Prisoner
Another new build has gone live!
Bugfixes: We discovered a hidden bug that was causing the monsters to not chase you after your first death in the early (first 8) days of the game. This has been fixed and now the first few days should have a lot of content that was previously getting ignored. We also fixed some bugs with the loading system, and the system should be much more reliable.
We also added a save button to the pause menu. More animations on the player character for his strafing made the movement look a little smoother. We added the jump command to the "controls" pannel for clarity and consistency. Finally, we also made some changes to the prisoners that come to speak to you in order to make them not get so close to the player.
Let us know what you think and how it feels to play with the new fixes, and thanks for taking part in the Prisoner Early Access!
- Tugboat, Creative Lead for High Five Studios
New update with many fixes and the beginning of new, huge, fixes!
On the topic of prisoner animation: you have been heard. While many of the animations were fine, we also have expirienced some issues with prisoners eyes bulging out of their head, and we are working on the fix for this. This fix has begun, and many of the animaion are in this build, however, this is a massive fix and will be working its way into several updates over the next three days. We'll talk more about this when it is finished.
In addition, we have revised the gaurd AI to be a little more workable, and have QA testers working on the rough edges of those interactions.
Keep offering feedback, both here, on our facebook, and directly to us.
Thanks for taking part in our early access!
Tugboat, Creative Lead at High Five Studios
New update! More changes coming tomorrow!
We also made one change that we feel is important to call out individually: we added a disclaimer to the opening cinematic. Though we felt most of the information in this disclaimer to be evident throughout the game, we wanted to make our views towards the setting very clear across the board.
The fixes listed for tomorrow will still be aimed at exposing content that is already in the game, such as updating animations for each of the prisoners individually, and overhauling their pathing to make it look significantly more natural.
We look forward to hearing back more from the community as the game progresses, and will be working hard to bring improvements with every new version.
Thanks
- Tugboat, Creative Lead for High Five Studios
Bugs, Early Access, and Game Improvements
To kick our bugfixing off. We have also just fixed the issues that have shown up elsewhere (our reviews, discussions, and other websties)
Thanks for participating in the early access of our game, and we look forward to making progress!
Release Bugs
EARLY ACCESS IS NOW LIVE!
Early Access - Expectations, small delays, and timings
Make sure to keep an eye on our twitter and instagram for further updates!
1/21-1/28 Dev Blog (EARLY ACCESS COMING NEXT WEEK!)
This is the big “Early Access Expectations” dev blog. If you want to know what the early access will be, jump to the second paragraph. Warning: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD.
We began the long progress (that will never really end) of implementing the narrative for the game (specifically, the voice lines). We also got the music implemented in the game for (what was originally meant to be) the full music system. On the design aspect of the game, Spider lady got a small facelift so that she looked better in her behavior (and to make fog look nicer). Programmatically, the team has been working overtime in order to get not only the narrative, but the entirety of art assets (all 80 prisoners for the game is no small pipeline to manage) and also to fix bugs that impede playability. For the studio as a whole, we had two major progressions: the first being a hard release date: Wednesday, February 7! After all of the deliberations on marketing and game quality we have managed to determine what will be in the early access (more on this in a moment). In addition to deciding on a release date, we also attended our first con with Prisoner, which was an absolutely amazing experience. Being the only professional studio in Alabama, we did not expect a huge turnout, but the local community proved that we were insanely wrong. The response that they gave was hugely positive, and every team member who was at the con left feeling far more proud of their work and far more proud of where we are from. Developing in a state that has no other professional development can get lonely at times, and the response that we received from the community not only eased that for us, but will also help other, aspiring developers in Alabama, and will hopefully let us give back to our local community.
The early access has been solidified, and every day we are getting closer to having it finished. Given the state of early access releases in the past, we would like to take a minute to clarify what it means to us, why we are doing it, and what it will be. Prepare for slight spoilers. Our game will include, on early access release: a collection (five) monsters that are inspired from Japanese folklore, a small amount of narrative in the form of other prisoners, a lot of horror, and an enjoyable and memorable experience for the player. It will not have the entire planned narrative; due to the development process of this game, we recently overhauled the narrative and it is simply too ambitious to make it into the initial early access. Instead of having more sparse narrative, we opted to add it in, iteratively, over the course of the next two months. It will not have a branched, complete ending; there will be an ending to the game, but for the full 1.0 release planned for March we are going to deliver the full, official, canon ending that takes into account all of the prisoners and guards in the camp, including the player. Our Early Access will not have a full set of steam achievements. There will be many in the final release of the game, but the early access will include a smaller subset.
We have chose to do an early access for two reasons: the first being community engagement, and the second being testing. Engaging the community in a game is the single best way to determine which parts of the game are the best parts. We have done the best we could, but seeing which portions of the game sit well with the community will help provide guidance as we plan the future of Prisoner. The second reason, testing, is a little less fun. It is unreasonable for any indie studio to test their game on a wide variety of hardware. Bringing the game into the marketplace allows us to get feedback on hardware our players have that we don't own to test on.
As for what we can promise as our portion of the early access: bug reports are going to be read, considered, and patched. As a central part of this early access, we are going to be trying to identify and solve every bug we can, first and foremost. We will be listening to opinions on content: if you find something fun, say so. If you hate it, let us know. This is a time when we are going to be staying agile with all of our changes, and we are going to seriously listen to the community when trying to improve our game. We also want to address our role in the community: we do understand that everyone who plays our game has invested both time and money to support our studio and play our game. Our goal has been, and will continue to be, to provide the best play experience that we can. Every member of the studio plays games, and has been an involved gamer in the past. We see how other studios act, and we feel strongly about the decisions they make. We hope to follow the good examples, and avoid the bad ones to do well by the overall community and the individual players.
Though these devblogs normally cover more content, but that's going to be all for this week. While there have been many other achievements, (the entire ambient music suite is getting overhauled yet again because we keep getting better at doing fun things with the audio) those are going to be covered next week. This week, watch the new trailer, and let us know how you feel about the upcoming game!
1/14-1/21 Dev Blog
This last week in the studio has been impossibly busy across every department. As we get closer to the release of this game, the studio is struggling to stay on top of the workload. Across the board, we are moving into final stages of creation with all of the content planned for the early access; working without version in this situation control means a very clogged pipeline. In addition, preparing for release means testing the game far more than reasonable, which means miles of QA data and bug-fixes to be implemented across the board.
The first and most notable change of this week is the narrative. Personnel changes always bring shakeup, and in this case there is a very welcome reimagination of what this game says narratively. This does not mean that the themes of the game are changing (those are still deeply ingrained in the art and design of the game) but the human characters have all received facelifts, and the way the narrative will be delivered was reconsidered to better match with the game. Most impressively, the changes to the script were all delivered within the week leaving us in an advantageous position (for once).
Which brings us to audio: music, voices, and screaming. This past week, the music changes that had already been laid out were delivered, and we now how the first half of the full suite of music ready to go into the game. Before the week is out, the full suite of music will be both composed and implemented. On the more technical side of audio production is the voice lines. The new changes to the script mean a mountain of work for the audio team, but with concrete plans in place, it should be completed shortly and much of the spoken narrative will be ready by the weeks end. In addition, our playtesting management is focusing heavily on player interactions with sound cues, and the systematic side of sounds in Prisoner will be significantly more refined by the full release.
Moving forward in the lineup is art. As the art in the game has progressed, the art style has become more defined than in the early days. This means that some considerations were made mindfully on much of the art, but not on the earlier pieces. The art team has worked hard this week to isolate some of the most obvious cases for this and updates have been planned to consolidate the artistic feel of the project. This attention extends to more than just characters; the new environment from last weeks changes means a shifted level-feel, and more changes to many of the structures to account for this. In addition, the level has taken on a static quality, relative to all of the changes to the rest of the game, so dynamic effects (mostly non-structural) have been drawn up for future updates.
On the side of design, as the game inches ever closer to our desired product, some of the monsters have been left behind. Many of the changes from last week meant that some of the monsters feel dull in comparison. To match this with our themes, the monsters have been reconsidered, redrawn, and partially overhauled to both take advantage of new infrastructure and make use of the new asymmetries in our design. In other words, as the game expands, so to does the capabilities of the systems and as a result, each monster becomes more distinct; older monsters have been partially rewritten to reduce overlap and take advantage of fun and interesting parts of their design.
As is the curse of game production, all of the previous changes bring both programming expansions and bug fixes for the future. Our playtesting section has been furiously stress-testing the game within several breakpoints. Each update brings an enormous section of bug-fixing that are being tackled by programming as well as serving as the exit point for every single pipeline. On top of bug fixes, systems implementation, and pipeline finishing, programming has been setting up for the full release, which mostly means familiarizing ourselves with the current code base. Having more than one person programming means not everyone knows every single line of code. When the game fully launches, we will inevitably be fixing bugs which we have not yet discovered, and effective management means the entire programming team needs to be able to tackle any single one.
This has been our second to last week putting content into the project, and as a result, we have been extraordinarily busy trying to plan, create, implement, and fix assets that will eventually by played by many people. The stress on the team is building, and the pressure that every team is under grows with every passing day, but so does the anticipation. The possibility of having both reliability and sustainability in our production is far more exciting than it sounds. Not only does it mean a smaller sense constant of panic for the entire studio, but also the ability to deliver not only more content, but content that is more meaningful to both the creator and the player. The launch of the early access carries that possibility and the promise of openness and consumer feedback. As time continues to pass, so to do tensions and excitements begin to rise! The next week will be both busy and exciting for everyone!
1/7-1/14 Dev Blog
In addition, we moved on to the final step of our prisoner model workflow which involves flushing out the animations for the prisoners and finally putting each prisoner onto their very own skeleton so that they can be appropriately tall, short, skinny, and fat. This means a massive amount of retargeting animations, but in the end, it will be well worth the cost.
More content is on the way in the form of a new monster. Our art team has been hard at work on a kabuki-themed demon using our new toys, Substance Designer and Substance Painter, to compliment Blender and Photoshop. In addition, we have started to rework Slit Mouth to really capitalize on the parts of her that were more successful than originally anticipated. On the flip-side of the coin, our playtesting has shown that her dismembered friend is not having the desired effect, so No Legs is being taken back to the drawing board for a top-to-bottom rework in the more distant future.
A new monster also meant a whole new set of sounds. In addition to working on an entire array of noises, alerts, and ambiance for the new monster, final decisions were made about music implementation. What was once a few ambient tracks playing throughout the day will now be a heavily situation-based score that moves with the monsters in the level to provide both a strong direction to the game and a clear ambient feel.
With the new engine, we also took a new pen to the map, redoing all of the foliage for the game, sprucing up the textures on the ground, and making the barriers at the edge of the level more natural than they were before. The grass in the level is now less obtrusive to help with visual noise, the trees are more evenly dispersed make the forest feel more realistic and be easier to walk through, and the lighting system was completely overhauled with the new engine. All of these changes were also great strides for the performance of the full project and allowed us to configure the scalability so that people with lower-end computers had the option to trim the trees a little. This leaves only building touch-ups and partial retexturing to be done on the level as a whole before it is in the final version, and puts us within arms reach of an early-access-ready version of the game
On the narrative side of development, we laid the groundwork for a complete overhaul of the level. Personnel changes coupled with unsolvable issues in the old concept meant a complete rewrite for our side characters stories. While all of us have our hopes high for what this will mean in the long run, in the short run we are trying to come up with solutions for entering an early access with fewer side-character narratives than originally planned, though we are pleased to, once again, have a firm narrative footing with a strong roadmap for progress.
In the next week we will be revisiting our conversation about bugs that need fixing and greatly expanding our play-testing to help control and balance content. The discussion of when to release the game at a firm date, and how to strategize the lead-in on social media will come back. This process has been ongoing for months, but as we get closer to the finished product, we are forced to make very difficult decisions about which features are necessary. This will make a huge impact on our plan for the next few weeks, and form the next set of tasks for QA.
All in all, the improvements this week presented several interesting challenges, but also gave way to developments that heavily invigorated the team and got them really excited to play and release the final product.