The bitter-sweet fate of Foundations

Hi everyone!

It's been a while, so I figured I'd give you a quick update on Foundations:
It's not good.

Those of you who are helping with playtesting might have noticed how little content there is in the game. There's only a tiny tutorial scene, one proper Loading Docs scene with a simple environmental puzzle to solve, and that's about it.

This is not because I wanted to hide the rest of the game from you so as to not spoil the fun. No no - what's in the playtest is literally all the content we have at the moment.

To give you some context, we started writing the script on July 28th. At that point, the dialogue system was ready, we had figured out all the ins and outs of how we wanted to author the dialogue, etc.

On September 20th, roughly two months later, all we had written was the incomplete dialogue for the Loading Docs scene. Mind you, this scene was meant to be just the intro, with the complete story taking place inside the factory that the convicts would enter. It became clear to me that there was no way we could finish the entire story in a reasonable amount of time.

And so the current plan is to finish the Loading Docs and tutorial scenes and release the game in the form of a demo. It is saddening because I really wanted this game to be a complete experience. However, at the same time, I did manage to implement everything I planned and learn a ton of stuff. I now know how to model in Blender, use FMOD, set up Steamworks, organize playtesting, etc. And I feel much more confident about Astortion moving forward. So I guess it's not a total loss.

I've already finished most of the script for my next video (announcing the release of Foundations), and I hope to publish it together with the game sometime in mid-November. But before that, we'll have one or two more playtesting sessions, including Fragment and Vertex tiers, to test the environmental puzzle and the tutorial. So be sure to join our Discord server if you don't want to miss it.

Anyway, thank you so much for making this possible! I'm forever grateful that you supported me despite no new videos being released.

Fortunately, we'll be back to our regular programming (pun not intended) really soon. I missed making videos and working on Astortion way too much ❤️

Thanks again, and have a great day!