Praey for the Gods

We’ve been working around-the-clock on our PFTG Closed Alpha release. Right now, this means doing a substantial amount of tuning on controls, climbing, and combat. We recently integrated Unity’s new Cinemachine/Timeline system, which is a huge improvement for cutscenes and trailers. It’s a great tool and will cut down the development time we were going to have to dedicate to cutscenes. Cutscenes that used to take us one week to set up now take 20 minutes! It’s pretty amazing.

Our hope was to have the Closed Alpha done earlier, however we felt it was necessary to include a number of features now that we had slotted for later releases, including a new onboarding area for players. Initially, our plan was to throw players into the deep end and see how it went. However, in recent playtests we quickly found that a dedicated area to let players get comfortable with the world and the mechanics was worth prioritizing.

it’s become obvious to us that we need to push out the PFTG Closed Alpha and full release into 2018.

Since our last newsletter, the camera system in PFTG has undergone some major improvements, the biggest of those improvements is the smoothness of the camera when following the player. This may sound like something simple in theory, but when the player is hanging from fast-moving giants, gliding with a sail cloth or maneuvering through tight climbing puzzles, things get much trickier.

Overall, we’ve spent a good chunk of time getting our controls and combat to feel much tighter and more responsive. Climbing controls were improved to react better to player movements. Tim has been working hard tuning this as well as simplifying the base controls with our bow/arrow and grappling hook. In the pre-alpha build, to use the bow you pressed right click to pull up the bow then left click to shoot. We’ve streamlined this now so it’s left click to pull up and shoot with both the bow and grappling hook. We also improved climbing so that you can climb around 90 degree angles, and also tweaked stamina usage and cold resistance.

A new feature we added was the ability to jump backwards off a wall.

Caves:

A backer on the Kickstarter page had a question about this, and in previous streams we’ve discussed how caves would possibly be used to expand our environments. In general, we’re looking into developing multiple paths within caves. Some would be short, some would be longer, and some would have platforming elements. We’ve begun work on these and we like the early results so far and hope to share more soon.

Music:

So we’ve been silent on this for a while (ha!). Ian has been working on some tracks for a while now, and we’ve been exploring choirs quite a bit as we find that they really fit the atmosphere in the game. Over the course of the last year we’ve done some short sessions with vocalists to try out some ideas. This winter, we’ll be doing another recording session with a full choir for some of our tracks.

Awakening: This was recorded nearly a year ago as Ian was running tests with a smaller vocal ensemble. Sitting in on the performance of the choral test was amazing to say the least. We really liked the results and frequently we play it on loop while working on the game.

Hymn: This track will play in a large ruined temple that you’ll visit in the game. Currently, the temple track is using vocal samples but will be recorded later with a choir.

Bosses:

We wrapped up the third boss and are now deep in refining the fourth boss. We have a little work left on the Closed Alpha but are really close. We also have a couple of other bosses sketched out and will have to decide which one will be the fifth boss.