Hey everyone,
We hope that you have had a good week! This week we have been preparing for the next pre-alpha update, which is focusing on introducing the full list of “regular” usable items into the game. Aka all the food, items, weapons, etc, that we need to create a full play through. We have a bunch of surprises coming in, and are very looking forward to your experimentation and feedback.
This is a condensed version of the Weekly Update (due to character limitation), for the full version check here
Narrative Team
Alex
I’ve been continuing to search for a voice for some revelatory audio. There’s a character in game who’s autistic. Good actors are hard enough to find; actors who can play autistic with emotional truthfulness are rarer still. And, the role has another characteristic I can’t tell you yet. Few people can handle a speech impediment without the impediment becoming the whole performance. And, we want charisma in our voices.
(My daughter is autistic, so autism is something I think about a lot. It’s nice to be able to put it in the game. And by “nice,” I mean that it’s going to take us to a seriously effed-up place.)
Meanwhile, I’m continuing to work on dialog for encounters. Writing encounter dialog is tricky because sound eats memory, and we need the game to be a reasonable size on your computer or console. So I need to suggest as much as possible in as little dialog as possible. Also, any time Arthur talks, that means our other player characters will eventually have to have something to say, too. On the other hand, we’re long past the point in video games where we can get away with throwing text on the screen. And a voice performance adds so much, anyway.
I’ve also been having a bash at tooltips. The designers have written very “gamey” tooltips, e.g. “does .2 shock damage + .4 blunt damage.” I feel that takes you out of the game, so the tooltip will now read something clever-ish like, “this weapon is really smashing, and a bit shocking too.”
And there’s the usual ongoing support. What brand gin do people drink? What do Wellies say after they are no longer distracted by Rick the Stunt Duck? What do Bobbies say? Each one of these is not a lot of work, but they add up, and there’s a fair amount of bookkeeping necessary as well, to make sure that everything gets recorded and shepherded into the game.
Art Team
Marc-André
This week, I had a tremendous amount of fun modeling and texturing interesting props like the Elite Hammer Tool, the music box, the gas masks and a bunch of other small props.
Emmanuel
I did a lot of props this week; some are more fun than others to make. A vinegar bottle is not something intellectually challenging but it has to be done. But I have to say, I love making pies!
Design Team
Vince
Lots of different tasks this week, I don’t really know where to start!
I did some tweaks to the encounters I’m working on, and started new ones. The Altar of Yam is getting even more epic, but I’m keeping that a surprise for next week.
We are releasing a build to all our pre-alpha backers soon, so I did a little bit of work that will go in that build, notably: added a whole bunch of descriptions to pickups and a lot of updates to existing ones. Level designers usually put placeholder objects in the game real quick when we need them and write a bunch of silly stuff in their description. But now, Alex wrote even more funny stuff for them, so try to collect and read them all!
Antoine
Hi there! This week was a lot of preparation work, talking to people on the team, and adjusting workflows so everything goes smoothly for everybody. I’ve sent a document to the art team explaining how all the current traps work. I believe they should start to art them up soon-ish (very excited). This means in the future I’ll be able to unveil some of them in the weekly updates (we’ll definitely keep a couple secret for maximum surprise when you get your hands on new updates). Been having talks with the artists since I’m entering the realm of Village encounters. We’ve talked about a workflow that is going to allow the design team to tweak Village houses geometry, encounters and so on. By the end you should be able to see more variety in the Village. I’ve also been working on a new trap which is definitely going to spice up house gameplay and two other encounters (including a house where people have very strange ways of passing time… leaving it there as a tease).
Hayden
Hello Folks! This week had me working on my first encounter for the game, Faraday’s Workshop, which is located in the Village. It’s an interesting space filled with many shocking surprises, literally and figuratively. Working on this encounter was a real gas; I was able to block-out the physical space, add all the cool surprises and stubbed in the first part of the quest. I’m sure when you play it, it’ll be an electrifying experience!
Thank you for tuning and have a great weekend everyone!
Compulsion