The irony of calling these updates "Weekly" is not lost on me...

You never write... You never call...

It has been an absolute whirlwind the last two months. Outbreak: The Nightmare Chronicles has now launched on both Steam and Xbox One (to pretty good reviews I'd say!). As such, a lot of my time has been spent preparing for those releases, working through cert and handling all of the "non-dev" parts of being an indie developer. I pushed a PC-side Steam patch a few weeks back and all of those fixes made it into the Xbox One version that was released a few days back. But with those releases behind me... it's time to think about the future...

Chapter Two

Chapter One saw Lydia's story continue as she survived the events of The New Nightmare and now found herself alone in a manor. Well, spoiler alert, but she survived Chapter One as well. Chapter Two picks up almost immediately after the end of the first chapter, with her exploring even further beneath the manor. She's going to find all new horrors down there and gameplay is taking a bit of a shift... There will be some new locations, but I don't want to spoil them too much in the screenshots here.

Being Alone in the Dark...

The theme of Chapter Two is going to be darkness. Let's just say near the start of Chapter Two, there's going to be a bit of a power loss in the underground section. As such, Lydia will need to rely on her trusty flashlight to find a way back to the surface alive. Anywhere she isn't looking, will be pitch black. Think of this as a loving homage to Silent Hill...

Graphics Improvements

With darkness being so prominent in Chapter Two, it made sense to make some lighting upgrades. Lydia's flashlight and chest light will now have volumetric light beams. This greatly helps in illuminating the darkness, but you'll also notice them subtly added to Chapter One. They're far more prominent in pitch black. You'll face this darkness in the next set of Battle Mode rooms as well...

So when is Chapter Two coming out?

It's going to be a while. I'm a solo dev working on the game in my limited free time. I'll try to keep sharing updates and I hope it won't be too long, but let's say we'll aim for sometime during the summer if things go well. I would imagine the Xbox release will trail Steam in general for The Nightmare Chronicles as I can release faster on Steam. Stay tuned for more details. Thank you to everyone who has purchased and played any games in the Outbreak series! It has been an awesome ride and the feedback and support is amazing. It's awesome to have such a great community and COME JOIN US ON DISCORD!

[ 2018-05-05 20:04:53 CET ] [ Original post ]