📣 📣 📣 JETT: The Far Shore + Given Time release date announced! ✨ᴊᴀɴᴜᴀʀy 31 2023 on PlayStation + PC ✨🗓️ Watch a guided tour of what's in store in our new Given Time showcase trailer:

So around summer of 2015 we felt like we had a sparse but pretty representative chunk of how we saw the game turning out and got some more tester feedback. We’ll tackle where we went from there next time.

I’m sure there are still people that feel some things are too slow, but across the board everything is orders of magnitude more snappy than the slow, deliberate pace we started out with.

The play pattern that this version of the resonator encouraged felt a lot like when you’re out hiking and take a break to look around to see what there is to see and have a chance to decide to set out on a new heading.

There are still aspects about it that I think would fit in a different game. While it was frustrating if you were in a hurry, we were aiming for an experience where the player would slow down and really engage in the world, studying the environment, and making connections.

For a while, you could only use it with the scramjets off. Then we backed off to allow it with your scramjets on, but the signals wouldn’t come in as strongly. Then finally we just had it fully accessible at all times.

It actually took us a long time for us to relax the constraints though. we tweaked it in minor steps over the years until it got to its final form.

In the first version, not only did you need to be parked, you also had to turn off your engines. A lot of people didn’t love it. In retrospect, it seems pretty obvious that you wouldn’t want to hamper your basic navigation tool by having to repeatedly stop to get your bearings.

For the resonator, our thought was the tool listened for subtle vibrations. When thinking through how it would work, it seemed natural that you would need to be stationary and quiet in order to pick up those vibrations.

Something from back then that always gives me a laugh is how the resonator worked. Most of our early design was done by thinking of something cool, coming up with a grounded mechanism for how it would work, then filling in details based on that mechanism.

Eventually, we stripped a lot out, as it just felt like unnecessary complexity. We'll touch more on that later.

We were trying all sorts of mechanics back then as well. There was a whole material collection and crafting system. You needed to recharge your ship’s batteries in sunlight. The pilot got tired if you stayed awake too long and eventually, you’d pass out.

Fun fact: This room was actually part of a larger complex. An Expo about the scouts and the space program that Craig had blocked out early on.

And anyone who played to the end of Investigate will recognize this early reading room:

Here's an early cleft on an early Tor.

https://t.co/R2ts3VPUy1

Towards the end of the year, we started to block out more key moments in the game so we could playtest and see how things would feel. Some things stuck around, like an early Ground Control that is still super recognizable.

https://t.co/XA92mQUQU0

Entity-wise, we made early versions of Shock Serpents, Hectors, Pests, and Brutes, as well as some more ambient ones like Drove flocks. Plus basic versions of the various Kolos.

We started with a rough version of the early part of the game where the scouts make planetfall, and set up their base of operations. Along the way we were also developing tools for environment construction, game flow, audio, etc to build things out.