Hey everyone! Our last update was during Steam Next Fest, and even two months on we're still blown away by the response. Over 10,000 of you checked out the demo during the event and thousands more have left snowy footprints since. We've been more motivated than ever from seeing the excitement surrounding the world we're creating!
Demo Update
Since Next Fest, we've been hard at work completing the full game, fixing bugs and making improvements based on the hundreds of feedback messages we received and the dozens of streams we've watched. Beyond just getting the game in front of so many new people, these last few months have been incredibly valuable for us to improve the overall game before release. Since we aren't doing early access, the demo has doubled as a sort of beta test for us.
While most of our recent efforts have been in the later stages of the game, and while we still have more work to do based on the submitted feedback, we've taken the time to release an updated build of the demo that includes:
Various minor and some game-breaking bugs
Improvements to overall traversal mechanics
Enhancements to drone flight and navigation
Performance optimizations
Art and level design polish
Improvements to the auto save system
Newly recorded voice-over
Localization improvements for all 7 languages
Full Game Progress
We aren't quite ready to share a release date just yet (we've got one in mind, but we're going to be extra sure before finalizing it); however, we are excited to announce that the game has now been content complete for nearly a month, and as of today we've finished recording all voice-over for the entire game! Our main focus right now is QA testing (and more QA testing -- you can never do too much), polishing every detail and optimizing performance to make sure the game runs smoothly and looks great.
We're in the home stretch now, and we can't wait to share more soon. Stay tuned, and as always, thank you for your support! Feel free to pop into Discord, X or BlueSky and say hello as well.
New Demo for Steam Next Fest!
Hey everyone,
Steam Next Fest is officially underway from February 24 - March 3, and we've released a brand new updated demo as part of the event!
In this version, we've taken all of your feedback and packed it into a fresh, extended demo with loads of polish, frozen bugs, performance improvements and full translations in 7 languages. We've even decided to break the ice with brand-new content never before seen in the demo!
Check it out during Steam Next Fest, let us know what you think (we're still making improvements based on your invaluable feedback) and don't forget to wishlist/follow to stay up to date!
See you in the snow soon! ❄️
PS: We're also running a giveaway for a free copy of the game -- just play the demo and signup to the newsletter in-game to be entered into the drawing (you'll get an email before release if you're selected)!
Arctic Awakening Delayed
Hello Arctic adventurers!
We started working on Arctic Awakening nearly 5 years ago. Our team has poured all of our creative efforts into bringing this thrilling tale to life, and we can’t wait for all of you to start exploring the wilderness with Kai and Alfie.
We're in the final stages: mechanics are being finalized, QA is squashing the last stubborn bugs, performance is being put on overdrive and every last leaf, trail and mysterious moment is getting the polish it deserves. Localization is also in full swing to make sure the game speaks to adventurers all around the world.
Today, however, we have to ask all of you patient adventurers to wait just a little bit longer. We have to delay the release... one more time. We're truly sorry to keep you waiting longer than we hoped, but we're committed to making this experience something truly unforgettable.
We know delays are frustrating, and believe us, we'd love nothing more than to have the game in your hands right now. But we refuse to settle for “good enough.” While we can't announce a release date just yet, rest assured it's coming soon, and we're so excited for you to experience what we've been working so hard on.
Thank you for your patience and support. It means the world to us, and it's what keeps us pushing to make Arctic Awakening the incredible adventure you deserve. We can't wait to share it with you – see you in the snow soon!
-The GoldFire Studios Team
PS
We also recently updated the demo, which includes a bunch of improvements including:
A long list of bugs and general polish (including some crashes).
25-50% performance improvements across the board.
Various navigation and flight improvements to Alfie.
Improved gamepad support.
Fixed various issues with the save system.
Level design polish.
Added some new settings including FOV control (more coming soon).
Further sound effects and music polish.
Full professional translations for Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Portuguese (Brazil). German, Spanish, French and Russian coming soon.
We really appreciate all of the feedback on the demo -- it's been truly invaluable to the development!
AdventureX is back for 2024! It's the premier annual festival in London for narrative-driven games. We showcased Arctic Awakening in-person for the first time in 2022. This year we're once again participating in the Steam event, which runs from November 4-11.
About Stream One of our favorite YouTube streamers plays and commentates on the Arctic Awakening demo, from the opening scene in the plane all the way to the surprise finish of the demo. We've also included some behind-the-scenes segments in the stream.
About Arctic Awakening Arctic Awakening is a first-person narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your court-mandated therapy bot for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the mysteries buried beneath the ice.
AdventureX is back for 2024! It's the premier annual festival in London for narrative-driven games. We showcased Arctic Awakening in-person for the first time in 2022. This year we're once again participating in the Steam event, which runs from November 4-11.
About Stream One of our favorite YouTube streamers plays and commentates on the Arctic Awakening demo, from the opening scene in the plane all the way to the surprise finish of the demo. We've also included some behind-the-scenes segments in the stream.
About Arctic Awakening Arctic Awakening is a first-person narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your court-mandated therapy bot for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the mysteries buried beneath the ice.
Music Deep Dive: Save & Sound 2024
Save & Sound is an incredible celebration of music in games, so we're more than thrilled to have been selected to participate in this year's event!
If you missed the live stream, our own feature can be viewed below. Our composer (Joff Winks) performs live on various instruments featured in the soundtrack and does a deep dive on some of the dynamic elements used in the game.
We're nearing completion on the game -- more updates on that soon. In the meantime, let us know what you thought in the comments and join in on Discord and X!
Devlog #14: The Home Stretch
It's been a while since our last post, so we thought we'd give a quick update about the latest development progress on Arctic Awakening. The exciting news is that we've nearly completed all of the gameplay, level design, art, etc – which means the game is just about fully playable from start to finish in our internal builds!
Episodic Structure
There are obviously other games that have influenced us, but it's safe to say an even bigger influence has been the episodic format of some of our favorite TV and mini-series. We especially love how this narrative structure allows for more of a focus on character development and pacing. It's also just a lot easier as a player to tackle a 1 to 1.5 hour episode rather than the open-ended nature of many story games – we're busy too, we get it!
This is why we decided all the way back before the pandemic to make what would become Arctic Awakening an episodic game – not in terms of a release schedule (all content will be released in a single download from day one), but in terms of narrative and gameplay structure.
It's taken a lot of work to get here (4+ years! 🤯), but that's why it's so exciting to finally be able to play through all five episodes as we enter the home stretch of the development cycle – we're excited for all of you to do the same soon, too!
What Comes Next
There's a lot of work that goes into games outside of the obvious gameplay and visuals – it's a wonder that any game ever sees the light of day! The bulk of the work is now behind us, but here's a few areas that we're still chugging away at:
Bugs & Polish
The biggest area remaining is around QA testing, bug fixing and overall polish. This isn't the sort of game that really makes sense for an "Early Access" release, so we're committed to releasing a game that's as polished and bug-free as possible. With such a large world and so many branches to account for, this is a rather complex and difficult process – but also a fun one as the vision for the game really starts to solidify and feel real!
Performance
We want the game to run smoothly on as wide a range of devices as possible. Some of our technical choices (like creating a vast landscape with tens of thousands of rocks, hundreds of thousands of trees and millions of plants) make this more of a challenge than it might seem at first glance, but we've got a variety of solutions in the works that should provide significant gains over the current demo build.
Console Porting
We haven't made any "official" announcements on the console front yet, but we're also working on two console ports that we'll provide more concrete information on soon. This is no small task, but we're working closely with our console partners to get the game ready to play fully cross-platform.
Localization
Storytelling is universal, so localizing the game into as many languages as possible has been important to us from day one. However, due to the evolving nature of the game, it has been cost prohibitive to professionally translate the demo (with the exception of Japanese due to our inclusion in the Tokyo Game Show last year).
The auto translations in the demo have always just been placeholders, and we've recently started the process of professional localization for the full game into the following languages: French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese. We hope to support even more languages in the future, but translating over 55,000 words is both time-consuming and expensive for any studio, much less a small indie.
Demo Update
Our last demo update was in February, and while most of our focus since then has been on all facets of the game past the demo, there's plenty of bug fixing and polish that have found their way back into the demo build.
The star of the show is obviously bug fixes and a good helping of polish/tweaks thanks to all of the fantastic feedback we've received from those of you playing the demo and sending in your comments (yes, we really do read all of it!). We've also gained plenty of insights from streamers playing the demo – for example, we realized we'd gotten a little hand hold happy in the demo areas and have made the necessary adjustments.
We've also continued making improvements to the AI companion systems and how the related navigation systems work. Not only is Alfie more spatially aware of the world around him, but Kai also now has a compass function available on his watch to help you stay oriented while exploring the world.
If you've already played the demo then there isn't too much in the way of content updates – but we continue to greatly appreciate receiving the feedback! Either way, be sure to stay tuned for more updates by following/wishlisting on our our Steam page. You can also join our Discord, Twitter (X?) or newsletter for future updates and chat with us and others about the progress of the development!
Devlog #13: Demo Updates
While we've mostly been focused on the later stages of the game as we ready it for the full release, we've still been putting in plenty of overall polish, bug fixing and core system improvements that have made their way into our demo build.
We really appreciate all of your incredible feedback and detailed bug reports -- we've read every comment and have been hard at work incorporating the feedback and fixing the issues. We're thrilled to release today's update to the demo that encapsulates all of the progress since our last update for Gamescom last fall!
Interacting with the World
Agency to explore and interact with the world has been one of our key pillars from day one, so a lot of our recent work has revolved around honing those aspects of the experience.
First and foremost, the traversal system has been rebuilt from the ground up. All traversal mechanics are now run automatically with no button presses needed other than jumping from a height that you can't climb back up from. The animations and motions of the traversals are faster and smoother to feel more fluid and address motion sickness concerns. The camera is also never taken over during any traversal mechanic so that you won't get disoriented or lose the feeling of control. And for those of you that like to toggle jogging, this is now supported alongside the ability to hold the button/key as before.
We've also made significant improvements to interactions such as picking up and putting down objects. These actions are now dramatically smoother and faster without feeling so jarring (and just like with traversal mechanics, the camera is never taken over). You can also now use physics to place objects on flat surfaces or even on top of other objects to arrange things in your shelter just the way you like them.
Weather Systems
We view weather as just another character in the game, so it's been long overdue for some TLC. The most obvious of changes is that we've added clouds to the sky! It's a subtle change at times and quite dramatic at others, but it really gives us some fantastic freedom to make the weather systems that much more dynamic and vistas that much more breathtaking.
To go along with the updated skies, the weather system and the color grading that goes along with it now supports full dynamic blending. The time could already dynamically update the visuals as it passed, but now the weather can change in an instant or over an extended period of time and everything will update seamlessly.
In addition, the quality of the feet deformations in the snow has been improved to be more dynamic and realistic. We've also addressed some nagging issues like Kai's head dropping below the surface of the snow in some areas or the fact that dropping items into the snow would cause them to disappear into another realm, never to be seen again.
Auto Save
One of the most vital features missing from our prior demos was the ability to save. We haven't added cloud saves (yet), but we do have an initial implementation of a full auto save system in place now. This turns out to be much more complex to nail down with such a dynamic world of choices and actions to keep track of, so we still consider the saving functionality in a "beta" state for the moment.
Performance
We still have a big list of performance improvements we'll be wrapping up before the full release. However, one big update we've completed is the world streaming system that splits the whole world of Arctic Awakening into chunks and then loads them in the background without the need for loading screens. The plan from the very beginning was to make this a fully seamless world to explore with no loading screens, and as that world grew it became clear a more robust system would be needed to support it on the hardware of mere mortals. Outside of the world streaming system, we've made a variety of other updates to reduce memory and GPU usage across the board.
Inventory
The inventory system has continued to evolve, now with a history view and the ability to examine objects that are currently in your inventory. Even more crucially, we've built a number of new core systems that allow us to support a variety of scenarios with objects you've collected that just wouldn't have been possible before. Some of these will be subtle, but we think they'll really help make the world feel alive and more dynamic than ever.
AI Companion
This is one of those systems that is never really done. There's always more that can be improved, more scenarios that can be supported and more polish to layer on top. We talked about some of our recent updates to Alfie in a prior devlog (https://goldfirestudios.com/companion-ai-improvements), and we've continued iterating on those and other systems to continually refine his behaviors. There's still more to do, but Alfie becomes seemingly more "alive" every day!
Audio
We got a lot of feedback surrounding audio and the music and we've been working to remedy the various issues and concerns. While most of the work around sound design and music has been taking place beyond the scope of the demo, we hope you'll appreciate improvements such as changes to the mix to make dialogue easier to hear and improved reactivity within the music design.
Bugs
Did I mention bug reports? Yeah... there were a lot of them! Over the last few months we've fixed hundreds (thousands?!?) of bugs in both the core systems and the demo sections of the game. It certainly isn't bug-free yet, but we're continuing to work hard at polishing up the entire experience -- so keep the bug reports coming, they've been absolutely vital as a sort of beta test for the final game.
As we approach the full release of the game, be sure to stay tuned for more updates by following/wishlisting our Steam page. You can also join our Discord, Twitter (X?) or newsletter for future updates and chat with us and others about the progress of the development!
AdventureX is back for 2023! It's the premier annual festival in London for narrative-driven games. We showcased Arctic Awakening in-person for the first time at last year's event. This year we're once again participating in the Steam event, which runs from November 2-8.
About Stream One of our favorite YouTube streamers plays and commentates on the Arctic Awakening demo, from the opening scene in the plane all the way to the surprise finish of the demo.
About Arctic Awakening Arctic Awakening first-person narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your court-mandated therapy bot for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the mysteries buried beneath the ice.
AdventureX is back for 2023! It's the premier annual festival in London for narrative-driven games. We showcased Arctic Awakening in-person for the first time at last year's event. This year we're once again participating in the Steam event, which runs from November 2-8.
About Stream One of our favorite YouTube streamers plays and commentates on the Arctic Awakening demo, from the opening scene in the plane all the way to the surprise finish of the demo.
About Arctic Awakening Arctic Awakening first-person narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your court-mandated therapy bot for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the mysteries buried beneath the ice.
