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.
The Astronauts Posts
The Astronauts Archives
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The ReckoningDev Diary: World Corruption, Bestiary, Velmorne Witch Vault
We promised more info on what’s coming to the game, and now we’re delivering. This week Adrian introduces a new vault, explains how the world will react to your deeds, and showcases two updates to Hermitorium – among other things.
And all that before we even open the Archives…
Witchfire is a corrupt ether – at least that’s what the Church scholars claim. Witches often saturate their land with it, creating magical defenses and traps that deal with any intruders not worth their attention. The land adapts, and in a way becomes a junkie hooked on witchfire. A dependency the preyer knows all too well.
When you steal that witchfire, the fabric of the world begins to destabilize. The land reacts violently, twisting matter, memory, and dormant enchantments into hostile forms. Golems of earth and bone, corrupted magic, and echoes of long-buried rituals all emerge as byproducts of this destabilization.
The witch herself does not fully command these manifestations – some are splinters of her research, others remnants of forgotten pagan rites, and many simply the land’s own corrupted immune response.
This phenomenon is known as World Corruption. A chaotic rising instability that intensifies the longer the preyer lingers in the expedition.
There is an upside, though. The most secret chests of The Order of the Broken Mirror – fortified with locks requiring Divine Essence, a mysterious substance even more powerful than witchfire – can be opened only by the most daring of hunters.
Do your thing and escape back to the Hermitorium, or try to survive the chaos of a disintegrating world and reap the benefits.
With each Gnosis level, your witchfire gains increase. The tipping point for World Corruption is Gnosis III, and this is when the feature enters the gameplay.
From a purely mechanical point of view, here’s what World Corruption is:
Entropy at work: the longer you’re in the expedition, the more chaos ensues. Note: this is mostly based on game time units, not real time.
What does “chaos” mean in practice? For example, unstable rifts will begin to appear – more and more of them – releasing additional enemy packs into the world when triggered. Or perhaps a Golem will rise and start tracking you: slowly, but never stopping.
You will also be able to earn Divine Essence outside of zones like the interior of the Tower. With that resource, you’ll be able to open a Divine Chest for special rewards.
For regular players, the game becomes more dynamic, each run more interesting due to surprises.
The idea behind World Corruption is to add depth to expeditions by increasing the value of planning, boosting the density of fun, and offering new choices without raising difficulty too much. As always, we will be monitoring feedback closely.
World Corruption is separate from Calamities, which are deliberate strikes from the witch when she senses weakness, using different mechanics and a different feel. One way to think about it is… Calamities are localized, “deal with it right here, right now” events. World Corruption cooks the entire world, slowly.
Oh, and World Corruption is what we previously called Extraction 2.0. I’m sure we’ll do a separate post on it – the whole journey from one idea to another was fascinating. But once we saw what World Corruption could be, we knew it simply made the game better, deeper – and decided to pursue that direction rather than focusing only on the escape part.
Although, to be clear, the feature does affect your extraction strategy in a big way…
New update, new Witch Vault. We promised two, but we just couldn’t squeeze them both in at the quality we want and you expect. The second one will have to wait for the next update – sorry about that.
The good news is that the one we did finish is the largest yet. I won’t say more not to spoil anything, but it is… special. And it’s in Velmorne, so that giant map just got even bigger (while also being more optimized).
A single lonely undead is no longer all that the Hermitorium has to offer. We expanded this feature in a big way.
You can summon three enemies now
You can summon any enemy you’ve killed a sufficient number of times (except bosses).
A nearby Witchfire Basin restores your spells, Stamina, and ammo
Three summon circles. each can summon a different enemy
And also:
Unlocking an enemy in the summoning circle will also reveal their lore in the Bestiary.
Until now, three Fallen Preyers were available to aid you in your quest to kill the Witch. With The Reckoning update, three more join the crusade. Need help with traps, the exit portal, or pure firepower? It’s here.
The limit of how many Fallen Preyers the Vestal Flame can support remains, though. So the choice becomes harder – if we did our job right.
Also, you can now revive any Fallen Preyer during an expedition …for a price.
There are still some big things left to reveal, but we’ll keep those for the next post – the last one before release. For now, let’s end with news of the newest weapon joining your arsenal.
Another – after Striga – in the family of painful projectiles, Martyr is all about exotic pain magic from a distant land and the storms that connect the dots.
Yours soon, if you can earn it.
Hermitorium Archives
Cleanup on floor -1.
We begin this instalment of the Archives by visiting the Wailing Tower – the descent is always a challenge, and Spudster812 found a way to make the early stages a bit easier on the ammo reserves. The method involves using the parasite to wipe the tower floor clean, and it’s brilliant in its simplicity. We enjoy seeing you mount a challenge in unconventional ways; it’s always a good lesson and a chance to observe your out-of-the-box thinking. This also inspires us when designing new levels and mechanics, so everybody wins in the long run.
Over the past months, we have witnessed many cases of turning the tables on supposedly frightening bosses and making them look like village idiots who have no idea what they are doing. Hypnosis Goblin, a preyer whose exploits are at this point legendary, decided to find yet another way of showing the first familiar that size does not always matter. The comedic effect of Galley Slave being repeatedly boinked on the head is – to my mind at least – great, and it proves that even if Twinshade is not among the community’s favourite spells, it does have its uses. Even if they are not strictly in line with the tone of the game.
We don’t mind players trying to speedrun the game – in the welcoming post on our Discord we even link to Witchfire’s profile on speedrun.com, although not many people seem to be posting their records, which is not surprising considering the early access nature of the game and its (somewhat) rapidly evolving shape. That said, we’re also observing the other end of the spectrum with curiosity – those who decide, for one reason or another, to take their time, just as u/aimstotheleft did. The post paints a picture of a long road to Gnosis IV and the experience shifting yet again with ascension. We invite you all to take your time and play the game the way you want it to be played.
Now, granted, Halloween may have been a while ago, but we wanted to share this creation nevertheless – u/lighthammerforge posted it on our subreddit and we think it really deserves the shoutout. Most of us in the studio may not have the faintest idea how difficult it is to craft jack-o-lanterns (save for our Senior Environment Artist, Peter, who knows a thing or two), but we’re really happy to see fan creations encroaching into new territories – thanks!
* – we don’t really work from the office, but you get the idea.
Rumble me this.
Being in early access (the tail end of it now, but still) gives us the ability to listen to your suggestions and implement them if we find them solid. There is one suggestion – maybe even a request – that holds a lot of water and hasn’t been realised yet: controller vibration. We recognise it’s been a while since we last talked about rumble support, but this time it’s not just talking the talk – we’re prototyping it and exploring our options. Sure, we could probably adopt an off-the-shelf solution and call it a day, but that’s just not how we work. Since we’re not far from the release of The Reckoning, don’t expect it to appear on the changelist soon, but it’s coming.
Oh, and before we wrap this up – back in the days before Webgrave, there was talk about including a flamethrower in the game. It made us scratch our heads. Now there’s been another request for it, so let’s be clear: it’s going to make an appearance.
Okay, I’ll admit it: there is a slight chance a bit of diabolical laughter slipped out while composing the above meme.
Stay tuned for another dev diary next week, there is even more in store and we’re excited to share news with you.
