Welcome to Into the Light, a exploration game with a horrific atmosphere where every sound you make can lead you to death. You will cross path with strange things at best, and dangerous beings at worst. Gigantic eyes, tentacles and ashen corpses await you.
But that's not all: there is a monster we kept from you until now.
The Howlers: immobile but dangerous
The Howlers are standing still. At first, you'll think they are harmless and you would be right. But they contain something far more dangerous that can cost you your life if you do not pay attention to your environment and above all, the sound you make.
Stay quite. At all cost, or the Seeker will emerge from the darkness to catch you.
What kind of design for the Howlers?
A first draft was designed that we tried in an internal demo. It was used for a long time and we kind of got used to it:
But then, a new idea came along. A more troubling monster, less human and different from the ashen corpses you can see amongst the environment.
A Howler does not use its eyes but its ears to detect any intruders into its personal space. Then, it starts to pulse with a vivid red light up, stronger and stronger, until a Seeker leaves the dark to join you in the light.
If you see a Howler like this, run and hide as fast as you can.
That's it for today! We would love to tell you more but that would be for another time. Nevertheless, we'll have a good news to share with you very soon!
Hi, we're still working on the demo and we're improving it based on your feedback. The big changes will come later.
[Improvements[/b]
Revised lighting in the second half of the demo
Items to pick up better highlighted
Fixed minor AI issues
Fixed loca on inventory shortcuts
Known bugs
Item inspection text takes too long to appear
AI may still have issues
The lighting in the first part of the demo is not good
Sound balancing problem
Joystick control bugs
Demo now available !
Today we're giving you the chance to try out the first few minutes of Into The Light, and we hope you enjoy the demo!
We still have some way to go before we can offer you the full game, but we're making progress. Don't hesitate to give us your feedback on the demo on our discord, it's the best way to talk directly to us: https://discord.gg/f7DYfAGry7
With this release comes a short video:
IMPORTANT
The joystick is not fully available on all interfaces. We'll fix that later, but it's not the most important thing for us at this stage.
You will encounter problems in the settings menus and in the log. Even if this doesn't prevent you from playing the game with the controller, it can affect your experience.
If you encounter any bugs in the game, let us know on discord (the link is above), and we'll prioritise the problem areas.
Into The Light - Reveal Trailer
Last week was the French Direct GA organized by ActuGaming, it was the opportunity for us to unveil new things for the game, including a release year, 2025.
Into The Light - Devblog #2
Hello to all of you,
We are back today for our Devblog number 2 where we talk about the evolution of our gameplay and level design.
We have been developing this game for two years now, during all our production we had to make design choices that respect our technical and human constraints.
The very first concept: the beginning of the adventure
At the very beginning our desire was to make a game with a horrific atmosphere with puzzle solving. All this in a 3d universe in first person. The main objective for the player was to bring lost souls to a portal to free them.
The player could move around the world as well as move cubes whose faces gave a directional command to a soul that came in contact with that face. The souls had a behavior of movement constrained by the orders of direction if it touched the cube then its direction became that indicated by the cube.
The player had a limit to how far he could move the cubes. He had to think carefully before taking any action. The souls also had to stay in the light, so the player could interact with a ball of light above him to move it and follow the movement of the souls.
The problem here was that we had a lot of trouble incorporating an interesting storyline and a horrific atmosphere. So we reworked the formula.
We still have some images that illustrate this first concept:
The second concept: level design at the service of reflection
Here we have a doubt about our game, after five months of development we decide to start over and make bigger levels and have more fun.
We write a story that we care about, we look for concepts and we push the graphics of our game. We decide that our puzzle gameplay will revolve around the theme "Getting out of a maze", our maze will become a bunker.
In a bunker it can be easily explained that doors are closed and have to be opened with a mechanism, the objective here for the player will be to get out of the maze by activating the levers in the right order. The problem was that there was no "danger" and no risk. So we decided to add some.
We searched our hard drives and found this video that illustrates the first drafts of the gameplay :
The third concept: Let there be light
One mechanic we had from the beginning was related to light. We kept it to create an additional constraint for the player. The longer he stays in the dark, the more he is affected by madness (translated by a stress bar, if it falls to 0 the character dies).
So he will have to use a lantern, recharge it, but also activate switches to turn on lights. But it was still too simple for us, so for each switch and lever activated an energy charge was used. This charge of energy came from a generator that had a limited number of charges. If the generator ran out of energy he had to reactivate the generator manually and all mechanisms related to the generator were disabled.
Fourth concept: What if we were not alone?
Well, now we have a not too shaky concept with an objective and a constraint. But we were missing a little bit of stress, that thing that would push the player to make mistakes and thus force him to take decisions. That's how the "Adam" was born, at first there were several of them, then only one. Sometimes he could move, sometimes not.
This monster, this "Adam" could catch the player and eliminate him directly, then a system to escape from his grip was put in place; the player could sacrifice his lantern to flee.
Gradually, the Adam was a monster that appeared according to the player's mental health and no longer by the activation or not of a generator or electricity.
Nowadays, the Adam only appears when the player's mental health drops to zero, so you have all the cards in your hand to avoid this "monster" appearing.
The objective is still to make your way through the environment by activating several levers, but be careful to stay in the light as much as possible ːsteamhappyː
Conclusion
We try to think of our mechanics in such a way that they serve our purpose. By that we mean, the graphics, the narrative and our technological restrictions. If we want to add so many constraints to the player it's really to create the feeling of being in a big mess and then to think and say "But wait, I have a lot of tools to get out of it" and then to create a reflection on how he can manage to survive.
Our main goal is not to scare people, but to make them feel the omnipresent danger with fun mechanics once they are caught in it.
We've revealed a lot about our game today, but don't worry, we still have a lot of surprises in store for you!
We plan to keep these Devblogs going every month to keep you up to date on the game's progress. If you want us to talk about a particular subject concerning the development of the game, don't hesitate to let us know by email at contact@2lgames.fr or by comment.
We wish you an excellent day,
The Into The Light Team
Into The Light - Devblog #1
Hello,
It's been a while since our steam page was created, we wanted to get a head start, and to tell you the truth it was a bit stressful for us, it was the first time we launched a game on steam.
Welcome to our first "Devblog".
If you're here, you probably have some kind of curiosity about our game, maybe you even played our first demo more than a year ago. We wanted to take the temperature on this type of game and we had good feedback on our proposal, a small "gameplay" session of fifteen minutes without much pretension. And since then, a lot of things have changed... A lot.
We are Sylvain & Alexandre (me), the two creators of Into The Light, two friends from the video game world. Sylvain was able to participate in some AA productions as QA/Lead QA (Quality Assurance) and still does. As for me, I started in the independent world on a two-man production for two years and then I branched out to AAA at Ubisoft as a 3D Environment Artist. After my experience in the "big" world, I decided to leave to work full time on Into The Light.
Now that the presentations are done, it's time to talk about the game!
We don't want to reveal more than enough to make you want to play the game, but we can tell you about some of the details that make up our game. In particular the graphical advances.
THE DEMO & THE GAS STATION
To begin with, we want to immerse you in a universe and a story through visuals, immersion and atmosphere. Our first demo already had a little atmosphere but we wanted to go further. And we will probably go even further in the coming months.
On the first images you can already feel an intention that we wanted to reinforce a few months later but the whole lacked clarity.
We opted for something more sober while waiting to see more clearly for this introduction and we added street lamps... A very simple idea but it will help you to find your way in the level because we will guide you with it.
Beyond the visual aspect, we have also revised a lot of things in the gameplay which is more focused on exploration.
LE BUNKER
To continue in the evolutions during the demo we had a completely different idea of game, the bunker was almost done, it made 2 rooms.
Today our bunker includes many environments and mysteries to solve with a nice evolution of atmosphere compared to what we had in mind.
It was important for us to think of it as if it could exist, that its inhabitants could be self-sufficient with quarters to sleep, observe the outside, eat, a hierarchy, life and a story behind it all. As you may have guessed, there was life before, but not anymore.
THE FINAL IMAGE
We've also already communicated quite a bit about them, but it's important to mention them here, our monsters. Initially we could see one at the end of the demo in the tunnel that leads to the bunker during the final cinematic. It has evolved since then.
His design is mainly defined by the gameplay. The fact that he doesn't have legs is not at all related to the fact that we didn't want to animate them...
I think we can leave it at that.
We plan to keep these Devblogs going every month to keep you up to date on the progress of the game. If you want us to talk about a particular subject concerning the development of the game, don't hesitate to let us know by email at contact@2lgames.fr or by comment.
We wish you a great day and hope that reading our first devblog will be full of information.
The Into the Light team
Into The Light is finalist of the game cup 3 !
Hello to all of you,
A few weeks ago we submitted Into The Light to the French competition "La game cup 3" organized by KissKissBankBank, a French participative financing platform.
We are one of the four finalists and we need your votes to advance in the competition.
Here is their website where you can vote: game cup 3 (All is in french)
You can also follow the development on the network of your choice :
We have made a lot of progress on the development of Into The Light, from graphics to gameplay. To illustrate a part of our progress we propose you to dive a few seconds in our universe with this video which illustrates a part of our gameplay, in an enigmatic way, obviously.
You can also follow us on twitter where we are more active : https://twitter.com/2L_Games
