PAX Voice Acting Panel Recording w/a Teaser Song + Hello from Steam Dev Days
We've been at Steam Dev Days this week, learning more about all sorts of features we're exploring trying out in the game. It's been an intense few days of talks and meeting folks, and it leaves us even more excited about shipping on Steam.
Being here made me want to post something to our page,and in particular I wanted to share all the very cool panel we did back at PAX West called “The Dark Art of Video Game Voice Acting Revealed!” with a lineup of veteran voice actors, including our own Ellen McLain and John Patrick Lowrie. Joining us were Darren Korb and Logan Cunningham from Supergiant Games (makers of Bastion, Transistor, and now Pyre) as well as veteran actor Elias Toufexis (best know for playing Adam Jensen in the recent Deus Ex games).
After talking about our past projects and how actors create signature characters, we got into current projects, which naturally led to a discussion about The Church in the Darkness. A few weeks before PAX John suggested singing a song from the game as part of the panel - John’s been writing multiple songs for us, and I’ve given him free rein with them. He gets the time period, he gets the characters of Isaac and Rebecca Walker, and best of all he can write a great piece of music. He played a song called “Lost Along the Way,” a 70s-folk inspired duet between he and Ellen. The live performance surpassed all my hopes and dreams, and from the applause we know the audience liked it too.
Enterprising podcaster Dave Kramer from busygamernation.com was in the audience and was kind enough to record our session and post it at the link below. The audio’s not great in the recording, but is better than you might expect for a guy using a microphone sitting in the audience. If you want to hear the song it starts around the 23 minute mark:
John & Ellen will be doing more songs for the game, and how we’ll use each of them is still something we’re working out. And of course the songs will change depending on the different permutations of our narrative. We're planning on having a sound track including all their music, but we're also figuring out ways to make the soundtrack not have spoilers so players first find the songs in-game. We'll keep you posted for more information on that.
Let us know what you think about the song or what you want to hear us talk about in our next panel!
- Richard
DEVBLOG Post - PAX Wrap-Up + PC Gamer Coverage
Hey all,
We recently showed off the game at PAX West for the first time, and it went really well. It was a huge amount of work to get it all ready, but that was worth it because it was so cool to get our small demo in front of players.
Here's a full devblog post wrapping that up!
http://churchinthedarkness.tumblr.com/post/150121784684/so-pax-west-is-in-the-bag-we-dug-showing-off-the
And here's some coverage we got from PC Gamer:
http://www.pcgamer.com/infiltrate-randomly-generated-cults-ruled-by-the-voices-of-glados-and-tf2s-sniper/?utm_content=buffer08502&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer-pcgamertw
We hope to show the game off at some future shows as well, but no details have been finalized as of yet. And right now we're glad to just get back to development.
As always, let us know what you think! What expos would you like us to show it off at next?
- Richard
First Look at Gameplay! And some Commentary to go with it!
Today we put our first look at The Church in the Darkness gameplay, accompanied with narration by myself. Check it out:
https://youtu.be/DWXY0ZkjppU
Keep in mind, this is just one playthrough - there's many different ways you can tackle the demo - and changes to the narrative as well.
For those of you not making it to PAX this year,this is the next best thing. For those of you who are lucky enough to be PAX-bound, come see us at Booth #7009, or the Indie Megabooth on Friday/Saturday and grab a controller and some headphones and try this very demo!
And we'd love to hear what you think of the gameplay you've seen above. What do you like? What do you like less? What do you still wonder about? Please leave us a comment below and let us know what you think.
- Richard
The Church in the Darkness - Playable at PAX West!
After skipping E3, we didn’t want to keep things under wraps for too long, so I’m happy to say we’ll be having The Church in the Darkness playable on the show floor of PAX! We’ll be up on the sixth floor in booth 7009, so come find us. We’re planning to have our esteemed voice actors, Ellen McLain and John Patrick Lowrie, stopping by the booth for a time as well - once we have the schedule finalized we'll let you know.
And if you’re at PAX West, you may also dig the “Dark Art of Voice Acting Revealed!” panel Ellen, John, and Richard are doing along with Logan Cunningham and Darren Korb from Supergiant Games and voice acting veteran Elias Toufexis. That’s Saturday at 2PM in the Sasquatch theater.
If you're not coming to PAX, no worries, we've got something for you there too - we'll be releasing some gameplay footage you can check out. Keep an eye out for that, we'll definitely post about it here.
Finally today we're wrapping up our survey of our Steam players - we still think it'd be cool if we heard from you. And maybe you could win a postcard.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/D3XB9TH
Thanks everyone for your interest! Hope to meet you at PAX.
- Richard
Take our Survey! Win a Cool Postcard!
Hey all,
We'd love to hear more about what most interests you about the Church in the Darkness, so we set up this super-easy, super-quick survey you can take:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/D3XB9TH
And if you take it, we'll pick out a few respondents who can win a cool, physical The Church in the Darkness postcard we'll send you in the real, physical mail. Sounds cool, yes?
We'd love to hear from you!
- Richard
Check out our DevBlog!
Hey all,
Enough folks asked for it, so we've started a proper DevBlog for The Church in the Darkness.
This collects a lot of the little bits we've written over the last few months into one handy place.
And for a first post in this new venue, I wrote about the joys of guards accidentally killing each other and how we went about fixing that in our systems-driven game.
And if Tumblr's your thing, give us a follow? Good things come to those who do. But if you're not into Tumblr, you can easily read it anyway. Here's the link:
http://churchinthedarkness.tumblr.com/
Let us know what you think, or what topics you'd like to have covered down the road.
- Richard
Nice Article on The Church in the Darkness from Polygon
This is from a little while back, but we never posted it here. It's one of my favorite stories that's been written about the game, because the author (Dave Tach) really got what we're going for. So I still thought it was worth sharing with you fine folks.
Here's a snippet:
It's 40 minutes into my conversation with Richard Rouse III before I finally figure it out: The Church in the Darkness doesn't have a story.
Rouse, currently an independent developer but formerly of Ubisoft and Microsoft, tells me that he gave his upcoming game characters. He gave it a setting. He gave it a setup that, depending on how you feel about the tenets of socialism, might piss you off or confirm your suspicions.
Ultimately, though, once you infiltrate The Church in the Darkness' South American utopia, the story will burst into variations on Rouse's themes like fractal artwork.
And that's when it dawns on me: I'm the story. You're the story.
Imagine you're a man. Imagine you're a woman. Doesn't matter. Point is, you have a sister. She has a child. You have a nephew. Or maybe a niece. Alex.
It's the late 1970s, and Alex's mom — your sister — is worried. Alex skipped town — skipped the country, in fact — to follow the Collective Justice Mission. Alex is in South America, because that's where the Collective Justice Mission is.
That organization holds some controversial beliefs about God and government and guns — but maybe not in the way you'd think. In the game's debut trailer, the co-founder of the Collective Justice Mission warns his flock about the impending invasion from do-gooders who won't leave them alone. He reminds them of their God-given right to live in a socialist society — and to defend it at the point of a gun.
It's a cult. And you, Vic, are going to find Alex.
Read the full piece here:
http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/15/11236620/the-church-in-the-darkness-god-guns-socialism-interview
And as always let us know what you think!
- Richard
Talking The Church in the Darkness on the Spawn on Me Podcast
For some more about The Church in the Darkness, this time in audio format, I was lucky enough to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts - Spawn on Me. We talked about Church, naturally, but also The Suffering, death metal, fishing in NYC, and lost videogame works of Snoop Dogg. And hey, whenever a show can be called "Rouse in the Darkness" I think that's a good thing.
http://spawnon.me/110-rouse-darkness/
Hope you dig it, let me know what you think.
- Richard
10 Minute talk on The Church in the Darkness from GDC
Thanks to everyone who has put us on their wishlist! Our numbers are climbing and that's great to see. Very much appreciated.
Thought you might enjoy a 10 minute talk I did about The Church in the Darkness back at the Game Developer's Conference. I go on in the last ten minutes - Church was probably the most "traditional" game of the set, but the other games do some pretty out there and interesting stuff with game narrative, worth checking out if you're into that. Or just jump to the last 10 minutes - I'm good with that too, ha ha.
We're working on another edition of our newsletter for our email list and thought we'd post here about it. We don't email too often, but all the key updates we think you'll be interested will be in there. This time we've got a little poll we're conducting and some lucky folks might even win a prize. It's a good place to keep up with development and we promise not to spam you. Sign up here: paranoidproductions.com/mailinglist/
