Weekly Report #64
[h3]UPDATE[/h3]
We've quickly gathered the needed tester base, so the registration is now CLOSED. Thanks all for your precious support!
[h3]Hello Stalkers![/h3]
We are fully aware that you’re waiting for the final version of Chernobylite and today we can say it’s not just around the corner. It’s already leaning and aiming at you.
We want to invite you to closed testing of the English version of the last Mega Patch before we release it next month.
The short and simple plan is that now we’re starting the closed tests of the Mega Patch, make it public in April, and then we’ll ask you to wait only weeks till the game is finally released and leaves Early Access (we’ll be able to give you the final game release date in April together with the public Mega Patch). The testing group will be limited to 100 people only, so don’t hesitate to register - we’ll send the access codes to the first 100 players who register HERE.
It was promised that we’ll deliver the last Mega Patch on Q1 2021 and we truly want to fulfill this promise. The only issue why we can’t do a public Mega Patch release today is because in the meantime we started to work on more language localizations and this process is not over yet. Thanks to cooperation with our publisher, All in! Games, the game will be localized into several additional languages, but this is taking a bit longer than our original timeline presented on the Roadmap of Early Access. The original story dialogues have been fully rewritten and character voices were recorded from the scratch, so it’s not just an update to the text and voices you may know, but it’s a true 2.0 version of the initial story. That’s why we had to restart all the text and dialogue work for all the languages.
[h3]So what you can expect if you’d join the testing group?[/h3]
[h3]What you shouldn’t expect from joining the testing group?[/h3]
[h3]What WE’d expect from you?[/h3]
Just to make sure once again: if you’d like have the fun from playing the 100% polished game, we recommend you to wait until we release a final version of Mega Patch, and if you like to finalize the game story till the finish, please wait for the end of the Early Access.
[h2]And that's why we need YOUR help![/h2]
Back in 2015, we visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for the first time attempting to collect some data for the experimental VR documentary about the catastrophe in 1986. We couldn’t imagine that it’ll lead us to the point when today we’ll be sharing with you the (almost) finished role-playing survival horror game that tells the alternative story of the infamous incident.
Now we’re just about to end the craziest and biggest project that most of us have been working on. From the 3D-scanning of the real Zone, through the atypical non-linearity of the story, to the insane will to recreate some of the tiniest details of this beautiful and dark world - we tried to push our skills and tools to the limits.
A game like this wouldn’t be possible to make without your help. In the harsh reality of the video games industry, the unusual projects like Chernobylite usually end as small and unnoticed indie titles or turn into the bigger but much more safely crafted mainstream productions. But thanks to you, our Kickstarter and Early Access supporters, we could develop the game according to our original vision and immediately share it with you through the updates on Steam and GOG. The ideas we had a few years ago are here all the time, but their execution was strongly driven by our players’ feedback and countless discussions we had on Steam forums, Discord, messengers and direct emails.
And this is why we’d like to ask you once again to help us with the final testing phase of the Chernobylite. You could ask “why?” and the question would be perfectly valid. Well, we’re doing very excessive tests with your participation since the Early Access launch in 2019. And we believe that the high quality of many aspects of the game we’ve reached during this time is clearly your contribution. In our team, since the beginning of the development, we had some internal testers working on checking the gameflow and looking for the bugs within the game all the time. Moreover, for the last 6 months, we’re cooperating with a professional testing team that guides us from the Beta stage of the project to the soon-to-be release on many technical issues and bug fixing processes.
But let’s make it clear: a game like this (and Chernobylite definitely is not the biggest project in the world), in its original form, before it’s cooked and uploaded to Steam or GOG, contains almost 700.000 files, located in nearly 40.000 folders. It includes about 130.000 of various objects (models, textures, animations, sound files and so on) and we don’t even try to count the lines of code and parameters written in programming and scripting languages. For a team of fewer than 30 people, it’s virtually impossible to make sure that all these elements are working bug-free in all game scenarios that are available within the non-linear Chernobylite story. So we know that game still contains some bugs and the remaining weeks of development time before the final game is released we would like to focus entirely on the bug fixing and optimization of any remaining elements of the game that can be found as problematic for you.
[h3]Forgotten events[/h3]
And while we are talking about it… While fixing these major bugs, such as a bug where soldiers in Kopachi could shoot through walls (we have Counter-Strike flashbacks. You know - the mighty Desert Eagle), we came across something interesting.
As you well know, there are quite a few narrative elements in the game that help you understand the world of Chernobylite, such as newspaper clippings, notes, and official documents. But there were also numerous events scattered across the maps, which showed Igor pictures from the past. Thanks to this, players could see with their own eyes what was happening in Chernobyl during and after the disaster.
But there was one scene that caught our attention - that one event located in PripyatPort. It must have slipped out of our heads, because the cutscene lacked the character disintegration. Oops. Fortunately, the bug has been fixed, as can be seen in the attached picture.
These are the kinds of things we want you to pay attention to when testing the Mega Patch. Sometimes they can be like the one shown above, and sometimes they can be more minor like objects penetrating through walls.
[h3]Animations in the base[/h3]
Another small variety. We've always been a bit bothered by the fact that the characters recruited by the player appeared in the base and… that's it. They all stand in one place and barely move. We decided to change this a bit by implementing very simple animations of our NPCs, who now interact with specific buildings in the base.
A slight change, but thanks to this we’ll avoid the impression that the base is only a storage for dummies. Although, as you can see below, we still have to improve this and that.
We dare not ask Mikhail what he is doing...
[h3]That's it for today![/h3]
Take care, Stalkers!
We've quickly gathered the needed tester base, so the registration is now CLOSED. Thanks all for your precious support!
[h3]Hello Stalkers![/h3]
We are fully aware that you’re waiting for the final version of Chernobylite and today we can say it’s not just around the corner. It’s already leaning and aiming at you.
We want to invite you to closed testing of the English version of the last Mega Patch before we release it next month.
The short and simple plan is that now we’re starting the closed tests of the Mega Patch, make it public in April, and then we’ll ask you to wait only weeks till the game is finally released and leaves Early Access (we’ll be able to give you the final game release date in April together with the public Mega Patch). The testing group will be limited to 100 people only, so don’t hesitate to register - we’ll send the access codes to the first 100 players who register HERE.
It was promised that we’ll deliver the last Mega Patch on Q1 2021 and we truly want to fulfill this promise. The only issue why we can’t do a public Mega Patch release today is because in the meantime we started to work on more language localizations and this process is not over yet. Thanks to cooperation with our publisher, All in! Games, the game will be localized into several additional languages, but this is taking a bit longer than our original timeline presented on the Roadmap of Early Access. The original story dialogues have been fully rewritten and character voices were recorded from the scratch, so it’s not just an update to the text and voices you may know, but it’s a true 2.0 version of the initial story. That’s why we had to restart all the text and dialogue work for all the languages.
[h3]So what you can expect if you’d join the testing group?[/h3]
- You’ll get access to the testing branch of Chernobylite on Steam, meaning you’ll download the game again in a special version prepared for this opportunity. Register below with your email and within the next few days, you’ll get access to the testing branch.
- You’ll be able to play the latest version of the game with all the content updated comparing to the previous Mega Patch but only in English.
- The game will allow you to take a look at the part of the final Heist mission, but the game endings are still not available until we release the finished game.
- The game is strongly optimized and cleaned up from most of the bugs and glitches you were experiencing in previous versions...
- ...but you can still find some bugs and glitches and this is why we need your help.
- You’ll lose your progress from the previously saved games (it will happen anyway after the final release, but here it’ll happen sooner).
- We’ll be updating the game version on the testing branch many times within the next weeks, so you may expect both improved content and new bugs from time to time.
- You have a chance to get cool physical rewards if you help us and to be mentioned in the game credits.
[h3]What you shouldn’t expect from joining the testing group?[/h3]
- Playing the finalized game till the ending is still not here - if you want to have a smooth and fully enjoyable player experience instead of helping us in quite a demanding testing task, it’s better if you wait for the final game.
- No language versions other than English are available at this moment. We’ll be adding other languages to this testing version as soon as we’ll get them implemented and primarily tested internally - what is the matter of the next weeks.
[h3]What WE’d expect from you?[/h3]
- It makes sense for both you and us only if you’ll spend quite a time on playing the game and report any bugs or issues you’d find to our Steam forum.
- We’re closing the game development so we should focus only on looking for the technical and gameplay issues related to the existing content. I.e. it’s very important for us to know if the difficulty balance is OK or not for any of you. Or if the game works smoothly on your current PC rig. But it won’t help if you ask us to add the possibility to drive the vehicles or hunt the animals, because we simply have no option to add new content or features here.
- But if you have any suggestions about the possible expansion of the game in the future upgrades after the release (like DLC or the sequel), we’re more than happy to get them collected HERE.
Just to make sure once again: if you’d like have the fun from playing the 100% polished game, we recommend you to wait until we release a final version of Mega Patch, and if you like to finalize the game story till the finish, please wait for the end of the Early Access.
[h2]And that's why we need YOUR help![/h2]
Back in 2015, we visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for the first time attempting to collect some data for the experimental VR documentary about the catastrophe in 1986. We couldn’t imagine that it’ll lead us to the point when today we’ll be sharing with you the (almost) finished role-playing survival horror game that tells the alternative story of the infamous incident.
Now we’re just about to end the craziest and biggest project that most of us have been working on. From the 3D-scanning of the real Zone, through the atypical non-linearity of the story, to the insane will to recreate some of the tiniest details of this beautiful and dark world - we tried to push our skills and tools to the limits.
A game like this wouldn’t be possible to make without your help. In the harsh reality of the video games industry, the unusual projects like Chernobylite usually end as small and unnoticed indie titles or turn into the bigger but much more safely crafted mainstream productions. But thanks to you, our Kickstarter and Early Access supporters, we could develop the game according to our original vision and immediately share it with you through the updates on Steam and GOG. The ideas we had a few years ago are here all the time, but their execution was strongly driven by our players’ feedback and countless discussions we had on Steam forums, Discord, messengers and direct emails.
And this is why we’d like to ask you once again to help us with the final testing phase of the Chernobylite. You could ask “why?” and the question would be perfectly valid. Well, we’re doing very excessive tests with your participation since the Early Access launch in 2019. And we believe that the high quality of many aspects of the game we’ve reached during this time is clearly your contribution. In our team, since the beginning of the development, we had some internal testers working on checking the gameflow and looking for the bugs within the game all the time. Moreover, for the last 6 months, we’re cooperating with a professional testing team that guides us from the Beta stage of the project to the soon-to-be release on many technical issues and bug fixing processes.
But let’s make it clear: a game like this (and Chernobylite definitely is not the biggest project in the world), in its original form, before it’s cooked and uploaded to Steam or GOG, contains almost 700.000 files, located in nearly 40.000 folders. It includes about 130.000 of various objects (models, textures, animations, sound files and so on) and we don’t even try to count the lines of code and parameters written in programming and scripting languages. For a team of fewer than 30 people, it’s virtually impossible to make sure that all these elements are working bug-free in all game scenarios that are available within the non-linear Chernobylite story. So we know that game still contains some bugs and the remaining weeks of development time before the final game is released we would like to focus entirely on the bug fixing and optimization of any remaining elements of the game that can be found as problematic for you.
[h3]Forgotten events[/h3]
And while we are talking about it… While fixing these major bugs, such as a bug where soldiers in Kopachi could shoot through walls (we have Counter-Strike flashbacks. You know - the mighty Desert Eagle), we came across something interesting.
As you well know, there are quite a few narrative elements in the game that help you understand the world of Chernobylite, such as newspaper clippings, notes, and official documents. But there were also numerous events scattered across the maps, which showed Igor pictures from the past. Thanks to this, players could see with their own eyes what was happening in Chernobyl during and after the disaster.
But there was one scene that caught our attention - that one event located in PripyatPort. It must have slipped out of our heads, because the cutscene lacked the character disintegration. Oops. Fortunately, the bug has been fixed, as can be seen in the attached picture.
These are the kinds of things we want you to pay attention to when testing the Mega Patch. Sometimes they can be like the one shown above, and sometimes they can be more minor like objects penetrating through walls.
[h3]Animations in the base[/h3]
Another small variety. We've always been a bit bothered by the fact that the characters recruited by the player appeared in the base and… that's it. They all stand in one place and barely move. We decided to change this a bit by implementing very simple animations of our NPCs, who now interact with specific buildings in the base.
A slight change, but thanks to this we’ll avoid the impression that the base is only a storage for dummies. Although, as you can see below, we still have to improve this and that.
We dare not ask Mikhail what he is doing...
[h3]That's it for today![/h3]
Take care, Stalkers!