Project Absentia News

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!

We have gotten quite a lot of feedback on Project Absentia over the past month, and quite a bit of it has been helpful in shaping the project to be better. We wanted to share some of what we have in store.

First, this update is massive. We suggest uninstalling/reinstalling the demo, as many default settings have changed.


Abby's initial voice actress - our friend Sins - was a divisive call. Some people liked her, others didn't. After careful consideration we decided to redub Abby with a new VA - one of the artists on the dev team, Rita, has taken up the role of Abby. This was in no way meant to be a slight against Sins, and she is in good spirits about this, and we're going to keep her for another possible role.

We also dropped some of the more cringy one-liners and came up with some new ones. We also raised the default time between one-liners firing away. You can adjust this in the menus.

We are looking into redubbing some of the other work if necessary.

[h2]Speaking of redubbing...[/h2]

One of the VAs for the prototype game, Scoot Hard DX, was let go for a multitude of reasons that are beyond the scope of this announcement. That said, Phoenix has had a new VA for some time - our own composer, and purple enthusiast, Metal Neon. He does a pretty good job of playing the hammy effeminate corporate dictator.


Many people were concerned about the art direction. Most of the sprite art was being done by one person who admittedly isn't the best at animation, so we'll take the L there.

Fortunately, there is good news!

The sprites are going to be completely overhauled. Rita (who drew the current Steam cover/title pic art) and Sunray Central have been brought on as artists, and they have started work on replacing the sprites, gore and all that. Most of this isn't in the demo yet, but it will be in a matter of time.

Also the cutscenes will be completely re-done. For now, the intro cutscene has been disabled until we have that done.

[h2]New Sprites Thus Far[/h2]

However, Abby's player sprite has been redrawn - each frame was drawn by Rita, with additional details by Sunray.



There's also been a few props and textures done by both Rita and Sunray.

[h2]Reworking the models[/h2]
The old voxels converted to models are slowly going to be changed to proper 3d models. Some of the armor and the new weapon we have should demonstrate the look and feel we're going for.

[h2]Redrawn HUD[/h2]
We also redrew the HUD weapons and elements to be much nicer. The HUD has also been completely overhauled, complete with better default (on most monitors) scaling.







There's going to be a new cover art/steam boxart. When you fire up the game, it's the current titlemap. However, Sunray is still working on it, but I wanted to get some feedback on it. We think it's awesome even if it's not 100% finished!

[h2]New Character Designs[/h2]

Also you might notice Abby's design has been overhauled too. All the sprites are going to get that treatment eventually. They'll be much more recognizable apart, in terms of size, silhouette and overall look and feel.



The Boomstick™ (Patent Pending by the Orkan Corporation) is a double barreled shotgun that has a chance to gib enemies. Some people wanted a shotgun, and rightfully so!

Primary fire shoots one barrel at a time. Alt-fire, with both shells loaded, fires both at once. It's currently found in a few secret areas, be on the lookout!







There's been a plethora of optimizations, improvements and bugfixes on top of this. There might be a few we missed, so please report away.



One issue we've seen in other GZDoom based games is sometimes multi-monitor setups can be tricky, especially with fullscreen mode.

Not all hope is lost. If you or a loved one has been affected by this, there is a possible easy solution.

try changing vid_adapter to another number. You do this by activating the console (tilde ~). Not sure what number to type after? Use vid_listadapters to get an idea of what screens you should use.

For example:

vid_adapter 2 will change it to the secondary screen

After that, close the console by hitting ~ again.



We've been working hard to make Project Absentia a weird, quirky little game made by some equally quirky peeps. We try to listen to everyone and get a good cross-section of what we need to do to improve. We know the art style has been the biggest point people have made, so over the next few months we're going to be working on replacing the sprites and gore decals and floor splats to make them better.

Thank you for everyone who has played the game!

So we decided to add a dash to the game at the last minute to celebrate us being at Realms Deep.

Upon the suggestion of some of our playtesters and people observing said playtesters.

You see that cover image? That's Abby dashing backwards through the newest room in E1M3!

You can dash in all four cardinal directions, as well as diagonally. By default this uses the shift key.

Wait? Doesn't the shift key make you run?

Not anymore! You're always running now.

We found in playtesting people struggled with the default walk speed, but improved gameplay wise when they were running.

We also fixed some issues in E1M1, E1M2, and E1M3.

We also fixed some interesting bugs with E1M4's boss - Asphodel. (She's proven to be ironically, for the first boss, the most difficult boss to code).