Fellow travelers,
The updates and milestones are coming in faster and faster these days, with today's news being that we have officially reached our Alpha milestone. The most important part of this milestone is being able to play the game from beginning to end, and I can't put into words what a joy (and terror, this is a spooky game after all) it is to be able to do so.
From Writing Scripts to Designing Rituals
Throughout development we've tried to avoid overplaying our hand to keep the mysteries around Joni's haunting from being revealed, and that won't change. That said, we want to keep giving some idea of what we've been up to. In reaching our Alpha milestone, here's some of the work that went into it:
- We soft-locked the script at 134 (!) pages, with one final VO recording session to go
- We developed a whole set of spooky moments to raise the tension in certain chapters
- We finished up custom art assets for all of the Relics and Whispering Objects throughout the story
- We finished the core of and implemented all of the Rituals that go throughout the game, including Joni's final confrontation
Moving Toward Beta - Reaching Content Completeness
Now that we can experience Joni's tale from beginning to end it's time to fill in the last gaps and keep iterating until we're happy. This is the last core development milestone where we actually add things to the game, so we'll be finishing up art assets, finalizing visual effects, polishing mechanics, plugging the narrative edges, and having our final recording session with Joni's voice actor. Once we hit our Beta development milestone all of our efforts will go into bug fixing and final polish. Release is just a few short months away and our plans are all coming together.
Things are going to keep ramping up as we get closer to release! In the coming weeks we'll take part in some events, share more development progress, and our demo will be available on Steam again soon. While you wait for that, here are some links in case you've missed anything:
- Steam page (please wishlist and share): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2828590/The_Haunting_of_Joni_Evers/
- Discord community (join us to talk about Joni or the Worlds Across the Causeway): https://discord.gg/Bhp7nZkaVw
- Twitter (follow for smaller updates and announcements): https://twitter.com/CausewayGames
'Til we meet again along the Causeway,
Kjartan Kennedy (he/him), Studio Director