Estranged: The Departure News

A festive build is now live on Steam for Windows! This update will be the last Estranged: Act II update of 2018 - watch this space for a 2018 roundup!



There are new infected characters in town!



The visuals have been overhauled, but the infected sounds have been changed too - they now make sounds while chasing you, and different sounds when attacking.





There are now titles for each Estranged: Act II chapter. This provides a more polished experience while playing, and an insight into the theme of each chapter.

I would highly recommend playing from the start to experience all of the changes!



A long requested feature, the save game menu now has thumbnails! To find out how, here's a dev blog video giving the technical overview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSaAiYBTJKM


There are now new music tracks in Chapter 3 to accompany the street and base areas. There's also a glimpse of the next set of content - this will be extended in the new year.





This will help to organise Estranged bugs and allow the community to also raise them directly (with screenshots, videos and other media attached). Anyone can register (just poke me to approve your account). See here for currently open and closed bugs.

Thank you for playing Estranged - if you have feedback, I'm available on discord.gg/estranged :)

I wish you a very happy new year!

Alan

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