Games

[Texas]

http://www.theastronauts.com/2013/02/th ... an-carter/

Finally, we can reveal our first project: a game called…

Below is the press release for the project, all professional like, with quotes and stuff. More importantly, here is the first screenshot…

…and the first teaser video! Play it in HD 1080p if you can!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4sMtzeVqYc

In the next few posts we will reveal even more secrets, and do some “Behind the Scenes” or “Making Of” for the teaser and the screenshot. Meanwhile, here’s a taste of things to come:


Ex-People Can Fly Devs Unveil Weird Fiction Horror in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Weird Fiction Horror Coming to PC in 2013, In-Engine Teaser Video and Screenshot Released

Inspired by the weird fiction stories and other tales of macabre of the early 20th century, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a game to be played at night, alone, and in headphones. With The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, The Astronauts – a team comprised of People Can Fly (Bulletstorm, Painkiller) veterans – aim to evolve immersive storytelling in games. It’s set for release on PC via digital distributors in 2013.

As a detective with the supernatural ability to visualize scenes of lethal crimes, you investigate the kidnapping of a young boy, hoping to save him before it’s too late. The investigation leads you to a beautiful mountain area, where you come across a severely mutilated body of one of the kidnappers. Using both your paranormal skill and modern detective tools you discover the mystery behind the trail of corpses in the valley, the roots of an ancient force ruling the area, and the fate of the kidnapped boy.

“What we care about the most is that the players feel like they’re really there. Immersion is our number one priority”, said the game’s designer, Adrian Chmielarz. “It’s a game about exploration and discovery. We’re not abandoning the gameplay – on the contrary: we’re trying to strip it down to the bone and make sure it’s always meaningful and truly makes the experience better.”

The game is being developed on the latest version of the industry-leading Unreal Engine 3 technology from Epic Games, as well as exciting new technology, the details of which we will reveal in the coming months.

[Turnus]

http://www.theastronauts.com/2013/09/re ... reenshots/

After seven months of hard work, we’re ready to reveal what our game – a weird piece of horror fiction called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter – looks like. We’re releasing four in-game screenshots from the first few minutes of the game. We don’t plan to have any cut scenes in the game, so these screenshots all derive from actual gameplay.

Click on any image for a bigger version, or right-click and “Save As” for glorious 1080p source version:

Some extra info taken from our press release:

WHAT’S THE GAME ABOUT?

In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you play as Paul Prospero, an occult detective who receives a disturbing letter from Ethan Carter and realizes that the boy is in grave danger. When Paul arrives in Ethan’s home of Red Creek Valley, he realizes things are even worse than he imagined. Ethan has vanished in the wake of a brutal murder, which Paul comes to see might not be the only murder to investigate. Using both regular and supernatural detective skills, Paul must figure out what happened to the missing boy.

A few weeks ago we released a short prequel comic: http://www.theastronauts.com/2013/07/pr ... ini-comic/

HOW DO YOU PLAY THIS GAME?

Via a First-Person Perspective, you explore and interact with the environment in order to discover the truth. Paul has a supernatural gift that allows him to visualize the final moments of anyone who’s been murdered. The more clues you discover, the clearer and longer Paul’s vision. Exactly how much you are able to discern from a corpse is entirely up to you. You might discover the motivation of the murderer, or find a hint of where to go next – or both.

WHY ARE YOU MAKING THIS GAME?

We believe video games are a largely untapped medium for powerful storytelling possibilities. Every developer with a deep interest in the storytelling side of gaming uses different ways to let players live through a story: from interactive dramas like The Walking Dead to story-exploration games like Gone Home to online adventures like Journey. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is our own attempt to tell a multi-layered story while keeping the player completely immersed and constantly engaged–with the unique sense of presence only video games can offer.

WHAT KIND OF HORROR GAME IS IT?

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a “weird fiction” horror, meaning our focus is on atmosphere, mood, and the essential humanity of our characters. With its mixture of a beautiful world with the haunting and macabre, this story is for adult players. That said, there is no combat in our game. If our game leaves any scars, you won’t be able to see them. Also, we want gamers to experience the story of Paul and Ethan at their own pace, and without the need for sedatives. It’s less about pure terror and more about clammy unease.

WHAT PLATFORMS AND WHEN?

We’re currently developing the game for PC, but we’re hoping to eventually bring it to next-gen platforms. We’re in full production, but we don’t have a set release date. It’s a question of months, however, not years.

WHO ARE YOU?

We are The Astronauts, a small – eight people at the moment – team founded in 2012 by the ex-owners and leads of People Can Fly, creators of Painkiller and Bulletstorm. Our webpage is http://www.TheAstronauts.com (you’re here!), our Twitter is http://www.twitter.com/TheAstroCrew, and you can also follow Adrian, who is both writing these words and the lead designer on the game, at https://twitter.com/AdrianChm.

[Turnus]

http://www.theastronauts.com/2013/12/th ... an-carter/

ethan_carter_rocky_path_512.gif (6.39 MiB) Viewed 10688 times

ethan_carter_ghost_draisine_512.gif (5.29 MiB) Viewed 10688 times

I've attached two of the three new GIFs. These are the small versions, but even the third wasn't small enough to upload correctly. The full-size versions can all be seen at the above link.

[Turnus]

http://www.njoystic.com/2013/12/19/the- ... an-carter/

We set up the game in a way that merges storytelling and gameplay into a single, cohesive experience. You are a detective. When you arrive at a certain scene, you quickly learn that something bad has happened there. Everything you find and everything you discover is telling you a story. The more you find and the more you discover, the more you realize that there is more than one layer to what you are investigating.

That in itself would not be enough for me. Gone Home has proven that you can make a wonderful game about exploration, but gameplay-wise it’s mostly a museum tour. You walk around, you look at stuff, and then you connect the dots in your head. That was engaging for a lot of people, myself included, but for some people it was not enough.

They wanted to matter too. They wanted to feel like they’d earned that knowledge rather than stumbled upon it. They wanted to be agents of change, not observers, not witnesses.

So that was the starting point for us: keep the “connect the dots yourself” kind of story-telling, but at the same time, enable the players to feel like they’re the only ones capable of figuring it all out through their specific actions.

We do this in various ways. There is no one single mechanic behind it, but for example, when you have a vision of someone’s death, you only see fragments of the crime. It’s up to you to realize the proper order of these fragments and fully synchronize your mind to the events of the murder and thus gain knowledge that will help you further down the road.

Someone reading my previous answer might say, ‘Oh, so you just added puzzles?’ And they would be right. Of course that’s not the whole story. The existence of puzzles is obvious in a game featuring a detective. I mean, there’s the crime scene, figure out what happened – that is a puzzle, right?

What we try to do with puzzles is to make them not feel like puzzles. ‘Puzzley’ puzzles are one of the sins of the adventure genre. These puzzles exist only because, apparently, puzzles need to exist. They bring nothing to the experience. Sometimes they even ruin it.

Imagine you enter a seemingly abandoned house. You hear a scream, so you approach a door. Through a small hole you can see someone lying on the floor, bleeding out. When you eventually unlock the door, you save the person’s life, learn that a serial killer is on the loose, and that the killer is about to return to the room any second now.

The scream is a story. The news about the serial killer is a story. But most adventure games put a series of artificial blockers between you hearing the scream and you unlocking the door.

There’s a key to find, but the key is in a safe. Now you need to find the code, but the code is written in cipher. You need to find that old book first, but the book fell down into a crack in the floor. So now you need a fishing pole. And so on, and so forth – but none of that is telling any story. These steps exist just to tickle your brain, at best. They also disconnect you from the emotional side of the experience.

Imagine instead that when you approach the door, the wounded person inside the room lets you know that the key is in the cellar and that you need to hurry – then they pass out. You go down to the cellar and see that it’s a serial killer’s shrine, full of photos of the person you just saw, and full of blood and torture tools. There’s also some kind of CCTV system, and on the monitors you can see someone parking their car, exiting it and heading towards the house and then the cellar. You frantically look for a key, finally find it, and rush back to save a life.

Not only do you experience the emotion of racing against time in order to save someone’s life and to avoid facing the apparent serial killer, you also learn that whoever hurt this person is a psychopath and that there’s something seriously wrong here. Some people might not even realize they were actually solving a puzzle. In this case, finding the key in time is a test of someone’s perceptivity, and this is the right way to do it.

So at the very least, we try to make sure that you always learn something about the world when you solve a puzzle, and that the puzzle itself evokes emotions.

[dinopoke]

Welcome to Red Creek Valley Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oxbkL3N_fM

[icycalm]

A-M-A-Z-I-N-G trailer. With photorealistic characters it would have been worthy of Hollywood (the character models are glaringly primitive compared to the near-photorealistic environments they are in). They've got some real artists working on this one.

Now compare it with the No Man's Sky videos and perhaps you'll feel a little sick at all the color splashed around so inconsiderately in the latter game. They are using color to hide the deficiencies of their engine and art assets. No Man's Sky can almost be called garish, in a way. It overloads your eyes and makes them tired; whereas in Ethan Carter's world they can relax.

[earthboundtrev]

http://gematsu.com/2014/08/vanishing-et ... coming-ps4

The Astronauts is bringing its upcoming story-driven mystery game The Vanishing of Ethan Carter to PlayStation 4, the studio announced during Sony’s Gamescom press conference.

The release date for the PC version has also been announced:

http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/08/re ... r-edition/

“The release date for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter?”

September 25th 2014.