Incredibly a whole year has passed since our game was accepted into Steam’s early access!
We want to thank you so much for sticking with us through this time, waiting for the full release and helping us to find bugs, errors and generally helping us finesse the game. We carefully read all of your opinions and have been able to fix so much thanks to your feedback. Some of these things you can see in our most recent update.
As a bonus today I’m going to give you a few facts about our team and game development that you might not know:
<*>In the beginning we talked at length about how to practically remake The Cursed Forest. We were torn between keeping the game’s original content and only updating the graphics (which would have taken about 4 months) or completely overhauling the original game and changing a lot of it. Although it may be the long route we decided to make a new game based on the old one. It took more than a year, but we don’t regret this choice as the game will soon be available and it’s exactly how we wanted it to be.
<*>One of our main team arguments is whether Sarah is more of ghost or corporeal like a zombie (this argument was like deciding who was the strongest between Batman and Superman!)
<*>At one point in time the majority of team members working on the Cursed Forest lived in one house together for a few months. During this time we discussed different game engines, investors, publishers (even though we eventually decided against them). During this time some very, very bad person ate all of our soup (who was that!?), some team members (and me) slept on the floor (not enough beds). A journalist temporarily moved in with us and fed us disgusting spaghetti. One of our team members is still holding his sweater as hostage, and promises to never let him forget about the spaghetti incidents, and remind him about it when he will be old.
<*>So far our team has spent a total of 648 hours discussing the game in Skype (not even counting our arguments or the early access time we lived together!). Although we estimate about 300 hours of this was chatting and jokes (some of which was and will be released in game!)
<*>In the original game the forest was one big territory, but adding more detail and high graphical content made a very long loading times. Because of this we decided to separate the map into four sections. This fixed the problem and helped us appear in Early Access.
<*>The main character has no voice as a tribute to Gordon Freeman (and you thought I will say a silly thing that it is for you could place yourself in the role of the character...). The character Sarah is a tribute to Sadako and Kayako in The Ring (by the way have you seen a new movie where those two fight with each other?).
<*>I (the writer) decided to include long notes in the game, not because I have verbal diarrhoea (although I could write an hour long story about a trip to the shop), but because even though our game may not be the longest we want it to have a huge story. The most attentive players will be able to find many secrets plot in our storyline, and the rest of the story in the upcoming sections.
<*>If you have played our game and never touched the campfires please walk on them immediately! The strange and funny noise that the main character makes is a modified voice recording from our sound designer to dilute the tension.
It is really hard to believe that a year has already passed! Our game is nearly completed and already the team is considering what to do next, what to do with the Cursed Forest after it’s released, but most importantly focused on this final spurt.
We thank everybody who is waiting for our project and supporting us by testing the game. Our audience may not be the largest, but they are the warmest, and it has been a true pleasure to read all of your long emails with feedback. We thank you for all your support and kindness during our hard work.
Our team has made an application for The Indie Development Fund!
The Cursed Forest has successfully been accepted and now we need your help! Each competitor is chosen through community votes; so if you enjoy our work please go like our game!
This competition is a tough one, and while winning would be an incredible goal, we would be happy to place as a one of the finalist. The support Crytek could give us working with their engine would help us, allowing us to solve development problems more quickly.
Thank you for your continuing support and if you would like to vote for us please check out the link below.
I don’t think that anybody still remembers this but long time ago, before we even released our game in the steam early access we made a small Halloween video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOk9sKc8RVQ
In this video I (Igor Berezin – story writer) wanted to show a first-person story narration about one of the characters that include notes example and example of the dead ending. It was an example of the game-notes and instead of just showing them one after another (because it would be very boring) I decided to show them in the game situation. The idea was – character comes inside some abandon house in the settlement (in which game take place) he finds some notes that were written by Sarah where she describe some events that occurred there.
There wasn’t much time left till the Halloween that is why part of the team felt skeptically about this idea. But we decided to take a risk.
I wrote the text of the notes and made video editing, Andrey KPy3O made a simple prototype of the location and used free sound sample but we had a few troubles. Notes system wasn’t ready yet and just to show the text with the ambient would look pretty dull. That is why I asked my actor friend to help us and read this notes also I made an illusion that there is a note system by a simple video editing.
We with Andrey KPy3O worked hard and used the most simple but effective methods made it right in time. Surprisingly in the end all was not as bad as we thought and other team members also liked it. In the result we released this video that was made by our triple power (me, Andrey and actor). Was it worth it?! You can judge it by yourself. By the way what do you think about notes voice acting? Would you like to see some of the notes with this voice recording? Please tell us your opinion in the comments bellow.
Good news, everyone!
Good day! Suddenly for everybody (including ourselves) we have an anniversary. It was a year since we uploaded the very first pre-release version in the steam. That is why we decided weekly to post some small real stories from the “inside” of our team so you will be able to feel atmosphere of our modesty team and maybe (if you curious about game development) some of this stories will give you some interesting information. Besides of that we also give you our traditional screenshots!
Sale News!
The Cursed Forest in Steam summer sale! You can buy game with 30% discount.
Did you play in The Cursed Forest? Write you opinion on commentary!)
Second Chapter Release
Greetings! Summer has arrived and we are finally ready to release another long awaited update. We decided to celebrate it by making the discount on steam.
The main improvements we have made in Section 2 are that it is more stable than before and contains new content. There are new notes continuing our storyline which will uncover some details about the Cursed Forest and its inhabitants. 13 new achievements have been added making 27 in total.
We are currently working on the third section of the game and this update includes a small preview of it. With the speed we are working on the third section we should have it with you very soon! For now check out some screenshots of it:
We made main things for the intro that will tell you a short game prehistory. We are currently working on some small finishing details and the soundtrack.
The current update is still using CRYENGINE 3.8.6, which is why some problems have yet to be addressed. The next version will be on the CRYENIGNE V that gives a more opportunity and there old problems could be solved but it also brings some new problems… It is good that it will still be updated and Crytek (CRYENGINGE developers) is checking their community feedbacks so it will help to solve these new problems.
The most valuable asset of CRYENGINE V will be its stability with Linux. It will allow playing. Therefore the next update will include a Linux version. On our computers we are using Ubuntu, Linux Mint and ROSA Fresh. It would be incredibly helpful to have your feedback is you are playing on Steam OS or another Linux product.
Here at Team Noostyche we are constantly checking your feedback for information on how to improve the game, from watching your Let’s Play and Streams, to reading reviews and answering questions received from the Steam community. This is incredibly helpful in our development and we look forward to hearing your feedback on our new update.
Change list:
+Section 2 achievements were added
+Part of the Section 3 has been added
+Include events that was off in the beta version
+New events in Section 2 have been added
+Section 2 previous events have been elaborated
+More sounds and music tracks have been added
+New loading screens have been added
+New game notes have been added
+Trouble with the sound after game loading has been fixed
+Double environment sound activation has been fixed
+Game crashing after activation of some particles has been stabilised
+Object disappearing in the house in section 1 has been fixed
+Collision in the different places has been fixed
+Planks in the ruins fall down correctly
+Crouching speed has been fixed
+Counting of the items on the level that is available has been added
+Navigation in the Section 2 has been refined
+Progress saving from one section to the other has been optimized
+Other small fixes
In the next big update we are planning:
*Transfer to the CRYENGINE V
*Full release of the Third section
*Game available in Linux
*Optimization update
*Refining of the previous sections
*Small issues fixing
ATTENTION! If you already played The Cursed Forest you will need to start a new game, your old save files will not work correctly.
Development news
Good day everybody. Lately our team didn’t post any news, it is because we took a little vacation. We needed to solve a lot of private problems. One of the team member moved from his city another needed some rest time to normalize his health. But even on that time we tested CRYENGINE V. We thinking about transfer The Cursed Forest on it, because there is solved some of the problems that couldn’t be solved in the previous engine version (blurred textures, long loadings etc.).
In the current moment we are working at the game intro, where we going to tell you how main character appear on that forest. Also we testing and optimizing patch that going to improve the second section. As you probably noticed full second section release took little longer than we thought and we apologies for that. In the same time we are working at the third section of the game, so stay tuned for the next news!
Community News!
Good day, comrades. We are still working on the game and we plan to release second chapter of The Cursed Forest soon. When? As soon as all critical bugs will be fixed, code cleaned up and levels polished. Meantime, we want to thank our community, which helps us to improve our game. Especially we want to thank wolf, 0xDEFACED and Gemma.
Also we would like to thank youtubers: James ツ, PsiSyndicate, Princess, Kahuna Games, cute Junkiecakes and Mira, 수탉 TV, Jim Sterling, and other youtubers (maybe including You)!
Thank you all for your help and support. We will work hard to improve our game.
Also I will reveal a little secret that now we are working on the intro which will explain how the character appeared in the cursed forest. Stay tuned!
New achievments icons and small news
Full version of the second section soon will be released, until that you can try to guess which achievements this icons represent. Do you like it? Write about your thoughts in the comments.
Also we have some other news. Brazil magazine wrote a review about our game. Can you help to translate this article?
This is all for now! Right, really short news. Have a good time!
