We are a small independent game developer located in Warsaw, Poland. Before The Astronauts, some of us worked on games like Painkiller and Bulletstorm.
Our latest project is Witchfire, a dark fantasy first person shooter set in an alternative world in which witches are real and very dangerous – but so are you, witchhunter.
Our first game was a weird fiction mystery titled The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The game has won many awards, including BAFTA, and we sold over one million copies. It’s available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Click here for more details.
The Astronauts Posts
The Astronauts Archives
menuMenu
Snapshot: January 2020
Monsters, weapons, animal skulls, mood pieces and mocap.
Monsters, weapons, animal skulls, mood pieces and mocap.
Updates have become irregular, meaning we’re busy making the game. So that’s a good thing, I guess. On the other hand, we don’t want to work in a vacuum, so let me share some of the work we did in January.
I mean “some”, because the rest is either nothing really that presentable – tools, integrating with the latest UE4, etc. – or is a heavy spoiler. Especially considering the latter, I can’t show most of the work of our artists. But here are the bits I can show.
Andrew is testing various light settings for the lake and village area. Here’s the sunset/nightfall version (as everything in this post, work in progress):
Marek keeps redesigning the weapons to be more gaslamp fantasy and less World War 2. An example of a machine pistol below. Not many changes (the charging handle, the back, the sight), but the vibe is a bit different now:
Tamara started animating a new enemy we just call Heavy for now. Here’s a wip animation of when he gets hit from behind:
Kamil and Adam keep making assets, here’s a few examples:
Flavor asset to emphasize the witch’s influence in an areaIron bowl for the eternal fireBuilding blocks, literallyA small hero pieceEnemy weapon
The programming team is seriously busy at work (we lost Piotr for two weeks, but he had a good excuse: got married), with occassional sparkles of WTF. This is how it feels to fight a Sekiro boss:
Jakub Kisiel, who runs a one man army of animations services and does some excellent UE marketplace work, did some mocapping for the game. Here’s our Spartan set-up in a warehouse (indie life, baby!):
A bit more in the video:
And an example of the results (just the skeleton, so no fingers work, etc.):
So there you go. Busy, busy, busy. Feels good, man.
Question of the Week
you did great mimicking destiny gunplay. I thought it was destiny with the gun position and art style. Maybe a good or bad thing
Some people think Destiny slaps. Some think it sucks. But no one or nearly no one complains about the gunplay. Bungie didn’t invent it, but they mastered it. That game is most definitely our inspiration when it comes to the simple acts of firing a gun or moving with one.
However, and I am seeing this already in our internal builds, the deeper we are in the development, the more de-Destiny’ed we become. When the game is done, there’ll be no confusion about it at all.
