It is unusual to take on the role of a man diagnosed with terminal cancer in a videogame knowing that he will die for sure. In Between is doing so. It was the first game by German developer gentlymad that started out as part of a university assignment to deal with the taboo topics of death and dying within a video game. Find out more about In Between and the intentions and inspirations behind the game in this short developer interview: Daniel, could you please tell us a bit about yourself and gentlymad? Hello, I am Daniel Denne, Art Director, Co-founder and one of the in total six members of gentlymad. Were a game developing studio from Germany. On your website you talk of a Gently and a Mad Vision. Would you care to elaborate on that and how your game In Between fits into your vision? In Between actually started out as an assignment for a university project and helped us to define and flesh out structural processes within the team. Since it was our first commercial project, it really laid out the groundwork on which our company was founded, as well as helping us to generate attention within the industry. In retrospect though, it was quite the huge risk we took building a company on such an artistic project but ultimately that decision is characteristic for the core values of our company; thinking outside of the box and mustering the courage to be mad. In many ways In Between influenced the values of our studio to create games which do not conform but deviate from the Norm and established patterns. This mentality was manifested as our Gently Mission and our Mad Vision. In In Between you take on the role of a man diagnosed with terminal cancer. Early on, it is made very clear that there is no way of escaping his fate. Ultimately, players join the protagonist on his journey to face his own mortality and accept the inevitable which is rather unusual as game plots go. What inspired you to do so? There were two key motivations which drove us to develop a game like In Between. The challenge of dealing with the taboo topics of death and dying within a video game, was an extensive and with regards to content a very interesting task. At the time we felt that it would do our assignments requirements justice, in both theory and practice. It was especially exciting to overcome initial doubts about focusing a game around such dramatic and difficult topics, since games as a medium usually concentrate on empowering the player. Besides this, personal and familial experiences with death and cancer played an important role in the projects development. Especially during the initial phases of development, back when there were no commercial plans, these experiences were significant sources of motivation, which drove us to realise our idea. For me personally, I was confronted with death early on when my brother took his life. To me, In Between was more than just a thematically challenging project, but in part it became a form of self-therapy with which I was able to process the experiences I had made. At the same, it gave us the opportunity, to give people an idea of the emotional and mental burden that is placed upon people in such situations. The levels designs and themes are modelled after the Kbler-Ross model of grief, specifically the five stages of grief denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Were there any particular challenges, in transforming a concept from Psychology into a gameplay experience? On one hand the biggest challenges during development were to handle the topics of death and dying in an atmospheric and serious manner to not depict it in a way that was too corny or clich. But rather to tell a story, which would allow players own interpretations and present them with different possibilities of self-identification. On the other hand, from a gameplay-mechanics perspective, it was difficult to create and assign a specific set of rules for every stage of death from the Kbler-Ross-model, out of which you could then create interesting and diverse challenges. From 1st November 2018 till 31st January 2019 50% of revenues from purchases for In Between will go directly to the Cancer Research Institute. You can track the current amount of donations HERE.

Cancer is everywhere, and can hit anyone at any time. That is why we are doing a charity collaboration with the Cancer Research Institute to do our part in the battle against cancer. The collaboration starts on 1st November 2018 and will end on 31st January 2019. During this time span 50% of revenues from purchases for our game In Between will go directly to the CRI. You can track the amount of donations here. Besides raising donations, our goal is to increase awareness for the mental and emotional burden which cancer places on patients and their families. And that's why we chose In Between: The game puts players in control of a man diagnosed with terminal cancer. Joining the protagonist on his journey to achieve peace of mind, players discover the emotional story of a man struggling to come to terms with his own mortality and finiteness.

Dear followers and friends, we are happy to announce that we are working on a new game. It is a successor to the Pizza Connection series: Pizza Connection 3. We are in development since the beginning of 2017. Find out more on: https://gentlymad.org/game/pizza-connection-3 But every new path we are walking on means to leave another path behind. This is why we have to inform you that we aren't able to support In Between anymore as we are only a small team of 5 people. Sadly we need our full capacity on the new game. Regarding everyone who has participated in new subtitle translations: We won't be able to integrate your subtitles into the master build of the game in the foreseeable future. That is something we really regret and we understand if you are disappointed. Just as a small consolation: We hope to be able to share beta access to Pizza Connection 3 to you guys in this community as soon as we are ready. Thanks to everyone supporting and playing In Between, so far it was a great adventure. Much love!

Dear followers and friends, we are happy to announce that we are working on a new game. It is a successor to the Pizza Connection series: Pizza Connection 3. We are in development since the beginning of 2017. Find out more on: https://gentlymad.org/game/pizza-connection-3 But every new path we are walking on means to leave another path behind. This is why we have to inform you that we aren't able to support In Between anymore as we are only a small team of 5 people. Sadly we need our full capacity on the new game. Regarding everyone who has participated in new subtitle translations: We won't be able to integrate your subtitles into the master build of the game in the foreseeable future. That is something we really regret and we understand if you are disappointed. Just as a small consolation: We hope to be able to share beta access to Pizza Connection 3 to you guys in this community as soon as we are ready. Thanks to everyone supporting and playing In Between, so far it was a great adventure. Much love!

Hello everybody, a while ago we created the opportunity for you to translate In Between into new languages. Since then people started translating our game into: Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Georgian, Dutch, Hungarian and Russian. Thats a total of 8 new languages! Your dedication and awesomeness is simply overwhelming! :inbetween_box_scared: We also had time to incorporate your valuable work into the game. We start with a total of 6 new languages that have been fully translated: Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Russian. However, we are NOT ready to publish this version to the public as we need your help verifying that the new translations work correctly in our game. For this purpose we created a special development version. Here is a screenshot explaining how you can get it:
Everyone can participate! In this version you can also hit: 0 + Enter to unlock all levels in the game. Don't fear though, this won't mess with your progress in the normal version of the game! If you encounter anything odd (text overflowing/missing, subtitles not triggering etc) - send us an email to: contact@gentlymad.org. Please attach screenshots and/or a specific description on what went wrong. Lastly, we dont want your efforts to go unnoticed. Everyone in the community whose content makes it into the game will be credited. This is how the credits will look like:
If we credited someone wrong or if multiple people participated in the translation: Please let us know! No-one should be unmentioned. A big thanks to everyone so far. We really didnt anticipate such a dedication and love to our product. <3 Cheers, Doppelkeks

Hello everybody, a while ago we created the opportunity for you to translate In Between into new languages. Since then people started translating our game into: Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Georgian, Dutch, Hungarian and Russian. That’s a total of 8 new languages! Your dedication and awesomeness is simply overwhelming! ːinbetween_box_scaredː We also had time to incorporate your valuable work into the game. We start with a total of 6 new languages that have been fully translated: Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Russian. However, we are NOT ready to publish this version to the public as we need your help verifying that the new translations work correctly in our game. For this purpose we created a special development version. Here is a screenshot explaining how you can get it:
Everyone can participate! In this version you can also hit: 0 + Enter to unlock all levels in the game. Don't fear though, this won't mess with your progress in the normal version of the game! If you encounter anything odd (text overflowing/missing, subtitles not triggering etc) - send us an email to: contact@gentlymad.org. Please attach screenshots and/or a specific description on what went wrong. Lastly, we don’t want your efforts to go unnoticed. Everyone in the community whose content makes it into the game will be credited. This is how the credits will look like:
If we credited someone wrong or if multiple people participated in the translation: Please let us know! No-one should be unmentioned. A big thanks to everyone so far. We really didn’t anticipate such a dedication and love to our product. <3 Cheers, Doppelkeks

Hello everybody, due to many offers of translating In Between into different languages we decided to put up a google sheet containing the story script. Everyone who is willing to translate can just add his prefered language to the sheet. Please stick to the guidelines that are provided in the document. Our first thanks goes out to "dollppin" who did the korean translation. The links to the google sheets are... Story (Speaker): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jAr-uY-n8YXM_GFiPN2lzg0wbbnrXOV4zVweupcfwDI/edit#gid=1388850499 Achievements: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h2cMN31-JD9xwJk8bUeGw-juL8B4exD90Oqz0ALyKpw/edit#gid=493643042 We also did a few updates within the last week as a reaction to the bug reports we received, and we will continue to improve the game! All the best, Trymops

Hello everybody, due to many offers of translating In Between into different languages we decided to put up a google sheet containing the story script. Everyone who is willing to translate can just add his prefered language to the sheet. Please stick to the guidelines that are provided in the document. Our first thanks goes out to "dollppin" who did the korean translation. The links to the google sheets are... Story (Speaker): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jAr-uY-n8YXM_GFiPN2lzg0wbbnrXOV4zVweupcfwDI/edit#gid=1388850499 Achievements: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h2cMN31-JD9xwJk8bUeGw-juL8B4exD90Oqz0ALyKpw/edit#gid=493643042 We also did a few updates within the last week as a reaction to the bug reports we received, and we will continue to improve the game! All the best, Trymops

Hello everybody, since there were several bugs detected in the last days I opened a new forum for discussions called "Bug Reports". If you stumble upon any strange things while playing In Between feel free to report them there. This will give us a better overview if bugs were solved or are still open. At this point I want to thank everyone reporting bugs so far. I think we have a pretty stable version now. GG WP, Trymops

Hello everybody, since there were several bugs detected in the last days I opened a new forum for discussions called "Bug Reports". If you stumble upon any strange things while playing In Between feel free to report them there. This will give us a better overview if bugs were solved or are still open. At this point I want to thank everyone reporting bugs so far. I think we have a pretty stable version now. GG WP, Trymops

Hello fellow players, while analyzing some Let's Plays (thanks to Fumblkrusch) we encountered some bugs we didn't notice before. Therefore we just updated the client. Here's what we've changed:

• Fixed a bug that won't let you exit a gravity zone when trying to walk out of it with a different gravity direction set.
• Moving lights that are controlled by buttons will now remember their position when dying after a checkpoint or going into the menu.
• Removed spikes in an anger and a depression level that seemed to be unnecessarily unfair.

Hello fellow players, while analyzing some Let's Plays (thanks to Fumblkrusch) we encountered some bugs we didn't notice before. Therefore we just updated the client. Here's what we've changed:

• Fixed a bug that won't let you exit a gravity zone when trying to walk out of it with a different gravity direction set.
• Moving lights that are controlled by buttons will now remember their position when dying after a checkpoint or going into the menu.
• Removed spikes in an anger and a depression level that seemed to be unnecessarily unfair.

Good news to everyone who is already enjoying the In Between soundtrack or plans to enjoy it in the future! We added an extra song, as it was requested by our community. The soundtrack now features the music from our 2014 trailer.

Good news to everyone who is already enjoying the In Between soundtrack or plans to enjoy it in the future! We added an extra song, as it was requested by our community. The soundtrack now features the music from our 2014 trailer.

We are happy to announce that the major update is now live. We did some heavy improvements which mostly cover the following:

Checkpoints

Level Tweaking

Bug Fixing

We are happy to announce that the major update is now live. We did some heavy improvements which mostly cover the following:

Checkpoints

Level Tweaking

Bug Fixing

Good news for everyone having trouble completing the game. As we are working on the mobile release of In Between we are of course continuously improving the gameplay. After a lot of reviews and complaints about the game being to frustrating we decided to add checkpoints to most of the levels. There won't be more than one checkpoint in a level but we placed them near the center or right after difficult obstacles to make it as fair as possible. We also improved some level design to make solutions more obvious. We don't want the game to be too easy but we hope this will reduce the frustration. This will hopefully give players a chance to enjoy more of the story and to make the game what it is supposed to be: A space to reflect. There also will be some minor bug fixes and other improvements coming with the patch. Expect the major update next week!

Good news for everyone having trouble completing the game. As we are working on the mobile release of In Between we are of course continuously improving the gameplay. After a lot of reviews and complaints about the game being to frustrating we decided to add checkpoints to most of the levels. There won't be more than one checkpoint in a level but we placed them near the center or right after difficult obstacles to make it as fair as possible. We also improved some level design to make solutions more obvious. We don't want the game to be too easy but we hope this will reduce the frustration. This will hopefully give players a chance to enjoy more of the story and to make the game what it is supposed to be: A space to reflect. There also will be some minor bug fixes and other improvements coming with the patch. Expect the major update next week!

Here's a little update regarding our first days with In Between being available on Steam. First of all thanks for all the nice reviews. This means a lot to us and we want to encourage everyone else to share their experience too. We already have a bunch of Let's Plays on Youtube. Of course that's a nice thing and we hope that there will be much more in the future. But we also found some small bugs while watching them. In most cases this might not affect gameplay but of course we will bring an update in the next hours. We also found a nice review on the web. You can find it following this link: https://pressplaynews.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/in-between-review-pc/ We think it catches the quintessence of the game perfectly. Also it gives the game a nice rating of 8/10. That's all for the moment. Enjoy playing! :)

Here's a little update regarding our first days with In Between being available on Steam. First of all thanks for all the nice reviews. This means a lot to us and we want to encourage everyone else to share their experience too. We already have a bunch of Let's Plays on Youtube. Of course that's a nice thing and we hope that there will be much more in the future. But we also found some small bugs while watching them. In most cases this might not affect gameplay but of course we will bring an update in the next hours. We also found a nice review on the web. You can find it following this link: https://pressplaynews.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/in-between-review-pc/ We think it catches the quintessence of the game perfectly. Also it gives the game a nice rating of 8/10. That's all for the moment. Enjoy playing! :)

Dear fellows, we are happy to announce that In Between is officially released. You can download the game for Windows, Mac and Linux. Be sure to spread the word. Many thanks to everyone who assisted us so far. We are really happy about all the support we get. It's one thing to build a game as a prototype, but it's a completely different thing to finish it. And now: Enjoy playing!

Dear followers, I am happy to announce that In Between finally has its store page set up. We are just doing some minor bug fixing before the game is ready for release. The game will come out on friday, 21st August 2015. We are really looking forward to this and we hope, that you will enjoy In Between as much as we do. Cheerio, Stephan, gentlymad.