We're currently gearing up for launch and it's great to see all the pieces of the game coming together. Since last fall we've changed the game a lot - feedback from our alpha players and other trusted folks led to changes in our inventory system, new systems for changing gameplay and story elements in replays, and a new conversation system for how you interact with the friendly characters in Freedom Town. Now we've moved on to tracking down those last elusive bugs. Working with our new publisher we're getting a bunch more testing than we expected, which I hope translates to a more stable game when we launch.
I mean it when I say no one is as bummed by our delays in shipping as we are. But on the other hand I like how stable the game is feeling, how some of these design changes make the game feel a bunch better. I hope you'll think it's worth it and I'm very appreciative of everyone's patience.
More Voice Actors
Our voice and music recording has officially wrapped on the game - we just did a final music session with our cult leader John Patrick Lowrie.
When we first revealed our character trailer last December, you may have noticed it features some voices you have not heard before, and I want to tell you who they are.
Rafeedah Keys plays KeeAnne and Theresa. On The Suffering games I did years back, Rafeedah played Carmen - player character Torque's (ghostly) wife. I remember after a long search we finally cast her and that’s when The Suffering really started to get its emotional core. Working with her on those games over many sessions over many years was very creatively fulfilling back then, and reconnecting with her for The Church in the Darkness has been tremendous.
Arif Kinchen plays Alex and Charles. Arif and I first worked together on The Suffering - Ties that Bind where he played one of the main characters, Torque’s best friend Miles. Since The Suffering Arif has been staying super busy, perhaps most famously playing Pierce Washington in the Saint’s Row games, but recently you might also have heard him in anything from Mafia III to Where the Water Tastes Like Wine to State of Decay 2.
To read more about our actors and the characters they play, check out our in-depth blog post:
http://churchinthedarkness.tumblr.com/post/181224780839/cults-inspire-such-devotion-in-their-members-at
Next Stop: PAX East
And as a final note, we're happy to say we'll be back at PAX East (Boston, March 28-31) again this year, showing off a near-final build of the game. With our ramp up to full launch this will be our last big show before shipping. Players who can make it to Boston will get to see the game in its best state yet, and everyone else will get to try out the full game not that long after.
Last year PAX East was one of our favorite shows, and we're glad to do be there again.
Thanks again to everyone for their patience - the end is in sight!
- Richard
Director/Designer/Writer on The Church in the Darkness
New Character Trailer from Kinda Funny Games Showcase
Hi everyone,
Who joins a cult?
It's been a little longer than I prefer since my last post here, but I wanted to show up with something new and exciting for you to take a look at.
We just debuted a brand new trailer as part of the Kinda Funny Games Showcase event they held on Twitch. So cue the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG6Z3x32nyc
With this trailer we wanted to show off some of the people you will find and talk to inside Freedom Town. In this trailer you'll meet KeeAnne, Charles, Theresa, and Alex and hear in their own words why they joined. Why did they came to Freedom Town and what they think of it now that maybe it's not what they dreamed it would be?
And of course, when you meet these people in the actual game, you'll get to decide for yourself. Do you believe them? Do you trust them? Do you want to help them? Can you get them to help you? And Alex is your nephew - he's why you go Freedom Town in the first place. You need to decide if you're going to make him leave, even if he may want to stay.
In terms of development, as I mentioned in my last post, we launched our alpha back in September (and you can read more about that here). Based on feedback from the alpha and from a bunch of trusted people we had playtest the game, we have a list of polish and features we want to get into the game to make it as strong as possible for its launch early next year. In particular, we want to make sure the game has lots of reasons for you to go back and replay it, from difficulty levels to new stuff to discover as you keep exploring the depths of Freedom Town. So that's what we're focused on in December and January. When we're not busy making some cool new trailers.
As always, let us know if you have any questions or just what you thought of the new trailer! Getting feedback from people on this forum (as well as trade shows, the alpha, etc) has had a huge part in getting the game to where it is now. And for that I am very thankful.
- Richard
Director/Designer/Writer
Alpha Launch!
Hi everyone,
I promised you more big news this week, and those of you on our mailing list will already have seen this particular announcement: we have recently launched an alpha build of the game!
One of the top questions we've gotten since we announced the game was "are you doing a beta?" We didn't want to go the full Early Access route as, with narrative being such a strong core for The Church in the Darkness, we knew that we wanted to keep a good piece of the game shrouded for the full release. But with so many requests to play something sooner, we also wanted to give people who had been following the game for a while a chance to try out our gameplay a little early. This will also give us some critical feedback and help us determine what most needs to be worked on for the full release.
We also realized that shipping this year was going to be really hard while also trying to get all the features and story to the level we wanted. Talking things over with our new partners at Fellow Traveller, we decided it was best to ship the full game early next year. Though you'll have to wait a little longer for the complete experience, we hope shipping the alpha gives players who have been waiting patiently something to play now.
In the alpha you can try out the gameplay and explore most of Freedom Town, but a good chunk of the narrative content and all of the game’s different endings have been held back for the final release. That said, there’s tons of story to find and explore in here, and it will give you a chance to polish up your skills.
And yes, if you get the alpha, you will also get a Steam key for when we ship early next year. I really enjoy the community we've started here, and have no doubt we will be right here in a big way for our full launch.
- Richard
Finding our Fellow Traveller
We're back from a great PAX West here in our hometown on Seattle, which was another great chance to put the build in front of players. In the last few weeks since the show, we've been polishing some edges off our build. We've got two big pieces of news we haven't yet posted here on Steam. The second will come at the end of the week, but the first I thought we should share now.
We’re happy say we’re partnering up with Fellow Traveller to help us publish The Church in the Darkness!
The Australia-based Fellow Traveller is perhaps best known for publishing games like Orwell and Hacknet, two mature-oriented titles that tell unconventional, challenging stories. The good folks at Fellow Traveller have been fans of The Church in the Darkness since our announcement, and we all feel our game is a great fit with their lineup. We decided it made a lot of sense for us to partner up with them to make the game as strong as we all want it to be and also make sure it gets out into the world as smoothly as possible.
It was great to do PAX with the help of Fellow Traveller because we not only showed the game in our own, jungle cult compound themed booth, but also in theirs. And while we played the game on controller in our booth, in Fellow Traveller's we had it playable with keyboard mouse for the first time. And we feel it went quite well! We're looking forward to continuing to work with them as we march inevitably toward launching.
So that's our first big piece of news for the week. For the second piece of news check back on Friday and we'll have long awaited updates on our ship date and when you can play our game...
And as always, thanks for your patience.
- Richard
Big News Ahead + PAX West Plans
Hi everyone,
My apologies, it has been too long since our last post - a side effect of us being deep into finishing this game. We've actually recently been working on improvements to our mouse/keyboard controls. Though we support controller and often play it that way ourselves, we like mouse/keyboard too, and know a lot of you prefer it. We've looked at Monaco and Hotline Miami for inspiration, but If anyone has any top-down exploration-based games that do mouse-keyboard well I'd love to hear about them in the comments below.
We've also got some big news coming up that we'll be announcing next week. The best first place to find about any of that is on our mailing list. Oh and you can sign up right over here:
www.paranoidproductions.com/mailinglist
If the mailing list really isn't you speed though, don't worry, we'll be sharing the information back here, but it might not be quite as quick.
In other news, happy to say we will once again be at PAX West! This is a hometown show for a bunch of us so it feels like a tradition - we even still call in PAX Prime. This year we’ll be bringing the “One Shot One Life” challenge we first did at PAX East earlier this year - see if you can make it through our demo on the hardest difficulty on one playthrough and you might win something special. If you're going to be at the show, come find us on the 6th floor in booth #6218. Here's a flashback to our booth from last year:
We can confirm we will be having our preacher actors Ellen McLain and John Patrick Lowrie stopping by the booth Saturday and Sunday from 2 to 3:30 each day. You may also want to attend their panel "Video Game Voiceovers: The Sequel" on Saturday night at 8PM in the Cat Theater with a bunch of other great actors.
Or, if design is more your speed, come see me talk along with developers from BioShock, Horizon Zero Dawn, State of Decay and more on "Why We Love the Apocalypse." The panel will go over why developers keep making games set in an apocalypse, after an apocalypse, or in our case, an apocalypse that may or may not be coming. That's Sunday morning at 10:30am in the Sphinx Theater.
But if you can't make it to PAX, no worries, we've got plans for how to get a good look at the game to all of you too. Did you see where I mentioned the mailing list above? If we don't see you at PAX West, we hope to see you on there. And if not there, well, I promise not to wait so long before posting again here...
- Richard
The One Shot One Life Challenge, Talking Difficulty Levels, PAX East Wrap-Up
Hello all,
It's been a little bit since our last update, but we've been very hard at work putting a few more pieces of content into the game and polishing and tuning and some other technical pieces we're still putting together to make this game complete.
PAX East was a great show for us. It was nice to see our demo and the latest incarnation of our unique booth drew folks into our jungle.
We tried something at PAX East for the first time - we had a gameplay contest for players. We called it the "One Shot, One Life" challenge. We really liked how it worked out - we probably had 20-30 people take the challenge and all in all 6 people were successful.
The challenge was this - play the game on our hardest difficulty in one attempt, while we watch. Make it to the end of our short demo without dying, and you would win our collector's set of pins.
He have four difficulty levels in the game, which are Interloper, Infiltrator, Spy, and the hardest, Mole. On Mole players do not have the benefit of being able to see enemy sight cones. There's also more guards. And perhaps trickiest of all, only one shot from an enemy will kill you (though depending on how you play they may still capture you instead of executing you immediately).
Difficulty levels have been an important part of the design from early on because, since it's a game that's designed to be replayed, it's important to give players who need more challenge a way to get that challenge. We want players to replay to see all the different scenarios and ways the narrative can play out, yes, but we also want them to engage with the gameplay challenge each time. Having watched the game at so many shows, we know some players find the game challenging as it is, while some really get it and need to be pushed more. And truth be told, the harder difficulties are how we originally thought of the game, and its how we play it when playtesting.
And for PAX East we wanted to see how well players would do when pushed to try our hardest. We encouraged people to practice ahead of time before doing their challenge run. And those skilled six players managed to pull it off. And once we launch, we'll be curious how people take to it. We may even add another difficulty, if people show they need it.
How do you feel about difficulty levels in your favorite Steam games? Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Beyond that, here’s a quick roundup of what the press thought of us:
Game Informer put us on their “Best Indie Games of PAX East” list with some lovely company. http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2018/04/07/the-best-indie-games-of-pax-east-2018.aspx
Mike Futter named us one of his Hidden Gems of PAX East in this panel (now-podcast) - take a listen to hear all the interesting games - we come up toward the end. http://ward-games.com/podcast/episode-129-hidden-gems-pax-east-ii/
Waypoint did a nice write up that was quite thoughtful on their experiences checking out the game.
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/vbxjpj/in-this-cult-themed-stealth-game-the-truth-is-always-changing
All in all a great show - and mega thanks to the Indie Megabooth for having us. But now we’re happy to back to work nailing the final boards into place in our Freedom Town.
And if you've read this far, I'm sure you're waiting for that moment where I tell you when we are shipping. For now, we are sticking with "2018" along with "as soon as we feel it's really, really done" (except for post-launch support of course). We are getting in serious talks with people about our launch, so it is at the top of our minds. Because we've worked on this game long enough, we don't want to get anything wrong as we get so close to the end, and we really can't wait for everyone to play it.
- Richard
See Us at PAX East and GDC!
Wanted to let everyone know of a few opportunities coming up very soon (very soon, in fact) to try out our latest demo for The Church in the Darkness.
Game Developer's Conference
The annual Game Developer's Conference is next week in San Francisco and we will be showing a new build featuring some characters you haven't met before. There's two primary places you can check out the game.
GDC - The MIX
If you're in San Francisco we'll be showing the game at the MIX event, held Monday March 19th from 7:30PM-11PM. Note that you don't need a GDC badge to attend, and it's free. Find more information right here:
http://www.mediaindieexchange.com/event/gdcweek2018/
GDC - Intel Indie Game Lounge
If you're at the GDC Expo itself, we'll also be showing the game on the Expo Floor inside Intel's booth, called their Indie Game Lounge. We'll be there Thursday March 22nd from 10 to 2. Come join our following!
PAX East - Indie Megabooth
And then, only a few weeks later, way on the other US coast, come find us at the east coast's largest game show PAX East. This time we're in Boston, April 5th-8th.
Last year we met a lot of cool folks at PAX East when we just had a little kiosk in the back of the hall. But this year we'll have a full booth and we're super glad to have been selected by the Indie Megabooth to be featured in their unique curated space. Thanks to those good people for welcoming our little jungle cult into their fold for this show.
And if you want to see all the other games in the Indie MEGABOOTH this year, here's a amazingly long trailer to give you a taste of each one. Look for us at the 9:25 mark
https://youtu.be/yvnNIlJgtBk?t=565
I realize not everyone can make it to these events, and after we'll be posting some good wrap ups afterword.
And two final things...
We passed a large internal milestone recently - with our full game playable, we have started getting a few trusted developer comrades to play the full game. This is essential for some expert feedback and for us to identify which parts are most in need of polish and clarification, so the narrative works as well as we want it to when you finally get your hands on the game.
I try to explain our shipping situation as often as possible, because it's the question we still get the most: we're working hard to ship this year, with a game we feel good about, and we want to announce the exact date only when it is completely locked in. But yes, we know everyone's ready to play the game. No one more than us.
And for now, it keeps getting hotter in the jungle...
- Richard
The Song of Forgiveness Music + Gameplay Video
Here's a video that's very special to us. This is The Song of Forgiveness, one of the songs written for the game by our own Preacher Isaac, John Patrick Lowrie, and performed with our Preacher Rebecca, Ellen McLain. (Of course, you may know them as TF2's Sniper and GLaDOS from a little game called Portal.)
Mixed in we've got a bunch of in-game footage which you haven't seen before, so we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F1K9VanXVA
This is one of the five original songs John wrote and performed for the game, which combined with four classic spirituals are songs you'll hear over the many different endings you can achieve... if you live that long.
John, Ellen and myself were all interviewed for this in depth story in Polygon about about how the acting and music for the game came together. For that, head over here:
And sometime this year, you will all get to see how it fits into the game...
Our next post here will be more gameplay oriented, as I assure you we're making tons of progress on that front. Why we just implemented the last missing ending yesterday. More later!
- Richard
Director/Designer/Writer/Etc on The Church in the Darkness
Big Recording Sessions, Still More Features, and Shipping
Over the last few months we went in for our final big voice acting sessions with our two lead actors. In December it was Preacher Rebecca, aka the inimitable Ellen McLain
And earlier in November it was Preacher Isaac, aka the singular John Patrick Lowrie
As always, these were moving sessions of heartfelt revolution and stirring conviction, as we have come to expect of our good preachers. Now we're hard at work getting all these lines processed and into the game.
Over the last few months we've also done a big push on core gameplay - including getting our new alarm system working that brings in the reinforcement in the form of our green coated guards (still thinking of the perfect name for them), as well as an overhaul of our AI tuning in general.
Another feature we have long had in the works is a "stick up" mode. You may remember an image of this from our announce trailer:
We recently made "stick up" mode fully featured - if you get the drop on someone, whether a guard or civilian, you can aim your gun at them and they'll go into a "stick up" state. You can then choose to search them, subdue them (lethally/non lethally) or shoot them. It's something we are still balancing, but it's good to properly have that feature working.
So that's a small taste of our progress - and without getting too spoiler-y. Obviously there's a lot I want to save for when people play the game for the first time. As I discussed in an earlier post, we're definitely now shipping in 2018. I know this will be disappointing for people who have been following us since we announced. No one wanted to get this game done in 2017 more than us, but we also want to deliver the experience we've promised and make it the best game possible. The reaction to the game has been so good, when playtesters or people at shows make suggestions, we want to take the time to figure out the best way to handle that feedback and implement it into the game. And all that takes time. And as a game with a strong narrative, we want to make sure the first version of the game you play will feel complete.
We appreciate your patience as we head in 2018, and we'll definitely keep you posted once we land on a specific date. Got any questions or comments? Let us know below...
- Richard
Dreamhack Art Gallery + PAX West Wrap Up
An art piece from The Church in the Darkness was accepted for this year's DreamHack art gallery. This means it will be hanging in a gallery at all their shows for the next year or so. So if you’re at DreamHack Denver THIS WEEKEND, look for us! And if you see it on display, send us a photo.
All credit to Martin Murphy, Jason Bennett, and Kyle Miller for all their good work that went into this piece - an assembly of documents you will find in Freedom Town. And thanks to Dreamhack and “hey” to all the other teams whose work was selected. Check them out here:
https://denver.dreamhack.com/17/amazing-art-selected-for-the-art-gallery/
Also, since our last posting here, we had a great PAX West. We showed off our new demo which featured prisoners you could free from their cages, a confrontation with preacher Isaac, chickens, pigs, and a Macaw, and and the first fully voiced appearance from Stella, the player character's sister. If you want a sneak peek at some of the gameplay, you can find a fast playthrough of one of the demo paths here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy6yXQbMEJM
At PAX we made it official that we're shipping in 2018, with emphasis on "as early as possible." But we don't want to give out a specific date until we are very certain about it. Of course as soon as we have something more specific we will post about it here.
Thanks to Jeff, Eka, Carl, Brigitte and Deborah for helping with the booth and showing the games to the countless folks who dove in. And once again eternal gratitude to our voice acting power couple Ellen & John for coming by and signing for two plus hours. And finally thanks to the Indie Megabooth for having us. Here's a wrap up from them:
http://indiemegabooth.com/youre-still-pax-west-2017-go-home-go/?utm_content=buffer510d6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
