There’s a cause you don’t hear a lot about witches, which is that they’re not actual. There’s a separate cause why you haven’t heard a lot about Witchfire‘s witches since The Astronauts introduced their first-person occultist bosher final yr – the devs are solely eight in quantity, they usually have all been very busy.
In a recent blogpost, The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter devs introduced they’re about to get a bit extra chatty. Weekly dev updates are because of begin this Wednesday, whereas the announcement itself provides an summary of progress to date. It’s wanting very fairly, fairly swish, and somewhat creepy.
That’s the teaser from final yr. Pretty swish and creepy, yeah?
As detailed within the blogpost, Witchfire “is not a story-based game”. There are not any cutscenes, and “the heart of the game is somewhere else”, they are saying, in enigmatic daring font. It’s “focused on challenge and mastery”, although there’s additionally good sightseeing. Like so.
Here’s the place the devs are as much as:
“A lot of asset work has been done. We have dozens of guns ready, they’re being animated at this very moment. We have enough modelled and animated enemy models to make a significant portion of the game, and one of us is currently finishing the work on the core AI that will govern them all. For two years now, the graphic artists have been working on the map assets mostly using the photogrammetry tech. The actual levels are being meshed. The main features have all been designed and just wait until their implementation time comes.”
That fancy photogrammetry tech is what made Ethan’s Carter’s rocks look so good. Like, this good.
Witchfire Wednesdays, which they are saying we will name the dev updates if we need to and I do, “will reveal something new about the game, show behind the scenes stuff showing how games are made (so expect a lot of crude assets, basic animations and other dirty things), or explain the design ideas. For example, we will talk why it took us a day to have a functional gun, but three months to have a great feeling one, and we will show at how we arrived at the final form of a creepy monster after the first sketch that just made us laugh.”
I don’t assume I truly need to go poking round behind the monster-concealing curtain. Even the quantity I’ve discovered for this information put up is regrettable, once I’d somewhat the primary time I met these fellas be after they’re a number of inches away and attempting to carve out my eyeballs.
The Astronauts don’t assume their game shall be prepared till 2019, however “2020 sounds reasonable”.
