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.
Witch Mountain looms in the distance but the road ahead is a bit more difficult than we anticipated.
We have some good news to share, but first, let’s rip the band-aid off on the painful one. The Witch Mountain update is still a few weeks away.
The last time I wrote about this, I said that the gameplay part of it is so new to us that we cannot quite predict the end of the prototyping period. We believe it’s going to be good for Witchfire, but we cannot be certain how much more work is needed for the feature to truly shine. Every day, the mountain is a bit more fun, and one of these days it will be fun enough to share it with the world — but not today.
Also, the gameplay is not the only thing that needs more time in the oven. We’re infusing the level with legions of opponents, new puzzles, new prophecies, and new mechanics… but “accidentally,” we’ve also made the level our biggest one yet. This does not necessarily mean there’s more gameplay to enjoy than, say, in the Castle, but certainly from the sheer size of it, Witch Mountain is a giant.
I am torn between wanting to thank you for your patience with some preview screenshots and not wanting to spoil the experience. I think I found a nice middle ground, and so here are a few shots that actually avoid showing the main feature of the level: a huge area with a set of gameplay mechanics previously unseen in Witchfire, one that will put your skills and reflexes to the test. We will keep that one hidden for now. But I think we can tease bits and pieces of other areas, so here goes…
Finally, someone might ask why we won’t release Witch Mountain in a work-in-progress state. Witchfire is still in Early Access, after all. But in our opinion, there is a rather unsettling trend in the gaming industry which causes more and more titles to be delivered in a somewhat incomplete state, and we don’t want to follow it. We know it sounds sort of overzealous in the case of an Early Access game, but we’d rather swallow a bitter pill and annoy you with a longer wait than deliver something half-baked.
Now for some good news. Since the update is taking longer than anticipated, we’ve decided to make it fatter.
Fallen Preyers 2.0
Witchfire is a heist game in a dark fantasy skin, and Fallen Preyers are your crew. The Muscle, the Driver, the Safecracker, and so on. But while Fallen Preyers 1.0 turned out to be useful, they do not add a lot to the emotional layer of the game. They have such storytelling potential, but for now, all they are is icons on the map.
Also, we think they contribute to the issue of the overload of the cognitive buffer. Ever forgotten you have a Demonic Weapon? Not exclusively your fault. There are so many things to think about in Witchfire that the brain refuses to juggle them all. We love that aspect of the game; this is why we call it an RPG shooter, not just a shooter. But sometimes, too much is too much. Having to remember that a Fallen Preyer waits to be unleashed once during an expedition is a problem.
Also, it’s kind of an unnecessary thing anyway. If there’s a Fallen Preyer who can help you during a Calamity, hmmm, when would one want to call it? I don’t know, maybe during a Calamity?
So we’re changing Fallen Preyers from “nuke buttons” to semi-autonomous NPCs.
We give them shape, we give them life, we give them personalities.
This is a huge undertaking—e.g., seven (!) full new 3D characters—but we just want to do it. We do not compromise, and we treat the story and immersion as one of the unmovable fundamentals of the experience, and we hope Fallen Preyers 2.0 will contribute to that factor.
Not all of it might make it to the Witch Mountain update, but the core of the change will be there for sure.
New gear
Two new weapons, two new spells, and a new item. If you have already played Witchfire, you already know that these may be – pardon the pun – literal gamechangers, as equipment has a huge impact on the way you deal with enemies and your survivability. The new stuff is no exception; both affect the playstyle and are just fun.
Let’s reveal one piece today: a new revolver. Yes, this one is for the fan fire lovers.
Shadow Orbs
One of the brand new things that Witch Mountain is going to bring is the Shadow Orb—a magical combat-recording device that will give you challenges and reward you for meeting the requirements by granting you a piece of inventory or a resource that may prove crucial in the current and future runs. The reward will, obviously, depend on the scale of the challenge, but our community has already proven to be more hardcore and ambitious than we predicted, so we have to up the ante every now and then.
Under-the-hood improvements
We’re reading your feedback loud and clear, and we’re constantly looking for ways to improve what we have delivered so far—the evidence is pretty much everywhere in the game, and the new update is not going to be any different. We have reworked the balance of Knight and Ogre, giving them new behavior and fighting patterns, and refreshed their introductory cutscenes, just to make them that extra bit more intimidating. We have spent quite a lot of time diving deep into Arcana, changing the way some of them work. We have already fixed over 70 bugs reported to us by our community (huge thank you for bringing them to our attention).
The shape of things to come
Witchfire is very much an ongoing project, so the future is going to bring a lot more – while we’re prioritizing Witch Mountain right now, we’re working on several things at the same time and shaping the content for time beyond WMU. Another map is already playable(-ish) and being tested by the members of our dev team, new weapon concepts are being developed, new opponents are roaming the alleys of our UE Editors (and minds), and we’re in the planning stages of fleshing out a proper tutorial, addressing one of the main complaints you have been reporting in the past weeks and months. Thanks for your support; we appreciate your patience and understanding, and we’re working our hardest to bring you the game you want to play again and again.
To show how serious we are about this, we’ve grown twice in size in the last two years: from 12 to 24. Finally, we are the size of the team that made Painkiller in 2012-2014. We’re still a tiny team considering the standards and quality we aspire to, but we’re no longer minuscule. And we now have a Community Manager, too! See the #announcements channel on our Discord.
That’s it for today, but we will be back soon with new posts, trying to entertain you the best we can until the Witch Mountain drops. And then we’ll go into hiding because it is our hardest content yet, and we’re not sure we’ll survive the screams of the maimed…
Question of the Week
Great read! Is there anything in the game you're really proud of you think wouldn't be there if you had to sell some of the studio to investors?
On a more serious note, right now Witchfire is mostly gameplay and pieces of lore. But there’s much more coming in the world/story department. Some of the things we want to say will be… controversial. We can afford to be fearless in our storytelling thanks to enough of you buying the game to keep us independent.
