Game Updates and the Future

So it's been a week shy of a month since the last update. Today, I will discuss a few items of importance relating to the game, the forthcoming demo, and the future of Arseo Productions.




1^st – Hospital

As I mentioned, work is progressing on the Hospital, the first large (and honestly, largest planned) area the player has the option to explore. As mentioned I believe in the video, the player can decide to visit all of the open areas of the game, or simply sprint for the ending, getting the bad ending along the way.

The hospital, so far, is mostly just hallways with some plan for where rooms will go. Even so, the number of maps are staggering for just hallways (the first floor alone is somewhere around twenty maps). With three floors, a basement, and maybe a few extra spots to explore, it will take a some time for the player to make their way through if they want to find everything.

Another tidbit will be the notes and signs you are able to find littered around the game. Almost all of them will be unreadable, at least until certain conditions are met. This condition can be cleared right after you enter the city proper from the house you wake up in, can be put off until just before you leave the first city, or completely ignored until the game ends and you're stuck having no idea what anything around you says. Some may say this level of immersion into the game world is a bad idea. I say it is almost required.

2^nd – Demo

The second thing I want to talk about is the upcoming demo of the game. Not only will this demo be a small showcase of what the final project will look like, but it will also be a good judge for me to know just how much larger the game will be when full audio is implemented. For example, the current demo, sans audio, comes in at a whopping eighteen megabytes. This is without the twenty page script being recorded, background music being inserted, and any other audio issues I find between now and the publishing of said demo. When a later build was done, with only the voice acting for the first room added, it tacked on another three megabytes. This demo alone, at least in file size, my be larger than most full games built with this engine.

That also leads me to when the demo will be released. Seeing as the demo is more a showcase to show people whom I want to have work on the project with me, most of the voice over work will be done by me. During this early stage, almost all the spoken lines are given by the main character, Ian. As more characters are introduced later in the game, this will obviously change. However, while I can basically record my lines at will, I can't easily record the other character's lines. This is mainly due to the main female character being voiced by my sister, the aspiring voice actress Cheyenne Arseo. Her recordings will not be able to be recorded until her finals are over mid-May. As such, the demo of Project Silence will have a (subject to change) release date of June 2, 2015.

3^rd – Music

Next, I'm going to spend a moment and talk about the music. At the moment, I am in talks with an old bandmate to take up the position of the Music Lead for the project. I have heard various pieces of the music he has composed, and find it works with what I have in mind. While I do not believe there will be time to get pieces implemented for the demo, I do have high hopes of his pieces giving the game the music direction it needs. More information will follow as details get ironed out.

4^th – The Future

With my twenty-sixth birthday having happened this past week, one thing I did was take a day and really think about where I wanted this to go. Not just this one game, but my future in game design. When the original idea for Project Silence came into being over a year ago, it was originally going to be a full 3D game, almost little more than a Silent Hill clone. Rough concept sketches were made of the monsters Ian would come across. Several ideas for the story were written out, a few of which remain in the current version. However, lack of skill and the extreme learning curve a title like this would give me convinced me to shelve the idea. Instead, I took the idea into the 2D world.

Early on, some things remained. The main map changed designs several times. One character was cut from the game, for no other reason than his death being near impossible to replicate in 2D. Other things, such as the voice acting, took an even more important role. Yet this project also carries something more damning with it, the fear of failure.

Let me say this now. Project Silence WILL BE RELEASED.

This will also lead me to the future. The current public release date for Project Silence is Q4 2015. Provided I get it released by 11:59pm PST December 31, 2015 it will meet that release window. While I may be willing to change the release window a few months, the point is the game will eventually be released. At that point, it will be new projects that I will work on, some of which are already being planned in the strictest sense.

I will now publicly announce the next future project for Arseo Productions.

Project VN

Release Window – Q4 2016

Project VN will be a visual novel, and will spearhead one of the design branches for Arseo Productions. Plans will include to have custom drawn characters, backgrounds, and key visuals. Original music will be included. Full voice acting is unknown at this time, though I do hope to have it included. More details will come as Project Silence nears its completion.