In this week's progress update we'd like to share with you another part of the article that was mentioned before in these regular progress reports. This time a part about the inspiration and references for Wait! Life is Beautiful!
...After creating several things that will never be published and gaining some experience (or it’s better to say, getting an idea of what game design, storytelling, and programming is), I started my search for inspiration to find the theme of 'The Game'.
Gamejam “7 deadly sins”
While surfing the Internet and reading through numerous gamedev forums, I stumbled upon a tiny hackathon that had a catchy topic and thought: this is it! (the “it” - http://forum.hellroom.ru/index.php?topic=24029.0). So I worked on the idea of a game about suicide when I saw the title. Well, technically, killing yourself isn’t on the list of deadly sins, but in religious teachings, it guarantees that you would go straight to hell, doesn’t it? So there you go: suicide equals deadly sin, right? Well actually, no. My over-broad interpretation invoked the wrath of one of the event judges. Though wrath is a deadly sin, so I had that going for me!
Short indie film “Lime-blossom tea”
The best fuel for your own creativity is someone else’s art, but don't get me wrong, I do not mean stealing. So, I went to a local short film festival in Saint Petersburg and was deeply impressed. I personally think that it is a tragic loss that the event will never happen again due to some laws that prohibited it. However, it doesn’t stop me from sharing with you the short film that I’ve taken my concept from:
During that time I was also playing this game (Life is Strange) and after mastering my skill of searching through garbage (in-game), I stole an interesting idea from LiS. At some point in the game, a girl wants to jump from a roof, the main hero tries to talk her out of it while having no possibility to rewind time and safely pick proper words. It’s the only scene in the game when you can’t just rewind to choose the right option. You say something wrong – the girl dies.
Personal motives
This point is intentionally the last because I don’t like to talk about it. But you’ve probably already guessed that no one thinks about these themes just for fun. Unfortunately, depression and a suicidal tendency was a part of my life. I had a close friend who took his own life, I too live with depression and have to admit to several suicide attempts.
But it was these things that helped shape my direction, as I thought: why not put the thoughts of self-destruction to good use and create something meaningful out of it?
Thank you for being with us, Your W!LIB! Team!
Wait! Life is Beautiful! - Progress Update #6
Hello everyone!
This week we’d like to share what we have been working on and give you some fun work-in-progress teasers. If you follow us on our social media pages, you've probably seen some of these, but we're freshening things up with some new content, as well as some explanations on what you're seeing!
Animated trailer
First of all, let us start with the animated trailer's storyboard:
In this trailer, we aim to dive deep into the soul of the game’s protagonist (Will) to show you his feelings and thoughts. We started work on this quite a while ago, so you can look forward to seeing more in the near future. If you’d like to get an idea of what direction we are working towards, our main inspiration was this video: https://vimeo.com/267392220
Demo
We’ve already introduced you to several characters that you’ll find in the game. Here’s the police officer who’s very suspicious about Will’s endeavor on the Suicide Bridge.
This gif is taken from the early on in the game, so here the policeman simply warns Will, then leaves.
But what if the deaths continue and Will is almost always the last person to see them alive?
Looking to the future
Also as it was mentioned in the previous weekly update, we’re working on an article that interviews the developer. That is still being worked on, but stay tuned as it is shaping up to have a lot of interesting information in it!
Thank you for being with us, Your W!LIB! Team!
Wait! Life is Beautiful! - Progress Update #5
Hello everyone!
We know that you’re hungry for more details about our game, so how about we do a review of what we’ve been doing in the last few weeks and also tease you with some previously unseen content?
First of all, our main priority during the last month was localization (RU and EN) and the things that we wrote about in the previous progress updates. This would have been things like the gameplay trailer and our brand new website. What’s been hidden from your sight until now is that a lot of work has been done on fixing small bugs in the game, and we’ve been hard at work preparing a new animated trailer! This new video is going to be a piece of art, believe us - we’ve even invited a wonderfully talented artist to work on it.
And, of course, the most important asset that we continuously enhance the Wait! Life is Beautiful! demo. This free demo of our game is planned to be released at the end of next month, roughly 20-ish of July, until then the developer is working on the endings of the game, here’s a teaser of one of them!
Can you guess what’s going on here?
We’ve been keeping you updated about the week-to-week development news, but we’ve never told you about how it all began. One last piece of work we’re busy with is an article telling more about the idea of the game and how the project started.
Here’s a preview from the development insight material we are working on. The amount of information we wanted to share with you is pretty big so we decided to split it into several separate articles. Besides that, it still requires some more work to really finish up. We’ll invite you to read the full text later, but for now, here are the first few lines of the first article:
“You will not find any shocking content here, but I want to be clear right away: my game is about suicide.
How did I end up making a game about such a controversial and complex topic? Is it really that difficult? What is the connection between collecting bottles and my game? What mistakes did I make while developing and what was done right? What was my plan, what has come of it, and what should you expect in the future?”
Well, you'll need to come back in a couple of weeks because we’ll be answering all of these questions then! ;)
Thank you for being with us, Your W!LIB! Team!
Wait! Life is Beautiful! - Progress Update #4
Hello everyone!
Last week we teased you with a screenshot of our website and showed you a WIP GIF from the gameplay trailer. Now we’d like to present to you the final versions of both projects!
You might wonder: “Why is this important? Every game has a trailer and/or a website. Why making such big of a deal of it and writing about it for several weeks?” From the point of view of a game developer, these are the assets that will be used during the next several months to introduce a game to a new audience. Imagine you’ve spent months of work on a project, and when it comes to an end, you don’t have the means to show it to people for whom it was designed - and its release goes unnoticed. The website and the trailer will be our words to tell a story of Will and his quest to save lives on the Suicide Bridge.
With the help of the website and the trailer, we will be able to reach potential players and present to them Wait! Life is Beautiful! in a concise manner. That’s why finishing the trailer and the website is such an important milestone for us – we will need these assets later.
We decided to tell more about it to you, a person who regularly checks up on our progress every Friday ;)
Next week we will go more in-depth and prepare a special article providing insight into the development.
Thank you for being with us, Your W!LIB! Team!
Wait! Life is Beautiful! - Progress Update #3
Hello everyone!
It’s Friday, which means that it is time for our weekly progress update, giving you an insight into what we’ve been doing.
For this week’s edition, we’re looking at what we are currently working on. Naturally, the game is getting a lot of attention, with a special focus on the game text, but we’re also busy outside of the game itself. We have two major projects that we are working on.
Website
The first is a special website for Wait! Life is Beautiful! Though we’re not done just yet, we’ve got a teaser image to show you what the page looks like.
Game Trailer
Making a trailer for a game like ours is a unique experience, with challenges coming from both the sensitive genre and the issue of the game being heavily reliant on the in-game story and texts.
We did want to have the trailer ready for today, however in the end we decided that we needed a bit more time to make things perfect - after all we did not want to rush this one.
However, we do have a short teaser for you to enjoy!
And that’s it for this week. This was a rather short report, but we hope that you enjoy reading about what we are doing. Don’t forget the important news from last week - we’ll have a special demo for Wait! Life is Beautiful! scheduled for mid-July this year.
Thank you for being with us, Your W!LIB! Team!
Wait! Life is Beautiful! – Progress Update #2
Hello everyone!
Here's a short update on what we are planning for the coming month. We're finishing the demo of Wait!Life is Beautiful, and you will soon be able to play it yourself. English localization is almost done; just a few tricky places are left to tackle. We also need to give the game a round of QA tests to ensure it runs smoothly before giving it to you.
That said, we have some exciting news for you:
We are planning to release a demo of Wait! Life is Beautiful! mid-July.
In the W!LiB! demo you will:
Live through one day of Will’s life after he decides that he needs something more from his life.
Talk to those that visit the suicide bridge. Sometimes Will manages to talk them out, and sometimes he doesn't.
Get introduced to the main characters of the story.
And in the end, you will see the results of your decisions.
But before you can get your hands on W!LiB!, there will be some more news from us next week.
We have some exciting things to share with you, so stay tuned!
Our Reasons for making Wait! Life is Beautiful
We set out to create this game for two main reasons. The first is that we wanted to bring a voice to this mostly unspoken part of life, and secondly to give those that are blessed with never having to deal with these thoughts a glimpse into what it is like to live with them.
That said, it is important to know that ultimately Wait! Life is Beautiful! is still a game, and not a guide on how to handle difficult life situations.
Though we do our best to base the text and encounters in the game around our personal experiences, the game's dialogue is not a guide on how to communicate with people in a crisis.
Remember, every being is unique. What works for you and me, or what we personally do to cope with difficult situations, may not work for your fellow person.
So in the end, all events and characters in the game are fictional, please do not try to project the game onto real life.
What's more, the goal of W!LIB! (game goal) is actually not to save everyone, the goal is to survive, and get a glimpse into how even those that are out there helping others can fall into depression, anxiety, and ultimately suicide.
If you know someone that helps others, don't ignore them, or automatically think that they are ok, be sure to let them know that they are valued and that as much as they are there for others, others can be there for them.
P.S.: Suicide is one of the most common causes of death worldwide. If you or someone you know is depressed and suffering from suicidal thoughts, the best you can do is seek professional help. In such a situation, even the closest people without proper skills may make things worse, even if they have the best intentions.
Wait! Life is Beautiful! - Progress Update
Hello there everyone,
It’s been quite a while since we last wrote here, but that’s because we’ve been really busy securing the future of Wait! Life is Beautiful!. Now that the dust has settled, we’re happy to go into a bit of detail into what has been going on.
A Publisher Picks up W!LIB!
We are very pleased to announce that GameNet has picked up our game and will be our publisher. By teaming up with them, we have been able to secure a lot more opportunities for our game such as:
Translation to multiple languages
A full polish of our existing languages (we know that some of you have pointed out that our English was not always the best).
Lots of help with the QA side of things, finding and squashing bugs
Some very skilled hands to help us with the text in the game (more on this below).
If you have any concerns about this partnership, we’d like to assure you that this is a hugely positive step forward for us.
Other than simply helping us with the quality of the game, GameNet have proven to be extremely understanding, and even enthusiastic, about the genre that Wait! Life is Beautiful! is in, and are fully supportive of our efforts to bring awareness to this traditionally-less-spoken about genre. When you are dealing with sensitive topics like we are, it is vital that everyone that you work with really understands it.
New Release Date
The only downside to this all is that we had to push our release date back. Instead of launching in February like we wanted to, we are now working towards a launch in August 2020.
As we mentioned earlier, this extra time will allow us to sort out any lingering issues/bugs, translate the game to multiple languages, and really bring the written aspect (texts) in our game to the best level of quality possible.
Looking Forward
Now that we have settled with GameNet we will be doing our best to be a lot more active, engaging with you (our community) where you may be.
Thank you all for your patience, we now have a bright future and are looking forward to seeing our work come to fruition!
Wait! Life Is beautiful! | RELEASE ON FEB 20 CANCELLED
UPD. The release of W!LiB! is delayed until August 2020
Hello.
Happy to announce - Wait! Life is beautiful! Will be released on Feb 20 2020!
Few things still have to be done but I feel confident about finishing them! Wow, it's really happening. Quite excited about it (:
Also an important question about localization. Now planned only eng and rus. But If you want my game on your language - contact me (email or twitter there links on game page)
