We are a small independent game developer located in Warsaw, Poland. Before The Astronauts, some of us worked on games like Painkiller and Bulletstorm.
Our latest project is Witchfire, a dark fantasy first person shooter set in an alternative world in which witches are real and very dangerous – but so are you, witchhunter.
Our first game was a weird fiction mystery titled The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The game has won many awards, including BAFTA, and we sold over one million copies. It’s available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Click here for more details.
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Breaking Out of the Development Lull
Risking an internal demo at the cost of fundamentals
Risking an internal demo at the cost of fundamentals
Every project I worked on suffered from what I personally
call a development lull.
When you start a project, things happen fast, you prototype
like crazy and make decisions every day. When you finish the project, it’s
mayhem, you almost lose control over your tasks.
But somewhere in the middle, nothing happens for months,
sometimes years.
I mean, obviously things happen, everyone is working every
day, we discuss features and implement them, etc. etc. – but somehow,
magically, you have nothing to show for it. It feels like the game is in the
same exact state it was months ago.
It’s incredibly frustrating.
Since it was a part of, as I said, every project I ever
worked on, originally, I planned on just living with it. But the frustration
became unbearable, so we’ve decided to do things differently this time around.
Instead of keeping on building the game, we’re dedicating
August to building a demo. An internal one, focused on the flow of action, and
the minute-to-minute, or even hour-to-hour experience. Something short, but
also something you can actually loop-playtest for hours if it’s any good.
Anyway, what it is exactly is not important, the important part is that even at
the cost of some fundamentals, we should be getting something that is a proof
we have much more than we ever had before.
I want the team to be 100% focused on the task, that includes
me as well, so we’ll be going offline until the end of August. I have some
posts lined up – we have the concept art and the 3D model of the hero, I’d love
to share our thoughts of content re-use for indie devs, etc. – but I want no
distractions of any sort. It’s a really important “demo”, as it’s not just
about breaking out of the lull, but also about the release date (i.e. “can we
deliver?”).
This post needs something else than text, so here’s Jakub Wiśniewski‘s concept art for one of the bosses. See you in September!
Question(s) of the Month
2. question @TheAstroCrew How hard do you want the game? Is it going to be like Dark Souls? If Dark Souls is a 9 of a scale from 1-10 where is Your plan for witchfire on this scale?
