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.
A few days ago, we held the very first playtest of Witchfire. We invited a couple of industry friends – easier this way, they know what a work-in-progress build is and won’t be distracted by missing textures or placeholders sounds – to our studio to play the game for an hour or two. Does this […]
The Witchfire development stories I post here follow a certain pattern, usually. We face a problem, we attack it, we solve it, boom, happy ending and we move on to the next step. Not this time. Get your “F” keys ready. At the end of the last diary entry I wrote: So we are moving […]
I wrote this in the last devdiary entry: Right now, we’re working on a new, pretty challenging but super exciting milestone. We came up with the design for the core flow of the game (so it’s not about “30 seconds of fun”, but rather “30 minutes of fun”) and we’re prototyping that. Three months later, […]
Two important milestones behind us, one of which is a story of happiness, and the other a warning and a lesson. Going with the idea of altering between making systems and let’s have a new playable, after a few weeks of the former we’ve decided to make another internal demo. To be clear, it’s never […]
Playdead, a Danish game developer, released Limbo in 2010. It took them six years to make the next game, Inside. It’s been four years since then, and we still don’t even know the title of their next project. Frictional, a Swedish game developer, released Amnesia: Dark Descend in 2010. It took them five years to […]
In part one, I talked about the birth of Come Midnight. This here second, final part is about its life and death. Time to open the floodgates and see what we’ve managed to do during the year and a half or so of the development. Here are the documents, art and videos! Lets start with […]
The work on Witchfire continues, but there’s nothing to show for now unless you like heavy spoilers that don’t even look good because it’s all work in progress. So, I figured… Since most people prefer the entire saga, here we go. Painkiller didn’t make us rich. It was made for a flat fee, an embarrassingly […]
We like the idea of a studio being 100% responsible for their creation. Just a couple of guys and their ideas brought to life. But – we also know that gamers, especially of the hardcore kind, are knowledgeable. So one day we just sent out a tweet asking if there’s a track that people feel […]
One day, during the late stage of the development of Bulletstorm, I wanted to add a small new feature to the game. The Epic’s producer, Tanya, rolled her eyes and told me it’s not possible, we’re out of time. I felt it was a really important feature and pushed for it. “I only need one […]