Estranged: The Departure News

A new build is live on Steam, for Windows and Linux!





This build includes new explorable content following on from the previous Street & Apartments update, following the continual adventures of the fisherman!





A small but important detail, the opening titles now show the location of the fisherman in the prelude level, revealing the location of the wooden house and dock. Titles also exist after the fisherman falls, describing the location in relation to Act I, and the location in the world(!).



Community member Martin has been maintaining a wiki on Wikia ( http://estranged.wikia.com/ ), which I am now working with him to transfer to the official Estranged Community Wiki: https://wiki.iamestranged.com/

This wiki is full of community compiled references to the lore and world of Estranged. If you're interested in the story of Act I and Act II, it's definitely worth browsing!

Some of my favourite pages:

• https://wiki.iamestranged.com/Arque_Corporation
  
• https://wiki.iamestranged.com/Liam_Jones
  
• https://wiki.iamestranged.com/Sokol-Glockner_Private_Security
  

If you're interested in becoming an editor, reach out to Martin on the Estranged Discord server!

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I would also like to thank the Estranged volunteer translators and testers for their help with quickly translating and testing this update.

Stay tuned for more updates - if you'd like to provide feedback, head over to https://discord.gg/estranged where you can chat with me, and meet the rest of the community!

Thanks for playing Estranged!
Alan

A new build is live on Steam, for Windows and Linux!





This build includes new content - the street is now explorable content, leading to an apartment block. I'll be continuing this content in future updates.



There's a new Sokol guard in town with more armor, and a different weapon!





The rifle is now a playable weapon in Estranged: Act II! This can be found in the street level, and is also used by the new guard type.





I have re-written the save system to make it more robust. There should be no notable change to the game itself, but under the hood each item in the game now has a unique ID to identify it.

The previous system used the names of the items, but because items can move between levels, name collisions could occur. To combat this, I introduced a tag to the item to describe the level that the item came from - but this system was far from perfect and often resulted in incorrect items being restored. This should no longer happen!

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As ever, please let me know what you think! I'm around at alan [at] alanedwardes (dot) com, or on discord.gg/estranged.

Thank you for playing Estranged!

Alan

A new build is live on Steam for Windows, with a Linux build following soon!



The pickaxe is now a usable weapon in the game! This update adds the pickaxe, and destructible boards in some areas.



I would like to add more breakable elements to the rest of the game, as they're very fun to play with!



The water in the game has been slightly tweaked so that the fog does not follow the camera. This is a small detail that improves the appearance of water from some angles.



There's a development blog video explaining how the effect is achieved for those that are interested in a behind the scenes view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X46DHOhwvCA
There are a few fixes included in this release too - please note the cheat to spawn the pistol is now "spawn pistol" (rather than just "pistol"). If you have any feedback, let me know in the comments, or directly on Discord - https://discord.gg/estranged

Thank you for playing Estranged!

Alan

A build is now live on Steam for Windows!





There's a preview of a new weapon - the pickaxe! This can be spawned using the below cheat:

spawn pickaxe

This will be available to play with in the story campaign at a future date.



The weapons have been tweaked - with some small changes to the pistol, rifle and shotgun. The pistol is available to play, and the rifle and shotgun can be spawned using the cheats "spawn rifle" and "spawn shotgun".



If you're interested in Unreal Engine 4 development, I posted a new development blog documenting how to tweak skeletal meshes in blender, and import them back into Unreal!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTJ0tm6GscQ
If you have any feedback, Discord is by far the best way to send it! I'm available at alan [at] alanedwardes (dot) com too.

Thanks for playing, and see you around for the next update!

Alan

A build is now live on Steam for Windows, with Linux coming later this week!





The bucket achievement returns to Act II after being wildly popular in Act I! Take John's bucket to the end of the game to unlock it. Please note that if you cheat, you can't unlock it!





It's now possible to spawn various items as cheats using the code "spawn x", where x can be: guard, rabbit, infected, rifle, shotgun, pistol, bucket, brick, coffee, cone, paper, teapot, bottle, box, fence, crate, mug, fan, computer, toolbox and barrel.



The ambient sound system has been overhauled in preparation for future content. There should be no significant impact on the game - but please let me know if you hear anything out of the ordinary.

A major improvement is that water now muffles level sound, regardless of the type of water. Previously this was error prone as it had to be manually added to each water volume.

Another improvement is that different soundscapes can no longer bleed into each other, so you can't hear birds outside when close to an outer wall of a building.

• New: Iron sights for rifle model (only accessible via cheats)
  
• New: Backspace can now be used to navigate backwards on menus
  
• New: Spawn cheat extended to support above items
  
• New: Removes focus border from menu buttons, replaces with a pulse
  
• Fixed: Estranged News not loading on the main menu
  
• Fixed: Ordering of control options
  
• Fixed: Range awarding too many points
  
• Fixed: UI sounds are now no longer affected by reverb and muffling
  

As with the previous few posts, there is a known issue with certain hardware and long loading times on chapter 3: https://steamcommunity.com/app/582890/discussions/0/3338746335339497349/

Thanks for playing Estranged! I'm around on Discord if you have any feedback: https://discord.gg/estranged

Alan