We’re happy to announce that American Arcadia will be at Save & Sound starting November 4th!
Save & Sound is an online music festival with sales and demos on Steam. Come celebrate headbanging soundtracks as well as unique implementations of music and audio in games.
We’ll be participating in the festival with a a sale where you’ll be able to get American Arcadia 35% off from November 4th to 7th, and a livestream on November 5th at 1PM PST/10PM CET to talk a bit about the music in American Arcadia. We’ll discuss how it intertwines with the narrative and you’ll get a peek of what went on behind the scenes of Don’t Be A Fool! With this, we want to highlight how important music is in our games and how we conceive it as something that reinforces the story and the message we want to send.
You can watch the showcase on Bedtime Digital Games’ channels: Twitch Youtube
We’re excited to share some good music and good times with you. Check out the new trailer for Save & Sound 2024 below!
American Arcadia has been nominated for the A MAZE. / BERLIN Long Feature Award!
A MAZE hosts the International Games and Playful Media Festival, held annually in Berlin. And we are really excited because American Arcadia has been nominated for the Long Feature Award!
As part of the event, we're taking part in the A MAZE. / BERLIN Steam Festival, alongside all of the other amazing games that have been nominated across all of the different categories.
Make sure to give the American Arcadia demo a go, if you haven't already!
The Vigilante Diaries, from the devs of American Arcadia and Call of the Sea!
After launching both Call of the Sea and American Arcadia, we are excited to announce that we’re working on a new game: The Vigilante Diaries: An Out of the Blue Story.
In The Vigilante Diaries, you’ll put yourself in the shoes of a working-class man that returns to his hometown after two tours of duty in the Vietnam War, where he’ll be faced with a city ravaged by crime, corruption and social inequality. In this situation, the only way out for someone like him will be taking justice into his own hands!
Be ready to recap his life as a masked vigilante, and to define not only his appearance, but also his rules, methods and red lines. As you go through his Journal, you will be faced with choices in a raw account of the struggles, hardships and pivotal moments that drove him to become a masked vigilante, and the events that took place after. What kind of crimefighter will you become?
This is the first story of an anthology we’re working on called An Out Of The Blue Story, and each of the stories in it will focus on different characters in very different settings, but with one thing in common: the question “how far would you go to survive?”.
We hope you will like it! You can Wishlist it now, down here, and you can also follow Out Of The Blue on Twitter and Instagram to stay tuned for future updates.
Pick Up American Arcadia in the Steam Spring Sale!
The Spring Sale is here, and what better way to clean up you Steam Wishlist than to purchase a couple of the games on it?
Right now you can save on American Arcadia, the American Arcadia Soundtrack, and the American Arcadia Artbook on discount! If you're really feeling the savings, just note that all these discounts means that the discount on the Deluxe Edition Bundle becomes even better!
The following discounts will be active from March 14 @ 10:00 PDT / 13:00 EDT / 17:00 GMT / 18:00 CET until March 21st @ 10:00 PDT / 13:00 EDT / 17:00 GMT / 18:00 CET:
American Arcadia
25%
American Arcadia Soundtrack
25%
American Arcadia Artbook
25%
Make sure you pick up all the pieces of our award-winning puzzle!
American Arcadia Wins Game of the Year at DreamHack Beyond!
We're thrilled to annouce that American Arcadia has won Game of the Year at DreamHack Beyond's Indie Showcase!
It's a huge honor to receive the award - thank you to Dreamhack and thank you to all of our players for your support!
Presenting Don’t Be a Fool Official Music Video
🎶 The hit song Don’t Be a Fool by Merle Jefferson unveils today its official music clip with the amazing band The Swans.
Watch out for this tune because it is a catchy one!
Everyone inside and outside Arcadia knows this song, and it is a big pleasure to bring it to life with this music clip.
Dive into the groovy sounds of the 70s, performed by the incredible Broadway talent Kyra Da Costa and the vibrant and catchy composition of Eduardo de la Iglesia
American Arcadia - Hotfix #1
As we mentioned in our last blog, we've got a small update to fix some bugs and improve American Arcadia that were discovered after the game launched. Thanks to everyone for your support and for helping us improve the experience of the game!
American Arcadia - Hotfix #1 Changelog
Adjusted audio option to prevent high volume in loading videos
Fixed missing subtitles in Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese, and Korean
Fixed missing or attenuated voices in very few sequences
Adjusted the range for interacting with some objects
Fixed and adjusted the location of some checkpoints
Fixed an infrequent block when using the CCTV lamp device for catching the robot
Fixed an infrequent block due to not be able to interact with ZW's phone in cafeteria.
Fixed an infrequent crash after exiting during Steganography encryption puzzle
Fixed an infrequent crash in Javert chase in Sewers
Fixed an infrequent block in button previously to Braintrip Spectrex
Added feature of fullscreen
Minor adjustments of timing and acting in some sequences
Minor additional bug fixes
Angela can now boop the cat
Mixing Gameplays & the Challenges of American Arcadia
Hello there!
American Arcadia is out now, and we couldn’t be happier with the reception it is getting, especially now that we hit the Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam!
When we were developing American Arcadia we thought it’d be interesting to play with someone escaping but also with someone helping him from the outside. To have two different views of the same story, with completely different gameplay. But two different gameplays meant making two games in one. It was a design challenge as well as a technical challenge. And on top of that, we intertwined both perspectives in a CCTV system view. A system we had to design and develop from scratch.
That is the reason why the transitions between both worlds (the side-scrolling and the first-person perspective), are completely seamless. The screens, which have a really important presence in a game like ours, behave like portals where we move from one world to another and, consequently, from one character to another with what appears to be a simple zoom-in or zoom-out, but behind the scenes, it involves a complex system.
But not only that. Trevor’s escape brings a more physical kind of gameplay, despite Trevor not being exactly the kind of action hero you would imagine. Following that principle, Trevor’s escape is full of action, chases, and physical efforts, things that really take him out of his comfort zone. Even Trevor’s puzzles will be more affected by timing and quick thinking.
Angela’s gameplay, on the other hand, represents her more chaotic, messy and daring personality therefore the contrast comes from exploring, moving stealthily, hacking devices, and using her deductive skills to solve puzzles.
But more than that, our main objective when developing American Arcadia was to constantly surprise the player. Using those three gameplay modes, we tweaked it in different moments to create a thrilling, immersive cinematic playable experience.
Don’t be a Fool and stay tuned because we have one more special thing to share! And this one is going to be quite… catchy!
Also, look forward to a patch that we'll have coming soon! There won't be any new content in this patch, but we'll be ironing out a couple bugs that players have found or experienced since launch. We'll have more details about what will be fixed when we release the patch!
Out of the Blue
The References of American Arcadia
Hello there!
First of all, we want to thank all of you for the AMAZING reception American Arcadia is getting! So a huge thank you from the Out of the Blue Team for the warm reception and the incredible feedback!
And this is especially rewarding considering that American Arcadia was a risky bet from the start: a game about an escape, with two different gameplay styles in two perspectives, who delves into how our privacy and daily lives are affected by the involuntary overexposure that corporate greed corrupted companies impose on us.
We are huge fans of Walt Disney's original project to build an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). A metropolis of tomorrow designed to ensure the well-being and comfort of all its citizens. Turning this idyllic arcadia (pun intended) into a place to escape from seemed like a fantastic starting point for our game.
But shortly after we began development, we expanded from that original concept. Thus, Walton Pictures and their founders are an amalgamation of different Golden Age Hollywood moguls, such as Loew, Goldwyn and Mayer, the Warner Brothers and of course, Walt and Roy Disney. But have to confess we also took George Lucas’ middle name to give it to the founding father of Arcadia.
And for Arpad Kovacs (sorry to all our Hungarian players about the deliberate mispronunciation of his last name, this is a reference to Hollywood actor Ernie Kovacs) we also took some celebrities to create a friendly neighbor hybrid of Steve Wozniak, Fred Rogers and Bill Nye.
But that idyllic Walton Pictures has nothing to do with the media company it became. We wanted to represent how a company born from illusion and creativity can easily end up corrupted by making the worst decisions if they are driven only for cash. Corporate greed is not exclusive to a specific company, sadly it’s a common phenomenon nowadays.
Diving into the Dystopian Dreams & Nightmares
Being a game about escape, the most obvious references were cinematic. Whether these dystopias are reasonably kind like "The Truman Show" or much more twisted and cruel, as in "The Island," "Logan’s Run," or "The Prisoner," we were interested in all those elements of seemingly perfect societies with a dark side.
But not only that, we were also interested in other classic elements of escape movies. From classics like "North by Northwest," where an ordinary man has to escape from a conspiracy he accidentally confronts, to "The Fugitive," influenced us. In fact, the character of Agent Gerard in "The Fugitive" was the main inspiration for creating the tireless pursuer Chief of the Interceptors, whose surname is a direct and rather on the nose reference to "Les Misérables."
Setting American Arcadia apart
But we didn't just connect to that idyllic dystopia. We also wanted to make a reference to a much closer and much less beautiful society like the one in the real world. It's not a world so far from fictions like "Black Mirror," where it's assumed as normal to observe the private life of people locked in a place. We live in a world where similar things happen, and we have people addicted to consuming the lives of others or exposing their own.
Pop culture
In a game about the media, and where audiovisual culture plays such an important role, it was very easy and convenient for us to use pop culture references for our advantage. The game is full of this, but always in a non intrusive way. Some are direct, but some others are more subtle. The keen eye will find nods to Hollywood movie classics, Canadian progressive rock bands, 21st century manga authors… and even Out of the Blue Games itself!
Follow us on Twitter at @AmericanArcadia, where we'll keep sharing nice facts about the game!
- Out of the Blue
Nominate American Arcadia for the Outstanding Story-Rich Category!
Many of you have already enjoyed the thrilling story of Trevor's escape and its breathtaking plot twists. Now it is your time to tell the world how much you've loved it!
Nominate American Arcadia for the Outstanding Story-Rich category at this year's Steam Awards. Voting is open from now until November 28th - don't miss it!
