Hi there guys -- it's been awhile. The last update we gave to They Speak To Us was May 2024, sorry about the radio silence. If you are still excited for the game, we do have some updates, but first we wanted to give a bit of an explanation of where we went.
They Speak To Us was originally concepted and crafted from our own passion and love from other online horror games -- primarily Lethal Company. It was a massive inspiration for the project, and we genuinely loved making They Speak To Us. The issue we ran into was our own hubris while trying to make a co-op online game. We thought it would be an easier task when we first set out, and it was going great for local testing but the best we got the state of the game two years ago while testing it online was a permanent two to five second lag spike. Due to the nature of the gameplay loop, and the ability to fling your friends with velocity through doorways and over monsters. This became a major issue. Like game breaking bad. The fun part of playing locally was to do ridiculous tricks and play with the gravity gun. The game became too large of a task with the development team we had at the time, and our skill level. It was three friends who were working on it after their full time jobs, and we just could not ratify how long the development cycle would take with no funding.
So what did we do?
We did what we should have done before tackling this behemoth of a project. We started practicing on smaller games. We launched our first game on itch, Lost In Static which eventually we moved here and expanded it. Since then we have shifted our focus to doing smaller games, and that has been working, but every game we work on we are getting better.
So where does that put They Speak To Us?
Once we get our footing more, we plan to revamp the page and hit the project again. We had a lot of the models, and procedurally generated maps laid out. The timer and critical mass timer are still intact as well. What we are going to make more dynamic is the monsters and spawn timers. We never wanted to abandon They Speak To Us, and really want to play it ourselves fully realized -- we had a bunch of fun playtesting it's current iteration. All that being stated, we are focused right now on smaller games within scope of our three man studio. We still have other full time jobs. However, once we feel They Speak To Us is within our scope and we have the adequate time to wrap up the alpha build we will be launching the playtest. This game is going to go through complete cycles of playtest, beta, and demos -- we believe it's what this game deserves. Sorry we were a bit late, but we knew if we released the game when we planned for the demo in May 2024 -- it simply would have been a buggy mess, and we did not want that.
They Speak To Us is still planned to come out with all it's features and gameplay loop intake. We will have a more solid date in the upcoming months. Thank you for hanging around, see you all in Origin Point soon.