Witchfire, the upcoming game from Vanishing of Ethan Carter studio The Astronauts has a reasonably easy premise: “we just want to shoot monsters with guns.”
But in a recent blog post, the builders revealed they’d beforehand been engaged on one thing fairly completely different, and in the end determined to throw out a 12 months’s price of labor on a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic survival sim as a result of they “liked it, but not loved it.”
So why have been The Astronauts making a survival simulator within the first place? “Partially, it was about jumping on the bandwagon,” they are saying. “It seemed like the world has moved towards sandboxes like Day Z, Rust or Ark. We liked some of these games but figured we could do it differently. The plan was to make a survival sim for people who enjoy the idea of a survival sim – alone versus the universe – but hate the execution.”
But they quickly got here to grasp that it wasn’t the place their true passions lay. Presumably they wished to totally take pleasure in creating the game for private fulfilment, however in addition they say that gamers can inform when there’s “love behind every pixel,” and that this is a crucial high quality for his or her games to seize. It was solely as soon as they determined that what they honestly cherished was capturing at monsters that Witchfire because it now exists was born.
“Nothing carried over to what we’re working on these days. Not a single idea, not a single asset (okay, maybe except for the grass).” It is, I need to say, very lovely grass, helped out by some of the tricks employed in Ethan Carter. As effectively as the apparent gameplay adjustments, the sci-fi, post-apocalyptic setting has additionally been changed by “gaslamp fantasy.”
The eight-person studio has now been onerous at work with a lot of a very powerful components of “shoot monsters with guns” – namely the monsters and also the guns. It’s not stunning, then, that this “cautionary tale” nonetheless has a optimistic ending: “we’ve never been happier than we are now,” concludes the weblog.
