Dev Diary - March 2019
The teams been working hard on Episode Three this year. Wed started work on it in 2018 and then put it aside to finish up Redux and work through all the tech and pipeline improvements we wanted to use for the remaining Episodes of WINTERMUTE. One of the first things we did after coming back from the holidays was re-evaluate our plans for Episode Three scope based on the lessons wed learned from building and shipping Redux. A key lesson there was the importance of having enough gameplay and narrative content to fill the space of the game, to avoid the feeling of senseless backtracking or the world just feeling too empty, as it sometimes did in the 2017 Episode One and Two release. Building Redux provided a fresh perspective on how to better balance our narrative and survival experiences, as well as how to better write for narrative flow in our open-world survival experience. These key learnings let us review our plans for Episode Three to ensure we would hopefully avoid making some of the same mistakes wed made in the original 2017 releases, which we werent super happy with (and nor were many of you). Based on how we feel Redux turned out, and how you also seem to feel about the improvements, were confident were on a much stronger path now. Building Redux also showed us that the ideal length for a WINTERMUTE episode is about 5-7 hours. This gives us enough time to present a few interesting story threads, some compelling open-world survival gameplay, and enough narrative momentum to keep the story moving. Its also an amount of content that feels substantial -- these arent throw-away one or two-hour experiences -- but they are compact enough that you can finish them in a weekend if you like. In our original planning, we had considered building the episode around three major story hubs, each in a different region, but that episode would have ended up being larger than Episodes One and Two combined, and amount of content that just isnt sustainable for our team size. Just the testing on an episode that big would be a hugely daunting task, nevermind populating it with enough interesting narrative and mission content to fill the space. The Redux knowledge has helped us focus Episode Three down to a tighter experience that takes place in a single region.
Therefore, Episode Three is the story of Astrids survival after escaping Milton, and takes place entirely in Pleasant Valley. As you probably know, Pleasant Valley is a *huge* region, with a lot of scope for interesting environments and some great story moments. Weve been updating the region to freshen it up for the story, while adding some new landmarks and locations that are introduced in Episode Three. Im really excited about how its all coming together, particularly in how true to Astrids character and background the episode is.
As you know, hitting publicly announced release dates has never been our strong suit. As an independent studio without a huge marketing machine behind us, we count on our relationship with our community to be positive so that youll help us spread the word about the work were doing. We know we harm this relationship when we promise to deliver things to you and then, for whatever reason, they fail to happen. Unfortunately, project planning and game development as a whole is not an exact science, and while we are ready to work really hard to hit our goals, Im not willing to crunch my team to do so. In order to be more fair to the community, and also more fair to the development team, I think the best approach for us is to refrain from offering any more public release dates. So, moving forward, we wont publish release dates around any of our content, whether that be full Episodes or Survival Mode updates. Well keep working towards internal deadlines, of course, but we wont share news on when we plan to ship updates until those updates are essentially finished. That way, when you hear a release date from us, you know it will happen.
One of the things weve been working towards this year, with the development team, is hiring enough people with the right skills to be able to create two separate teams -- one to focus on Survival, and the other to focus on Story. Weve made some great progress towards that goal and were getting very close to having all the people we need to accomplish that. Once were there, itll become easier for us to make consistent progress in both areas of the game, so that we can ensure a more steady supply of free Survival updates, as well as ensuring the Episodes get the resources they need. We still have a few positions to hire for to have full redundancy across both teams, but Im hopeful well get there within the next few months. If you know any great developers with experience crafting memorable and award-winning interactive experiences, please send them to our careers page!
Last year, we put a ton of effort into Redux and solidifying our foundation for the future Episodes, so this year were working to get back on track with producing more frequent Survival Mode updates. To that end, were working on a bunch of new features and content for the 2019 Survival releases. As per my earlier point about release dates, we wont be sharing any tentative release windows for the next Survival release, but I will say that weve already done a fair bit of work on the new systems and content that will comprise the core of the next free update.
A few things were working on for the next Survival update include:
In a previous dev diary I mentioned that wed been able to get our hands on the motion-capture gear from Capcom Vancouvers now closed dev studio. Weve been using the equipment and we thought you might like to catch a glimpse of the current set-up; this image is from the camera test we did to check out 18 of the 36 cameras. Unfortunately, we dont have enough space in our current studio to set up all the cameras, but were looking for some overflow space so that we can set up all 36. In the short term, were going to remove the built-in desks and set up the gear in-house so that the animation team can very quickly and easily iterate on narrative scenes or gameplay animation in support of our Survival and Story goals. The animators whipped up this simple little animation to show you how well it works -- all told this took about an hour or so to shoot and integrate. Its only a quick test and obviously not something wed ever ship, but its fun as a proof of concept and, lets face it, Jeremiah has some sweet moves worth sharing.
We get a lot of questions about when The Long Dark will be brought to the Nintendo Switch. As you may know, we spent some time last year trying to get the game up and running on Switch devkits and ran into a lot of performance issues. The latest version of Unity -- which well be rolling out as part of our next Survival update -- does offer some performance improvements (which should also make the Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game run more smoothly), but we still dont find the Switch performance to be at an acceptable level yet. Were going to keep working on it alongside our other priorities, but I want to set reasonable expectations around this -- not every game can run well on the Switch, and if were not able to get The Long Dark running at a level of performance and visual quality that Im happy with, we wont be shipping it. All that said, Im still hopeful that we can find solutions to the current issues, and we think The Long Dark would be really compelling on this portable platform, so were not giving up! ***** Thanks for reading this update, and if youd like to share your thoughts about the contents of this developer diary, I hope youll take a few seconds to join the official The Long Dark community, as well as following us on Twitter. If you havent already done so, and youd like to be kept up to date on project announcements outside of general development updates -- for example, sale events, new merchandise, and information about the studio -- please consider signing up for the Hinterland Newsletter. And if youre interested in more regular, bite-sized responses to community questions, make sure to check out the (almost) weekly Milton Mailbag. See you where we see you! - Raph
[ 2019-03-06 21:02:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello community,
The teams been hard at work since the holidays, which we used to recover from finaling the massive December Redux release, and its time to update you on some of the things weve been doing in the meantime.
EPISODE THREE
The teams been working hard on Episode Three this year. Wed started work on it in 2018 and then put it aside to finish up Redux and work through all the tech and pipeline improvements we wanted to use for the remaining Episodes of WINTERMUTE. One of the first things we did after coming back from the holidays was re-evaluate our plans for Episode Three scope based on the lessons wed learned from building and shipping Redux. A key lesson there was the importance of having enough gameplay and narrative content to fill the space of the game, to avoid the feeling of senseless backtracking or the world just feeling too empty, as it sometimes did in the 2017 Episode One and Two release. Building Redux provided a fresh perspective on how to better balance our narrative and survival experiences, as well as how to better write for narrative flow in our open-world survival experience. These key learnings let us review our plans for Episode Three to ensure we would hopefully avoid making some of the same mistakes wed made in the original 2017 releases, which we werent super happy with (and nor were many of you). Based on how we feel Redux turned out, and how you also seem to feel about the improvements, were confident were on a much stronger path now. Building Redux also showed us that the ideal length for a WINTERMUTE episode is about 5-7 hours. This gives us enough time to present a few interesting story threads, some compelling open-world survival gameplay, and enough narrative momentum to keep the story moving. Its also an amount of content that feels substantial -- these arent throw-away one or two-hour experiences -- but they are compact enough that you can finish them in a weekend if you like. In our original planning, we had considered building the episode around three major story hubs, each in a different region, but that episode would have ended up being larger than Episodes One and Two combined, and amount of content that just isnt sustainable for our team size. Just the testing on an episode that big would be a hugely daunting task, nevermind populating it with enough interesting narrative and mission content to fill the space. The Redux knowledge has helped us focus Episode Three down to a tighter experience that takes place in a single region.
Therefore, Episode Three is the story of Astrids survival after escaping Milton, and takes place entirely in Pleasant Valley. As you probably know, Pleasant Valley is a *huge* region, with a lot of scope for interesting environments and some great story moments. Weve been updating the region to freshen it up for the story, while adding some new landmarks and locations that are introduced in Episode Three. Im really excited about how its all coming together, particularly in how true to Astrids character and background the episode is.
COMMUNICATING FUTURE RELEASE DATES
As you know, hitting publicly announced release dates has never been our strong suit. As an independent studio without a huge marketing machine behind us, we count on our relationship with our community to be positive so that youll help us spread the word about the work were doing. We know we harm this relationship when we promise to deliver things to you and then, for whatever reason, they fail to happen. Unfortunately, project planning and game development as a whole is not an exact science, and while we are ready to work really hard to hit our goals, Im not willing to crunch my team to do so. In order to be more fair to the community, and also more fair to the development team, I think the best approach for us is to refrain from offering any more public release dates. So, moving forward, we wont publish release dates around any of our content, whether that be full Episodes or Survival Mode updates. Well keep working towards internal deadlines, of course, but we wont share news on when we plan to ship updates until those updates are essentially finished. That way, when you hear a release date from us, you know it will happen.
SPLITTING THE TEAM
One of the things weve been working towards this year, with the development team, is hiring enough people with the right skills to be able to create two separate teams -- one to focus on Survival, and the other to focus on Story. Weve made some great progress towards that goal and were getting very close to having all the people we need to accomplish that. Once were there, itll become easier for us to make consistent progress in both areas of the game, so that we can ensure a more steady supply of free Survival updates, as well as ensuring the Episodes get the resources they need. We still have a few positions to hire for to have full redundancy across both teams, but Im hopeful well get there within the next few months. If you know any great developers with experience crafting memorable and award-winning interactive experiences, please send them to our careers page!
SURVIVAL MODE UPDATE
Last year, we put a ton of effort into Redux and solidifying our foundation for the future Episodes, so this year were working to get back on track with producing more frequent Survival Mode updates. To that end, were working on a bunch of new features and content for the 2019 Survival releases. As per my earlier point about release dates, we wont be sharing any tentative release windows for the next Survival release, but I will say that weve already done a fair bit of work on the new systems and content that will comprise the core of the next free update.
A few things were working on for the next Survival update include:
- Adding the Revolver to Survival Mode.
- Overhaul of the aiming mechanics for the Rifle, Bow, etc., to do a better job of integrating Fatigue and the breathing cycle, and making aiming less frustrating.
- Adding a new Food item.
- Adding a new Clothing item.
- Fixing the Sprains system.
- ...and more!
MOTION-CAPTURE SPACE
In a previous dev diary I mentioned that wed been able to get our hands on the motion-capture gear from Capcom Vancouvers now closed dev studio. Weve been using the equipment and we thought you might like to catch a glimpse of the current set-up; this image is from the camera test we did to check out 18 of the 36 cameras. Unfortunately, we dont have enough space in our current studio to set up all the cameras, but were looking for some overflow space so that we can set up all 36. In the short term, were going to remove the built-in desks and set up the gear in-house so that the animation team can very quickly and easily iterate on narrative scenes or gameplay animation in support of our Survival and Story goals. The animators whipped up this simple little animation to show you how well it works -- all told this took about an hour or so to shoot and integrate. Its only a quick test and obviously not something wed ever ship, but its fun as a proof of concept and, lets face it, Jeremiah has some sweet moves worth sharing.
NINTENDO SWITCH VERSION
We get a lot of questions about when The Long Dark will be brought to the Nintendo Switch. As you may know, we spent some time last year trying to get the game up and running on Switch devkits and ran into a lot of performance issues. The latest version of Unity -- which well be rolling out as part of our next Survival update -- does offer some performance improvements (which should also make the Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game run more smoothly), but we still dont find the Switch performance to be at an acceptable level yet. Were going to keep working on it alongside our other priorities, but I want to set reasonable expectations around this -- not every game can run well on the Switch, and if were not able to get The Long Dark running at a level of performance and visual quality that Im happy with, we wont be shipping it. All that said, Im still hopeful that we can find solutions to the current issues, and we think The Long Dark would be really compelling on this portable platform, so were not giving up! ***** Thanks for reading this update, and if youd like to share your thoughts about the contents of this developer diary, I hope youll take a few seconds to join the official The Long Dark community, as well as following us on Twitter. If you havent already done so, and youd like to be kept up to date on project announcements outside of general development updates -- for example, sale events, new merchandise, and information about the studio -- please consider signing up for the Hinterland Newsletter. And if youre interested in more regular, bite-sized responses to community questions, make sure to check out the (almost) weekly Milton Mailbag. See you where we see you! - Raph
The Long Dark
Hinterland Studio Inc.
Hinterland Studio Inc.
2017-08-01
Indie Strategy Simulation Singleplayer
Game News Posts 244
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
🎮 Full Controller Support
Very Positive
(92113 reviews)
http://www.thelongdark.com
https://store.steampowered.com/app/305620
The Game includes VR Support
The Long Dark Depot (Linux) [2.24 G]TLD Dev Depot (Linux) [5.42 G]DLC01Linux [721.27 M]The Long Dark: Wintermute Linux DLC [8.16 G]The Long Dark: Tales from the Far Territory Linux DLC [728.71 M]
The Long Dark: Tales from the Far Territory
The Long Dark: WINTERMUTE
***THE LONG DARK IS AN EARLY ACCESS TITLE. THE SANDBOX IS IN A CONSTANT STATE OF IMPROVEMENT, AND IT ISN'T FINISHED. BUYING THE LONG DARK ON EARLY ACCESS SUPPORTS OUR ABILITY TO CONTINUE IMPROVING THE GAME. FOR MORE INFORMATION, REFER TO THE EARLY ACCESS INFORMATION ABOVE.***
With an average of 3-4 updates per month, The Long Dark is in a state of constant improvement. We have released over 75 updates since bringing the game to Early Access. Updates typically include new gameplay, tuning, new areas, items, and visual improvements. We are constantly improving the game based on our iterative development process, with input from the community.
Please note that the Early Access price provides immediate access to the Sandbox Mode, and includes the cost of Season One episodes of the Story Mode, the first of which will be available at the game's full launch.
The Long Dark is brought to you by Hinterland Studio, an independent game developer comprised of industry veterans with significant credits on many renowned series including Far Cry, Red Faction, Saints Row, God of War, Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, Company of Heroes, and many others. The Long Dark is the team's first attempt to create a unique and thought-provoking independent game that pushes the boundaries of the medium.
We appreciate your support of our efforts!
What is The Long Dark?
The Long Dark is a thoughtful, exploration-survival experience that challenges solo players to think for themselves as they explore an expansive frozen wilderness. There are no zombies -- only you, the cold, and everything Mother Nature can throw at you.Current Game Features
The Early Access version of The Long Dark features the game’s non-narrative Survival Sandbox mode. The game will leave Early Access one we launch Episode One of our Story Mode. All Season One episodes are included in the cost of Early Access.- No hand holding! The game challenges players to think for themselves by providing the information but never the answers. You have to earn the right to survive.
- Permadeath! See how long you can survive, check your standing on the global Leaderboards, then head back in and push yourself to survive longer.
- Monitor your Calorie count, Hunger and Thirst, Fatigue, and Body Temperature. Maintain your overall Condition if you want to survive. Let yourself weaken and any small threat may lead to your death.
- Over 30 square kms of wilderness to explore (and with more regions coming!). Mystery Lake, Coastal Highway, Desolation Point, Pleasant Valley, and more, all interconnected and each with dozens of explorable locations.
- Dynamic weather, wildlife, and time of day, all with an impact on how you choose to survive.
- Over 100 gear items including clothing, tools like hatchets and rifles, first aid equipment, foodstuffs, light sources like lanterns and flares, and firestarting equipment.
- Hunt Deer, Snare Rabbits, and watch for Crows as they can signify the presence of animal, or human, corpses that can be vital sources of Supplies. Wolves are territorial and will defend their territory, or stalk you if they catch your scent. If you let them get too close, you may find yourself in a desperate struggle to survive. Be on the lookout for Black Bears, as they roam the landscape in search of food.
- Harvest Wood for fuel, maintain your Gear and Clothing, and keep your Knife, Hatchet, and Rifle in top shape as they will save your life!
- Harvest Medicinal plants like Old Man's Beard Lichen, Rose Hips, Reishi Mushrooms.
- Deep First Aid system featuring many afflictions including: Sprains, Blood Loss, Infection Risk, Infection, Food Poisoning, Dysentery, and more.
- Craft Snares, First Aid items, Repair your Clothing and Tools, and Harvest raw materials from the environment, as you do your best to become self-sufficient.
- ...and much more!
Ongoing Development
With an average of 3-4 updates per month, The Long Dark is in a state of constant improvement. We have released over 75 updates since bringing the game to Early Access. Updates typically include new gameplay, tuning, new areas, items, and visual improvements. We are constantly improving the game based on our iterative development process, with input from the community.
Please note that the Early Access price provides immediate access to the Sandbox Mode, and includes the cost of Season One episodes of the Story Mode, the first of which will be available at the game's full launch.
The Hinterland Team
The Long Dark is brought to you by Hinterland Studio, an independent game developer comprised of industry veterans with significant credits on many renowned series including Far Cry, Red Faction, Saints Row, God of War, Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, Company of Heroes, and many others. The Long Dark is the team's first attempt to create a unique and thought-provoking independent game that pushes the boundaries of the medium.
We appreciate your support of our efforts!
MINIMAL SETUP
- OS: SteamOS or Ubuntu 16.04 or 17.04
- Processor: Dual-Core Intel i5 CPU @ 2GHz+Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel 4xxx Series w/ 512MB VRAM or better
- Storage: 7 GB available space
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