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.
Missed the last entry due to national holidays but we’re
back with another dear diary.
A great thing happened that last week, though.
Making Witchfire is super hard. It’s a project, uhm, quite big
for a team this small. Painkiller was done, on average, by sixteen people: we
started with eleven, but ended up with twenty three. For Witchfire, there’s
nine of us here, and three contributors. Also, it’s 2019 and not 2002, so the demands
of quality and content are that much harder to satisfy. For example, making an
enemy model of expected quality took about a week for Painkiller, and takes two
months for Witchfire.
In other words, things are not moving very fast and this can
be frustrating. I am very impressed by everyone in the team but there’s only
that much the team of this size can do in a day.
However, this last week I have finally played “that” build. A
simple encounter, I just spawned 5-7 enemies of the same type and played to
win. And I lost. So I played again. And I spent an hour fighting them over and
over again until I was able to beat 10 of them in a single life.
This was without any rewards other than the satisfaction from beating a challenge I imposed upon myself. I just liked the game enough to keep playing, and I kept inventing new challenges just to have an excuse for one more go.
Don’t get me wrong, that AI was not perfect, there were animation glitches, features missing, no sounds, placeholder effects, etc. – but from the very point on, I know we got it. To me personally, we just opened the whole new chapter of Witchfire’s life.
Anyway, an example of what else is happening in the studio:
we’re redesigning a lot of the weapons. When Marek started his work on them, I
admit we did not have a totally clear vision for Witchfire other than “dark
fantasy with guns”. His work is and always was great, but some of the weapons are
a bit too modern for what we have now.
Not an easy decision to make, but we went for it, as we feel
the guns need to be perfect. To show off this new and final direction, here’s
one of the shotguns as it was originally made:
And here it is after making it the final form. Note, for example, the difference between muzzles. The colors also went from WW1 to church-y. Gotta feel the Holy Spirit during your monster killing sprees.
Side by side:
Question of the Week
@TheAstroCrew How much exploration are you intending there to be in #witchfire? 50/50 or 70/30 in favour of action? Thanks 😚
80/20, maybe even 90/10. There will be stuff to explore and stuff to discover, and this is not a pure shooter, but still. Lots of pew-pew, kaboom and abracadabra.
