Hello everyone from the New Life Studios team!
We are delighted to announce our upcoming release of Under The Map and have much to talk about! We have been making progress on our game over the last few months and believe it is time to consider releasing the game, we are aiming for an October Friday the 13th release date however we will confirm this roughly 7 days prior to confirm the time and date according to time zones.
We are further going to be running a series of Alpha testing 1 week prior to release on the weekend (6th October) to join this please ensure you're in our new Discord server. Yes a new Discord server, we unfortunately do not have access to the old one and is working on having it removed, to join our new one please do so here: DISCORD and you can find teammates to play with and get exclusive access. Please also note that terms and conditions apply to this testing and only individuals part of the Discord server will be allowed to Alpha test.
So what is expected on release?
Levels
As part of the games release we will be featuring two main levels to begin with on the release, the original level (0) yellow wall backrooms areas as well as the Supermarket level for which players will be able to do a hide and seek style gameplay hiding inside of objects avoiding the entity.
All of our levels are peer-to-peer (P2P) hosted meaning you will be able to host them with your friends and join them with a maximum of 20 people at the moment to begin with. We will explore changing the player limit depending on performance and testing through release however we want to be a game that lets people push the limits if they wish.
With only two levels being released on the official release date in October we aim to add a new level maps every 4-6 weeks featuring iconic backroom maps such as the Pool Rooms & Hotel & Pipe Dreams. The good news is we expect pipe dreams to be released 14-30 days after the original release date subject to any changes and priority development work we need to submit. I have even added an early concept of this level below.
Furthermore we are also expecting level fun to release sometime in mid/late November but we will let you know at the end of October regarding this as we have integrated 2 styles of level fun to fit into the theme which are basically two different environments and whilst some levels we may explore making level fun into two different parts we still want to give players the open world element of the backroom by integrating the two.
(Level Fun maze of the backrooms & we will show our Partygoer models next month so stay tuned)
(early concept of our play area modular models which will be used to create multiple mazes, the floor will be changed to puzzle flooring, remember to stay out of the ball pits!)
(note the textures on the pipes whilst good are expected to be redone before release)
(ignore the funny animation)
(Yellow Backrooms Level 0)
(The Hub which is the player spawn area when waiting to load into levels)
We are also in the process of adding the NVIDIA DLSS features to help maximise quality and performance in the game and we expect this fully working through our Alpha testing and on release. Our game runs smoothly at 60FPS without any issues in 4K tested on RTX cards, whilst we do not expect everyone to own an RTX card running the game at normal 1080p resolutions on Epic (ultra) quality should still grant players the opportunity to have over 100FPS.
We will make changes where necessary to help optimise the game and update every 3-6 months the game engine to the latest unreal version as we progress. Currently expected to be released on version 5.6.1 we will let you all know when we update it.
Gameplay
AI & Players is a big part of the game in each level you will get to either face AI enemies otherwise players as the entity. Yes that's right you can play as the entity, a nice idea we have had for over a year and implemented especially for streamers of backroom games and other horror games like R.E.P.O not a lot of games give players the opportunity to be players aside from a few selection of games such as dead by daylight.
There wasn't any game we have found in the last few years since the trend that have allowed people to play as the entity and when we decided to build this game that is the foundation we wanted to lay it on, we hope streamers of backroom games will join us on release and try it out as we want a funny and both horror feeling to our multiplayer experience.
For our release we have it planned where we expect both AI and Player entity functionality being added but we will let people know about this before release if the AI will be ready as this requires heavy testing to ensure functionality.
Player Functionality
What are some of our main gameplay features you may ask? We have plenty so let me break it down for you with some of the simple things first. As you may have already seen from many previous screenshots we have our in game chat functionality, we expect this to be something players may utilise to talk to each other in game to communicate with the multiple options. We will be adding VOIP however are in the process of currently making changes to this as time goes on.
We have also added an inventory system for players, whilst still in early concept we have decided at this time it will be linked to the player health. The lower your health the lower your stamina will be. Take the example below with the juice you can find around the map to drink.
As well as this we want to add a health system in terms of Health Points meaning you will not die instantly upon interacting by an entity however we want player feedback with this as we want a way to counter the entities but not have the hazmat survivors be invincible.
As flashlight batteries being an important resource this is something we want added to make it useful for particular levels we are looking at exploring the opportunity in the main menu when creating lobbies to give the option to enable or disable this but we will take player feedback on this through our release.
Conclusion
On the 30th we aim to release a completely new teaser trailer for our game so stay tuned as we will post it on our Discord!
To keep players updated our Discord server will contain Dev Corner & Dev Diaries. Developer Corners will be a small overview of the games changes and updates we aim to release once a month and Developer Diaries will be overviews of the new content released such as new levels with information on Alpha testing.
To make this release great and possible we are relying on everyone to help us! By joining our Discord and reaching out to us it helps a lot and keeps the morals high. We also ask people to also help by reaching out to streamers, whilst we have reached out to some we know members of the backroom communities may have connections with certain liminal space backroom streamers so any help is appreciated and youtubers will receive the content creator role in our server.
As always please remember everything is subject to change and we will do our best to communicate this effectively.
Thanks from the team!
New Life Studios LTD