Project Absentia News

There's gonna be another patch later this week with more fixes, but for now:

• Revert OpenAL to older version to fix horrifically bad sound mixing issues in some cases.
  

Hello! We have good news to share!

Project Absentia is releasing into Early Access on July 29th with a launch price of 14.99USD.

This price will scale as more content is added, but if you buy it now, the price won't go up for you later.

Currently the game will launch with all of Episode 1's content available - which is what's available in the demo, plus two additional chapters.

Hello there, hope everyone is doing well.

As we head closer towards releasing Project Absentia, we've been doing quite a bit of work behind the scenes.

We listened to a ton of feedback on Abby's VA.

While many of us at WIS liked Sins' performance, we realized for many people she was not the vast majority's cup of tea.

So we decided to go with another VA due to the mixed response. This was not an easy decision, and not any of those on the team's first choice of action.

On the advice of Jake the Voice, who voices Dr. Atmosphere, he suggested his friend and colleague - Mikell Dover - as a potential VA for Abby.

We ended up going with her! Her lines are live and playable in the demo as of the writing of this project.

We've also been retooling the writing to be a bit more smart, while still having the right amount of edge. For now we've gotten rid of the cutscenes as we strive to perfect those.

We appreciate Sin's contributions to WIS and we're keeping her on in a beta testing and possibly for promo graphics design in the future.

Project Absentia's demo has some features being backported from the devbranch including the following:

• Select renderer on launch You can select the Vulkan, OpenGL, or GLES (experimental and limited) renderers. Depending on your graphics card you might need to use a different renderer.
  
• Bugfixes to the levels, both functionality and geometry-wise.
  
• Overhaul one-liner system to be more consistent with the cooldown.
  
• Replaced many textures from SHDX/earlier builds of PA that were based on OTEX/Doom.
  
• Pool table in E1M1 works better. (This is an important feature)
  
• Misc bugfixes through the code.
  

The demo has been updated. It fixes some issues we were working on.

• E1M1 + E1M2 have different, improved skyboxes now
  
• Lower the frequency of the voice acting for most enemies
  
• Add another cutscene at the end of the demo - introducing Jake the Voice as Dr. Vivek Atmosphere!
• Fix some minor issues with E1M2
  
• Fix some minor issues with E1M3
  

This will be, unless major bugs are reported, the last build for the demo in the forseeable future. We feel the demo now is a proper representation of what the Early Access game is going to be.

We hope you enjoy playing it as we did making it.

Hello! We're ready to kick ass and eat pizza, and we're all outta pizza.

We have updated the voice acting, tons of graphical assets, done some fixes to the levels in the demo, and we are ready to move forward with Episode 1's Early Access Release, save for some minor fixes beforehand with some additional voice acting and other things.

• Overhaul spritework extensively - Things should look a lot nicer and not as MSPainty.
  
• Replaced voice acting for Abby and the High Guards
• Tweaked Boomstick - gave it a fixed pattern for both barrels as well as single barrels, as random spread made it feel inconsistent and weak
  
• Replaced voxel-models with low poly 3d models
• Tweaked some enemy behavior and poses to make them look more dynamic - This makes some of the enemies' attacks more telegraphed and fun to look at
  
• Overhauled some UI elements and the Title Screen/Cover Art - While not noticed by people, some of the UI elements were hhhhhideous and not up to snuff
  
• Pizza Powerup - Pizza Time! We have a health pickup item that acts like the medkit from Build Engine type games. You press "F" by default to activate it. (You may need to rebind this and other keybinds if you played an earlier build!)
• Quick Menu - A few of our internal testers who are not familiar with this genre of games and the GZDoom engine reported issues with the menu system. We overhauled the menu system to make it less tedious, and put what we thought were the most important settings in the forefront. You can activate this by pressing F1.

Now we should explain why we were gone for so long.

As some of you are aware, we brought on two artists, one of which was the VA for Abby. However, as time went on we had major creative differences with the artists. While we appreciate the work and the effort, it was not in line with what the rest of the team and the overall goal of the project.

We came to an agreement and we split on mutual terms.

So we took down the demo while we revitalized the demo again. I want the demo to be representative of the main game, and I felt like leaving up the demo was not going to do that.

We took our time replacing the assets. First, we brought back on Sins, the original voice of Abby, and we brought on Uncle Had (no relation), who has been a friend of the development team for some time, to help with overall voice direction. We used some of the old lines, but most of them were redone. We got rid of the more cringe lines and writing and replaced them with additional lines.

Uncle Had (no relation) also voices the High Guards now.

We are going to update the demo one last time for some additions so stay tuned for that.

Thank you for sticking by us through all this, and we hope you enjoy the new demo!