Moved around a few buttons on the controller: now Throw a Rock is on Right Bumper, the gear inventory is on Left Bumper, and the notes inventory is DPad left. This means you'll never again accidentally throw a rock when you meant to subdue someone! Take a look at the controls screen in game to see the new layout.
Now when you press and hold Right Bumper to throw a rock, you go to into a "rock aim" mode, which will allow you to aim it wherever you want without raising your gun. Then release the button to throw. This works on keyboard too, with whatever you might have mapped Throw a Rock to.
Further adjustments to how the aiming works with rocks or with guns - we find it feels a lot better. This combined with the rock-aim mode mentioned above has made our rock throwing a lot more accurate.
Did a big pass on guard variation throughout Freedom Town, with some variations to their behavior that change up more after you achieve endings. We also made the guards smarter about getting distracted by rocks, so be careful with your throws.
You can check that you have latest version by the spotting the number "v1.1" in the upper left on the Settings menu.
We feel good about this v1.1 release - this is our fifth update to the Steam build since launch. For those of you catching up, here's a round-up of some of our changes from previous updates:
New version of the PA voice over system that ensures less repetition, so you won't hear lines again for a much, much longer time. And as part of that you will hear "The Working Song" a lot less (one of our more persistent requests...)
Searched around our archives and found a small group of Isaac and Rebecca Walker lines that weren't in the game before, which are now added to the PA system in various places.
More logic changes that make sure each game you start has guaranteed differences from your previous game. Previously, some unlucky players would get served up a very similar game twice in a row.
Ability to skip through conversations and narration bits, so if you're on a replay and want to move faster through a conversation with one of the friendly characters, you can.
Fixed ending logic problem where if you had non-lethally subdued Isaac or Rebecca, the game would sometimes think you had killed them. Many people brought this one up too...
For PC/Mac users, Vsync options on the Graphics settings screen. We have more graphics settings updates planned, let us know if there is another that is high priority for you.
Much-requested multiple volume sliders for conversation, loudspeakers, sound effects, and music all separated, so you can balance and mix the volume how you like it.
We still have some more promised changes on the way - such as some colorblind support - that we will be working on next. As always, let us know what you think of the changes or if there's a fix you've been hoping for that you feel has been overlooked so far. We've got a great thread in the forums for that: https://steamcommunity.com/app/339830/discussions/0/1643170269575444394/
Thanks to everyone who has played the game and left all the helpful comments so far - we're glad to have addressed so many of the issues and think now's a good time to try it again.
Because, still, Isaac & Rebecca are waiting for you in in jungle.
- Richard Director/Designer/Writer on The Church in the Darkness
New Update is Live - v1.0.8
Hello everyone,
We've just posted our latest update, v1.0.8!
Here's what's included:
Fixed ending logic problem where if you had non-lethally subdued Isaac or Rebecca, the game would sometimes think you had killed them. This ended up being fairly involved to fix, but I also tuned some other aspects of the endings and I think the logic is a lot tighter now overall.
Fixed a few more cases where dialog from the PA would repeat dialog where it shouldn't.
Searched around our archives and found a small group of Isaac and Rebecca Walker lines that weren't in the game before, which are now added to the PA system in various places.
Added the ability to skip note-related voice over. If you pick up one of the documents that has narration (or for the ones you start the game with), you can now hit a key/button to get it to stop.
By popular demand, added a confirmation dialog to quitting a game without saving.
To play with these changes, confirm that you have the latest build by seeing the version # Sv1.0.8 in the upper left corner of the Settings screen.
Next, we'll be looking at some core control tweaks and other ways to vary up each playthrough. We're also going to investigate some adjustments to the save system and we still plan on getting to some colorblind support. Your patience is appreciated, and we haven't forgotten! Check out the Features thread if you have more requests: https://steamcommunity.com/app/339830/discussions/0/1643170269575444394/
As always, we value your input, so let us know what you think.
- Richard
Third Update Is Live - V1.0.6
We've just posted our third update, v1.0.6!
We didn't do an announcement for the second update which we posted last week, because we were trying to get one more thing fixed and thought we would be patching again quickly. That ended up becoming a more involved system than we expected and here we are. We have learned our lesson and plan to announce all updates in the future.
So rolling together the last two updates, the changes include:
New version of the PA voice over system - there were shortcomings in the old design that made certain lines play much more frequently than was ideal, and other lines would almost never be heard. The new system will actually remember what lines were played in all the games you have played (not just the current one), so you won't hear lines again for a much, much longer time.
As part of the above, you will also hear "The Working Song" a lot less (one of our more persistent requests...)
Some other logic changes that make sure each game you start has guaranteed differences from your previous game. Previously, some unlucky players would get served up a very similar game twice in a row.
Vsync options on the Graphics settings screen. We have more graphics settings updates planned, let us know if there is another that is high priority for you.
Tuned deadzone and made some other adjustments when playing with controller - this is a work in progress with some other planned controller improvements coming.
Made the "The Unknown Unknown" achievement easier to get - a bug before meant that if you talked to a friendly character, that would count against you getting this achievement. We also fixed a few other minor achievement bugs.
Improvements to our Japanese translation.
Next on our list is a change to the ending logic, where knocking out Isaac or Rebecca may be counted as killing them when it should not. This is a much requested fix, and we started looking into how to fix it properly. The ramifications on the game logic are a bit more than we expected, so we wanted to get this patch out first, and now we'll be tackling this logic problem next.
You should automatically get this build - if you want to check that you have the latest, go look on the Settings screen, where you should see the version number Sv1.0.6 in the upper left corner
As always, let us know what you think of the changes as we get started on the next set.
- Richard
First Update Is Live
We've just posted our first update v1.0.3!
This includes the following:
Much-requested multiple volume sliders for conversation, loudspeakers, sound effects, and music all separated, so you can balance and mix the volume how you like it. The loudspeaker voices are a bit quieter by default.
Ability to skip through conversations, so if you're on a replay and want to move faster through a conversation with one of the friendly characters, you can.
Fixed a lot of balance and bugs with the conversation and prayer murmurings that were making them play much more than they should have.
Fixed various problems with the Japanese subtitles.
Implementing the volume sliders involved touching more areas of the code than we expected, and made this update a little slower than we would have liked, but it's easily our most requested feature, so we hope it serves you well. We'll be moving on to some more gameplay related fixes next - see our pinned post on the forum for more on that or to post your own requests.
You should automatically get this build - if you want to check that you have the latest, go look on the Settings screen, where you should see the version number Sv1.0.3 in the upper left corner (not to mention the volume sliders right below).
Let us know what you think!
- Richard
THE CHURCH IN THE DARKNESS - OUT NOW
We have launched! After our lengthy development, it is great to see people trying out the game and finally getting to figure out what is going on in the jungles of Battuela.
Thanks to those of you who already picked up the game! To those of you who maybe have it on your wishlist but haven't yet, remember we have a 20% off discount just for launch week, so now's a great time to start your infiltration of Freedom Town.
Thanks to Blonde Viking (Will) and Rangutang (Geoffrey) who streamed the game on our store page on launch day (and which we have been repeating since). They're lovely people and if you want to go check them out on their own channels: https://www.twitch.tv/viking_blonde/ and https://www.twitch.tv/derangutang
Launch day is a lot of frantic things going on as you can imagine, but now that we are one day in we're reviewing the feedback and looking to work on our first update, focusing on quality of life improvements that will help everyone out as you try to seek out more narrative. In any development cycle, there's things that you want to do that you simply don't have time to. And for a very small team, The Church in the Darkness is a complex game with lots of moving parts. Now that we're getting your feedback we're going to prioritize the top things to improve. I've started a thread in the forums for just such feedback: https://steamcommunity.com/app/339830/discussions/0/1643170269575444394/
If you like the game a steam review is most appreciated. And if there's something that bugs you or feels broken, let us know in the comments below or on the forums and we'll see what we can do to fix it.
Thanks everyone!
- Richard
Director/Designer/etc
We Open Our doors on August 2nd!
Hello everyone,
The long awaited day is finally almost upon us - mark your calendars for August 2nd. I'm happy to announce that you will be able to infiltrate our always changing jungle cult compound next Friday, when we will be shipping the full version of The Church in the Darkness on Steam!
To commemorate our launch, above you can see a new painting for the game from our artist Jason Bennett. And if a good launch trailer is more your speed, cult leaders Isaac and Rebecca have a message they want you to hear in our launch trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iBS5Tp5NWA
We're just putting the finishing touches on the PC/Mac build right now, polishing the keyboard remapping that we wanted to make sure was in the Steam version. We'll also be shipping with Chinese, Russian, and Japanese language localization, all of which helps us get more people into our jungle.
I know we've kept you waiting a really long time for this game and we appreciate your patience sticking around for our lengthy development. In that time, we've added lots of features after rounds of playtesting. For a few examples, on the narrative side, we brought in a conversation system and put extra care into refining our endings. Or the gameplay side, we refined our difficulty levels and implemented a system to unlock additional content for each successive run through the game.
They tell me I'm supposed to tell everyone to Wishlist the game, but I doubt you'd be reading this if you haven't already Wishlisted, so thank you for that! I'm also happy to say if you pick it up during our launch week, you'll be able to get a 20% launch discount, bringing the game down from $19.99 to $15.99. You'll also be able to pick up our True Believer special edition with the full 28 song soundtrack and a collection of behind the scenes videos we've assembled that we think you'll enjoy.
We are so eager for you to explore Freedom Town. If you're as eager as us, picking the game up on launch day August 2nd will help us get the word out about the game, which in turn helps us support post-launch content. We'd love to continue enhancing the procedural systems, game balance, and hopefully add more languages.
But most of all I want to start hearing back from you what you find when you go venturing into the cult compound in the jungle. Which version of the story did you get? How many endings did you achieve? What difficulty did you do it at? Tell us about all the surprises along the way. We think you'll find it was worth the wait.
- Richard
Director/Designer/Writer on The Church in the Darkness
All Eyes on our Gameplay Stream + More About Difficulty Levels
Hi everyone,
I wanted to check in as we are working hard toward shipping and will have an announcement on the exact date soon - check back for specifics in the next month. But don’t fear, it won’t be long before you’ll get to stare down our cult leaders Isaac and Rebecca in person.
If you want more about the game right now, I wanted to make sure everyone got to see what we did for LudoNarraCon - the first game convention hosted and streamed right here on Steam. A ton of interesting story-related games streamed gameplay and other content all weekend long, all organized by our publisher Fellow Traveller. For The Church in the Darkness, we did two different streams on the game plus a panel discussion.
First up, I am sure you'll most want to see this long look at our gameplay. Some spoilers in here, so watch carefully, but the first 15 minutes or so are fairly safe. We were lucky to play with Geoffrey Card, senior designer at Undead Labs (who I got work with on State of Decay years ago). Geoffrey is pretty good at games (check out his many streams for examples of that), and when he plays again, I'll definitely make him go up a difficulty level. More on that below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqL5aM0tRM
I also got to do a panel on procedural storytelling with a great crew of designers: Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress), Bekah Saltsman (Overland, Night in the Woods), and Tanya X Short (The Shrouded Isle, Boyfriend Dungeon).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAHI1MfdbQ
And finally, we had a Q&A with Ellen McLain and John Patrick Lowrie (our cult leader actors) - we talked about how they got involved, inspiration behind the story, and their own background with 1970s “alternative societies.” We definitely got into the weeds with that, while we also took questions from people in the chat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzUOraASA9Q
The Church in the Darkness we feel is something different for a narrative game: it's got very specific story and fully voiced characters, but that story is also dynamic and it is designed to be replayed. It doesn't feel like a simulation, but under the hood it really is (and that's one reason it's taken so long to finish). So once you get your hands on the game and get your first ending, remember you've just started to unearth everything that's in there. Go get some more endings to find new characters, alternate versions of the cult leaders, and of course tons of different outcomes for you, your nephew, and the people of the Collective Justice Mission.
Once you get to replaying it to get different endings, some of you will find you're mastering it, and that's when we hope you'll bump it up to a higher difficulty. Geoffrey Card from our gameplay stream linked above is a great example. He's clearly someone who should play at one of the higher difficulties, and I know he can take it, so I'm inclined to guilt him until he does. But each player gets to decide that for themselves. If you just want to get more story or don't want to be challenged and pushed, stick to the default difficulty or even go down to something easier. But if you want to really master the game systems, go up a difficulty or two. One feature we've added while in our final stretch is that the game now tracks what difficulty level you achieved for each of the main ending types, so you'll be able to look at your overall progress and decide if you want to push yourself more.
But that's also something I'm looking forward to learning when we do ship - how well does everyone do? Will we need to tune the gameplay or even add more difficulty options to expand the range of challenge? I can't wait to find out.
- Richard
Director/Designer/Writer on The Church in the Darkness
Thank you for Attending LudoNarraCon!
THANK YOU for coming the to first #LudoNarraCon! 💖😍
This was a great experience for our team, and we were thrilled to share it with you. We hope you enjoyed it -- we did! And if you didn't get to see any of the panels from the main stage, you can now view them all on YouTube!
LuduNarraCon Streaming Schedule - This Weekend!
Hi everyone,
Following up from my last post, this weekend we'll be participating in LudoNarraCon, the online convention about interesting narrative games. It's this coming weekend, right here free on Steam! You'll see most of the content on our Store page live, with a chat you can join right along side.
Here's the schedule of when we will be live with The Church in the Darkness. All times are on Friday, May 10th:
7AM US Pacific Time - We're going to be live streaming our full game build with special guest Geoffrey, a fellow Seattle game developer and streaming veteran, playing it for the first time. Geoffrey and I will have fun talking about the game as he tries to survive and infiltrate Freedom Town. This will go for an hour to an hour and a half.
11AM US Pacific Time - We're going to be hosting our illustrious voice actors John Patrick Lowrie and Ellen McLain on our stream! They'll be talking about their work as voice actors, their other games (you know, Portal, DOTA 2, Team Fortress 2, even The Suffering) and of course we'll get into The Church in the Darkness and how they were involved in coming up with the game. This will also go for one hour to one hour and a half, and then loop with our other session.
3PM US Pacific Time- I'll be on a panel about Procedural Storytelling with Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress), Tanya Short (Boyfriend Dungeon, The Shrouded Isle) and Rebecca Saltsman (Overland). This won't be on our Steam page, but will be linked from the LudoNarraCon home page, at http://www.ludonarracon.com
Or if you can't make those live times, come by anytime over the weekend of May 10th-13th and if we can get the tech sorted out we are planning to set the streams to repeating on our store page.
We'll be looking at the Steam streaming chat as these sessions go on, and you can throw us questions live in that. But we know a lot of you may not watch it live, but still want your own questions answered by us right on camera. So if you have a question for John or Ellen (about our game or their games, or about voice acting, etc), or myself, or anything about The Church in the Darkness, we've created a handy form for you to use to submit Qs:
Or just post them below in this thread, I'll check it before we go on.
Looking forward to your questions and/or hope to see you in the chat this Friday!
- Richard
Director on The Church in the Darkness
LudoNarraCon - Coming Next Weekend!
We are in the final stages! Final bits of polish are getting done, bugs hunted down, and we're implementing a few PC-specific features like control remapping and (lest we forget) Steam trading cards.
But first, we have a bit of news I think will interest you. I know you've seen us post here in the past about conventions we've gone to - particularly all the PAXes we've attended in developing this game. And those are great for people who can make it to them. But what if that's just not possible because of where you live or other factors? I suspect for many of you getting to these shows just isn't possible.
Well we may have something of a solution - this coming weekend we'll be participating in LudoNarraCon - an online conference focused on unique narrative games - and it's going to be held on Steam and totally free!
For May 10th-13th we and a number of other intriguing narrative games will be showing off some new content and streaming it direct to our Steam store pages. For us this means showing off our near-final build for a good chunk of time, and some other interesting videos we think you'll enjoy. If you can, come by when we play the game live and throw us questions in the chat. Or if you can't make our live streaming times (which will probably mostly be Friday May 10th), come by anytime over the weekend of May10th-13th and you'll see some encore presentations.
I'm going to be posting more about this next week as we lock down our schedule - check back by Wednesday to find out our exact plans and what our timings will be. For right now, if you want to learn what other cool games are showing, head over to the LudoNarraCon website:
https://www.ludonarracon.com/
What do you think, does this sort of online convention sound interesting? Any questions you want answered as part of the show? Post a comment below and we'll try to get to it.
Oh, and if you just can't wait, here's a video you might enjoy - I recently did an interview with Suzanne from our publisher Fellow Traveller, where we talked multiple endings, player choices, and why cults like music so much. Take a watch right here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtiL0scd5Cg
Though we do enjoy traveling to events in person, we like the idea of holding an event where you can come and join us wherever in the world you may be. Hope to see you next weekend!
- Richard
Director/Designer/Writer on The Church in the Darkness
