Arctic Awakening News

Hello Arctic adventurers!

We started working on Arctic Awakening nearly 5 years ago. Our team has poured all of our creative efforts into bringing this thrilling tale to life, and we can’t wait for all of you to start exploring the wilderness with Kai and Alfie.

We're in the final stages: mechanics are being finalized, QA is squashing the last stubborn bugs, performance is being put on overdrive and every last leaf, trail and mysterious moment is getting the polish it deserves. Localization is also in full swing to make sure the game speaks to adventurers all around the world.

Today, however, we have to ask all of you patient adventurers to wait just a little bit longer. We have to delay the release... one more time. We're truly sorry to keep you waiting longer than we hoped, but we're committed to making this experience something truly unforgettable.

We know delays are frustrating, and believe us, we'd love nothing more than to have the game in your hands right now. But we refuse to settle for “good enough.” While we can't announce a release date just yet, rest assured it's coming soon, and we're so excited for you to experience what we've been working so hard on.

Thank you for your patience and support. It means the world to us, and it's what keeps us pushing to make Arctic Awakening the incredible adventure you deserve. We can't wait to share it with you – see you in the snow soon!

-The GoldFire Studios Team

[h3]PS[/h3]
We also recently updated the demo, which includes a bunch of improvements including:

• A long list of bugs and general polish (including some crashes).
  
• 25-50% performance improvements across the board.
  
• Various navigation and flight improvements to Alfie.
  
• Improved gamepad support.
  
• Fixed various issues with the save system.
  
• Level design polish.
  
• Added some new settings including FOV control (more coming soon).
  
• Further sound effects and music polish.
  
• Full professional translations for Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Portuguese (Brazil). German, Spanish, French and Russian coming soon.
  

We really appreciate all of the feedback on the demo -- it's been truly invaluable to the development!

AdventureX is back for 2024! It's the premier annual festival in London for narrative-driven games. We showcased Arctic Awakening in-person for the first time in 2022. This year we're once again participating in the Steam event, which runs from November 4-11.

About Stream
One of our favorite YouTube streamers plays and commentates on the Arctic Awakening demo, from the opening scene in the plane all the way to the surprise finish of the demo. We've also included some behind-the-scenes segments in the stream.

About Arctic Awakening
Arctic Awakening is a first-person narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your court-mandated therapy bot for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the mysteries buried beneath the ice.

AdventureX is back for 2024! It's the premier annual festival in London for narrative-driven games. We showcased Arctic Awakening in-person for the first time in 2022. This year we're once again participating in the Steam event, which runs from November 4-11.

About Stream
One of our favorite YouTube streamers plays and commentates on the Arctic Awakening demo, from the opening scene in the plane all the way to the surprise finish of the demo. We've also included some behind-the-scenes segments in the stream.

About Arctic Awakening
Arctic Awakening is a first-person narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your court-mandated therapy bot for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the mysteries buried beneath the ice.

Save & Sound is an incredible celebration of music in games, so we're more than thrilled to have been selected to participate in this year's event!

If you missed the live stream, our own feature can be viewed below. Our composer (Joff Winks) performs live on various instruments featured in the soundtrack and does a deep dive on some of the dynamic elements used in the game.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We're nearing completion on the game -- more updates on that soon. In the meantime, let us know what you thought in the comments and join in on Discord and X!

It's been a while since our last post, so we thought we'd give a quick update about the latest development progress on Arctic Awakening. The exciting news is that we've nearly completed all of the gameplay, level design, art, etc – which means the game is just about fully playable from start to finish in our internal builds!

[h2]Episodic Structure[/h2]
There are obviously other games that have influenced us, but it's safe to say an even bigger influence has been the episodic format of some of our favorite TV and mini-series. We especially love how this narrative structure allows for more of a focus on character development and pacing. It's also just a lot easier as a player to tackle a 1 to 1.5 hour episode rather than the open-ended nature of many story games – we're busy too, we get it!

This is why we decided all the way back before the pandemic to make what would become Arctic Awakening an episodic game – not in terms of a release schedule (all content will be released in a single download from day one), but in terms of narrative and gameplay structure.

It's taken a lot of work to get here (4+ years! 🤯), but that's why it's so exciting to finally be able to play through all five episodes as we enter the home stretch of the development cycle – we're excited for all of you to do the same soon, too!

[h2]What Comes Next[/h2]
There's a lot of work that goes into games outside of the obvious gameplay and visuals – it's a wonder that any game ever sees the light of day! The bulk of the work is now behind us, but here's a few areas that we're still chugging away at:

[h3]Bugs & Polish[/h3]
The biggest area remaining is around QA testing, bug fixing and overall polish. This isn't the sort of game that really makes sense for an "Early Access" release, so we're committed to releasing a game that's as polished and bug-free as possible. With such a large world and so many branches to account for, this is a rather complex and difficult process – but also a fun one as the vision for the game really starts to solidify and feel real!


[h3]Performance[/h3]
We want the game to run smoothly on as wide a range of devices as possible. Some of our technical choices (like creating a vast landscape with tens of thousands of rocks, hundreds of thousands of trees and millions of plants) make this more of a challenge than it might seem at first glance, but we've got a variety of solutions in the works that should provide significant gains over the current demo build.


[h3]Console Porting[/h3]
We haven't made any "official" announcements on the console front yet, but we're also working on two console ports that we'll provide more concrete information on soon. This is no small task, but we're working closely with our console partners to get the game ready to play fully cross-platform.

[h3]Localization[/h3]
Storytelling is universal, so localizing the game into as many languages as possible has been important to us from day one. However, due to the evolving nature of the game, it has been cost prohibitive to professionally translate the demo (with the exception of Japanese due to our inclusion in the Tokyo Game Show last year).

The auto translations in the demo have always just been placeholders, and we've recently started the process of professional localization for the full game into the following languages: French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese. We hope to support even more languages in the future, but translating over 55,000 words is both time-consuming and expensive for any studio, much less a small indie.

[h2]Demo Update[/h2]
Our last demo update was in February, and while most of our focus since then has been on all facets of the game past the demo, there's plenty of bug fixing and polish that have found their way back into the demo build.

The star of the show is obviously bug fixes and a good helping of polish/tweaks thanks to all of the fantastic feedback we've received from those of you playing the demo and sending in your comments (yes, we really do read all of it!). We've also gained plenty of insights from streamers playing the demo – for example, we realized we'd gotten a little hand hold happy in the demo areas and have made the necessary adjustments.

We've also continued making improvements to the AI companion systems and how the related navigation systems work. Not only is Alfie more spatially aware of the world around him, but Kai also now has a compass function available on his watch to help you stay oriented while exploring the world.


If you've already played the demo then there isn't too much in the way of content updates – but we continue to greatly appreciate receiving the feedback! Either way, be sure to stay tuned for more updates by following/wishlisting on our our Steam page. You can also join our Discord, Twitter (X?) or newsletter for future updates and chat with us and others about the progress of the development!