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The Chinese Room has released a status update for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Included in today's update is new information for the game, a few new screenshots, and even a new piece of music from the game! Let's start things off with "Wendy's Theme" from The Chinese Room's Jessica Curry.
Moving on, we have three new screenshots to share with you this evening for the PlayStation 4 exclusive title.
The team revealed tonight that the game is nearing alpha after working hard ever since E3. This essentially means that the gameplay is now almost completely locked as far as story, pacing, transitions, and other gameplay elements are concerned.
In terms of overall production, the team did reveal that they are now over halfway to completion.
(via The Chinese Room)
[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/thechineseroom/wendys-theme-1[/soundcloud]
Moving on, we have three new screenshots to share with you this evening for the PlayStation 4 exclusive title.
The team revealed tonight that the game is nearing alpha after working hard ever since E3. This essentially means that the gameplay is now almost completely locked as far as story, pacing, transitions, and other gameplay elements are concerned.
There are six major areas in the game, each of them needing a distinct identity whilst hanging together as a coherent whole, and getting that right needs in-depth iterations between design, audio and art.
Alongside that, the art team have been incredibly busy churning out the volume of assets a game like this requires. It's really made us realise that the way we've always talked about the game, not as an ‘indie’ title, but a short-form AAA, is definitely the most accurate way of talking about it. Making sure everything produced is historically accurate, to really sell a complete and compelling fictionalised version of rural England in the 1980s is a big challenge, but we've got an absolutely wonderful art team, including three amazing young artists all working on their first professional title, so we're very lucky. Alongside the environment art, our resident VFX genius has been creating some extraordinary visuals that are really unique and create a stunning layer of mystery in the game. Behind them, there's a lot of complex design and code, keeping a large open-world running at a steady frame-rate without compromising the visual quality, and creating an AI system that balances its mechanical role with really communicating a sense of life and agency. Often, the behind-the-scenes stuff is difficult to identify, but it's the spine of the experience and takes a long time to get right - usually something that is still getting tinkered with right up to beta.
The core thing about Rapture is atmosphere and story - a deep, engrossing, emotionally driven tale set in a living, breathing world, and that's a combination of lots of things from environmental storytelling to vocal performances. We went into the studio with a stunning cast in late September and integrated all of the scenes into the game during autumn, and we're really proud of the performances. We worked with a brilliant voice director and were lucky to attract some wonderful actors, and Sony supported us using a longer rehearsal period to be able to workshop the script and really get deeply into the nuances of the characters that you'd normally get. We think the results speak for themselves. Supporting those performances with foley, visualisations and art is the major task ahead of us now.
In audio, it's been a really exciting few months. On top of her many director duties, Jess has almost finished the score and we're heading to the studio in March to record it, and it's already clear it's going to be her strongest work yet. We've got a stunning, world-class line-up of musicians ready to go on this, and we can't wait to get it integrated. This is being blended into a procedural ambience and mood audio generation system that's been custom-built in-house and is letting us get around the normal compromises you find in game music that needs to respond to in-game events and player activity. The audio on this game is going to be really special, from voice to music to sound.
Alongside that, the art team have been incredibly busy churning out the volume of assets a game like this requires. It's really made us realise that the way we've always talked about the game, not as an ‘indie’ title, but a short-form AAA, is definitely the most accurate way of talking about it. Making sure everything produced is historically accurate, to really sell a complete and compelling fictionalised version of rural England in the 1980s is a big challenge, but we've got an absolutely wonderful art team, including three amazing young artists all working on their first professional title, so we're very lucky. Alongside the environment art, our resident VFX genius has been creating some extraordinary visuals that are really unique and create a stunning layer of mystery in the game. Behind them, there's a lot of complex design and code, keeping a large open-world running at a steady frame-rate without compromising the visual quality, and creating an AI system that balances its mechanical role with really communicating a sense of life and agency. Often, the behind-the-scenes stuff is difficult to identify, but it's the spine of the experience and takes a long time to get right - usually something that is still getting tinkered with right up to beta.
The core thing about Rapture is atmosphere and story - a deep, engrossing, emotionally driven tale set in a living, breathing world, and that's a combination of lots of things from environmental storytelling to vocal performances. We went into the studio with a stunning cast in late September and integrated all of the scenes into the game during autumn, and we're really proud of the performances. We worked with a brilliant voice director and were lucky to attract some wonderful actors, and Sony supported us using a longer rehearsal period to be able to workshop the script and really get deeply into the nuances of the characters that you'd normally get. We think the results speak for themselves. Supporting those performances with foley, visualisations and art is the major task ahead of us now.
In audio, it's been a really exciting few months. On top of her many director duties, Jess has almost finished the score and we're heading to the studio in March to record it, and it's already clear it's going to be her strongest work yet. We've got a stunning, world-class line-up of musicians ready to go on this, and we can't wait to get it integrated. This is being blended into a procedural ambience and mood audio generation system that's been custom-built in-house and is letting us get around the normal compromises you find in game music that needs to respond to in-game events and player activity. The audio on this game is going to be really special, from voice to music to sound.
In terms of overall production, the team did reveal that they are now over halfway to completion.
(via The Chinese Room)