Re: Pitch Black: The 'AAA' Audio Game
Listen here or read below!
https://youtu.be/AD3Uz62fFM0
Hi everybody! We hope you had a great winter break and new year!
We thought it’d be good to start the year by giving everyone a progress report on the game!
After listening to all the feedback from A Detective’s Demise we’ve had a significant re-design of A Dusklight Story. It’s clear that complex mechanics are what audio gamers want, on top of the quality 3D audio, sound design, voice acting and narrative we already deliver.
It’s also clear that a lot of audio gamers want complex combat mechanics in games, you’ve heard us discuss this previously and we’ve been working on it. However, we don’t want players to have to fight if they don’t wish to, and we want that decision to be meaningful, adjusting their experience of the rest of the game. That means stealth mechanics are required to move past enemies rather than fighting, that means the persons of interest you hear vary dependent on whether you choose to be a violent character or a peaceful one, that means the ambience in the world shifts depending on how you play to reflect that, that changes the level design, and so on..
Moreover, the Detective’s dialogue in a detective’s demise was something of a highlight for many, and the fact that he voices the menus and as well as talking about his surroundings and to other characters in the game added a lot of cohesion across the whole experience. We want to carry this strength over to A Dusklight Story, which means the main character is now voiced, this changes the in game dialogue, cutscenes and over all narrative.
..aand all of this needs to be integrated, in a cohesive design with our current audio mechanics. Needless to say, this change is very substantial.
The main thing to announce from a technical development perspective is that we’re moving from Unity to Unreal, and converting our current codebase to C++ from C#, this is for a number of reasons. Unreal Engine is closer to the industry standard (if there was one for engines), and uses C++, which is the industry standard programming language. C++ allows for levels of optimization that C# cannot as it facilitates more precise memory management and computation. In order for our games to run on older devices this is necessary. We saw issues with A Detective’s Demise on older devices and would like to ensure our games can be optimized to the fullest extent so that we can solve them.
We’re also moving to use the FMOD Core API for our audio system. This is to remove any overhead from using Unity’s built in audio mixer, and to allow us to have more direct control of the audio including utilizing our own dynamic libraries and plugins, eventually leading to a suite of Purple Jam’s own cross platform audio tools.
As you can imagine, all of these changes to game design and technical retooling add significant time to the development process.
This isn’t something we do lightly, especially considering our Kickstarter backers have been waiting a long time, but the goal has always been to make the best possible audio game, an audio game so compelling it brings the genre closer to the main stream and inspires other devs to make their own. These changes will mean that A Dusklight Story will be the best it can be, which in the long term, we’re sure our backers would prefer. Our new proposed release time for Pitch Black: A Dusklight Story - Episode One is summer 2021.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
