account for, this is a rather complex and difficult process – but also a fun one as the vision for the game really starts to solidify and feel real!
Performance
We want the game to run smoothly on as wide a range of devices as possible. Some of our technical choices (like creating a vast landscape with tens of thousands of rocks, hundreds of thousands of trees and millions of plants) make this more of a challenge than it might seem at first glance, but we've got a variety of solutions in the works that should provide significant gains over the current demo build.
Console Porting
We haven't made any "official" announcements on the console front yet, but we're also working on two console ports that we'll provide more concrete information on soon. This is no small task, but we're working closely with our console partners to get the game ready to play fully cross-platform.
Localization
Storytelling is universal, so localizing the game into as many languages as possible has been important to us from day one. However, due to the evolving nature of the game, it has been cost prohibitive to professionally translate the demo (with the exception of Japanese due to our inclusion in the Tokyo Game Show last year).
The auto translations in the demo have always just been placeholders, and we've recently started the process of professional localization for the full game into the following languages: French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese. We hope to support even more languages in the future, but translating over 55,000 words is both time-consuming and expensive for any studio, much less a small indie.
Demo Update
Our last demo update was in February, and while most of our focus since then has been on all facets of the game past the demo, there's plenty of bug fixing and polish that have found their way back into the demo build.
The star of the show is obviously bug fixes and a good helping of polish/tweaks thanks to all of the fantastic feedback we've received from those of you playing the demo and sending in your comments (yes, we really do read all of it!). We've also gained plenty of insights from streamers playing the demo – for example, we realized we'd gotten a little hand hold happy in the demo areas and have made the necessary adjustments.
We've also continued making improvements to the AI companion systems and how the related navigation systems work. Not only is Alfie more spatially aware of the world around him, but Kai also now has a compass function available on his watch to help you stay oriented while exploring the world.
If you've already played the demo then there isn't too much in the way of content updates – but we continue to greatly appreciate receiving the feedback! Either way, be sure to stay tuned for more updates by following/wishlisting on our our Steam page. You can also join our Discord, Twitter (X?) or newsletter for future updates and chat with us and others about the progress of the development!