|
kevin mung posted:do any of these guys do a podcast?? I'm not entirely sure if this is a joke or not, since a TON of us are on podcasts. Sean Vanaman and Chris Remo and I all work on Firewatch and also host Idle Thumbs, a weekly video game discussion podcast. Nels Anderson, another member of the Firewatch team, hosts Terminal7, a podcast about the card game Netrunner. Olly Moss has also guested on a number of podcasts. BottledBodhisvata posted:I actually really hope this game is good, and I think the set-up sounds like an actually substantial "walking simulator". I don't know what exactly the gameplay will consist of, but having orienteering and the danger of wildfire and other things gives me hope there will be more to this game's gameplay than "walk around an environment while somebody talks in your ear for two hours". It's got a lot in common with adventure games (lots of looking at, poking at, and talking about stuff, with very fine grained dialogue trees that remember your choices as you play, and your uncovering of the story and participation in the story is the central driving element in the game), but it's also set in a contiguous interconnected outdoor world, which you slowly unlock and more efficiently re-traverse as you gain new knowledge and abilities (eg: climbing rope lets you clip into old anchor/carabiner hookups around the world to get down previous inaccessible cliffs to new large areas of the map). A thing that I hope sets Firewatch apart from other similar "explore a space" games is that you are a participant in events that are happening inside the timeline of the game -- it's a mystery story that involves and hinges on you being there when you are -- and is not entirely focused on picking through the ashes of "what happened in this place long ago." A "first-person modern adventure game in a contiguous outdoor space" is very accurate, so don't expect a Miasmata or Metroid or something, but do expect a game that asks more of you than pushing through its contents in a line. The Devil Tesla posted:One of the companies involved in this game makes my FTP client. That is Panic. They are amazing! In addition to making great FTP clients and web development IDEs, they partnered with Keita Takahashi to make the official Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy tshirts that were for sale for most of the 2000s. Also, their first ever intern in the early '00s was a very young Derek Yu, who went on to make Spelunky as well as other things. Their founders are also responsible for the god send "Shut Up" browser plugin that blocks comment sections, as well as the Nokia NGage "Sidetalkin" gallery website if you remember that thing. Those guys are weird shadow puppetmasters of a bunch of great things. At one point they released a podcast player app called "Pantscast" that looked like a regular podcast player, but would look for silence between sentences and seamlessly splice in fart sound effects. It came pre-subscribed to NPRs Fresh Air. They also do crazy side projects like designing the trade show booths for Walt Disney Imagineering and posters for Disney theme parks. Strange, good people. ja2ke fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Oct 12, 2015 |
#
¿
Oct 12, 2015 18:34
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 13:04 |
|
|
The Devil Tesla posted:Apple wanted to buy their music player app to turn into iTunes but they were like "nah". Yeah Steve Jobs flew them out to try and hire them to become the iTunes team, but they decided they were happier being independent and making weird stuff. So Apple bought the team that made the other (shittier) popular Mac MP3 player instead, and that became the iTunes we know and love today. The Devil Tesla posted:They made a usenet client and didn't stop selling it until a year ago. It is impossible for Panic to exist, basically. At one point they made Atari 2600 boxes for all of their software and the one they did for their Usenet file downloading client was... honest. (it's the box in the lower right of that blog post. note kleenex box by monitor) Weird that this has briefly become a Panic thread! ja2ke fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Oct 12, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2015 18:44
|
|
|
Drifter posted:So how do the dialog trees and systems interactivity/responsiveness differ from Telltale's recent games? On the surface, dialogue interactions in Firewatch will probably feel pretty similar to Telltale and other modern timer-based conversations. There are a few differences, though. The most obvious one comes from the fact that Firewatch is primarily a back and forth between two people -- that alone let us really drill down on the things you can talk about, and the variances that can happen within a single conversation. The game's script is very focused on Henry and Delilah and the way their relationship can build as the story unfolds. There are multiple telltale-episode-scripts worth of dialogue dedicated to just those conversations and all their various forms. Under the hood, Firewatch also does not use explicit pre-written dialog trees - we opted to use a tag-driven dynamic dialogue system like the one Valve uses. You can watch a fascinating GDC talk about their in here, but in short, every line of dialogue in Firewatch is self contained, and uses a simple but smart tag-based system to find the optimal line to play next. So instead of writing five conversation branches where Henry asks Delilah "How are you doing?" and she has five unique followups, Henry asking "How are you doing?" can trigger an event called "DelilahReplyToHowAreYouDoing" which can then find the most appropriate reply in the script, based on which facts are currently true or false in the game's variable set. It has allowed us to write a lot more variation and responsiveness to player action into the script at a very fine grained level. Firewatch isn't using "procedural dialogue" or anything like that -- every line is still scripted to appear in a specific place in the story depending on a person's playthrough -- but we can author branching down to the level of a single line mid-conversation, and it's very fast and cheap for us to do that, so it happens a lot. Also conversations are regularly interruptable. Your primary tool in the game is the walkie talkie, used to report or discuss the things you find in the world, so if you find something more interesting than the current conversation, you can (and should) start talking about it instead, and you won't have to wait for the current dialogue tree to finish. Anything you already discussed in the previous conversation is remembered by the game so you don't "lose" the contents of a conversation by interrupting it. In practice it tends to mean that when you're in a really dense environment full of interesting things to talk about, it feels like Henry and Delilah bounce around between subjects at a high clip as their familiarity with the space improves, while when you're out in the deep wilderness, the conversation threads tend to run longer and deeper because there's time and space to talk. But the pace of conversation is generally up to you. Our goal is that Firewatch's conversations play out naturally as a flowing and growing relationship over the course of the game, and don't feel like a string of mini-cutscenes or mini-audiologs. Hopefully it works out! Ahundredbux posted:jake , will the game feature procedurally generated content for example if you walk into a grove the bears could be blue instead of brown also will there be guns in the game? There's no proceduraly-generated content. It's a handmade world. The time of day system is all operating in realtime, but is driven by the story (if you stand still for hours it won't become night time, but as you progress through the story, the world does change around you in realtime). You can also pick up and throw things around to make big gross piles of garbage (or keep them in your tower) like you can in Gone Home and other physics-aware exploration games. I honestly can't remember if there are guns in the game. There's definitely a radio, a flashlight, and a compass.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2015 19:09
|
|
|
Drifter posted:Holy poo poo, I loved that GDC talk back in the day. I think it's still saved to my hard drive somewhere. Yeah we had to bend it to do the things we wanted for Firewatch but as a philosophy it is very freeing! After thinking about game conversations as explicit trees and branches for a decade at Telltale (and as an adventure game mega fan before that), it was like fog lifting. The game still uses a very familiar call and response structure like most adventure games, and some conversations still have to be heard out in full (or nearly full) for the story to not break, but in my opinion the feeling of continuous light conversational patter throughout the game ends up coming across as really refreshing and interesting. It's been fun to make, at least!
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2015 19:31
|
|
|
The Walrus posted:Can you talk at all about your research process for this game? I've driven three days to wyoming the last four summers so I'm not kidding when I say it's one of my loves in this world. Did you get to spend much time out there taking notes on the environment? Is this game going to be set in yellowstone proper or somewhere else (bighorn mountains, or the tetons perhaps)? are you going for an accurate depiction or an impressionistic one (obviously accurate is relative considering the art style)? is the terrain itself at all based on a real area (I see lots of spruce and birch and not much lodgepole, so I am guessing you took a few liberties at least)? what about animals, they are such a big part of the region - are we going to see any bison, elk, bears, etc? did you visit the active firewatch station in yellowstone? did you see my buds the fattest ground squirrels on the planet? lots of burning questions. The game's set in Shoshone National Forest / the Thorofare, but the world map was made up for Firewatch to fit the needs of the game's story, aesthetic, and mechanics. That said, here are some answers to your questions... While we never made it out to Wyoming as a group, two of Firewatch's team grew up there: Sean Vanaman, the writer of the game and a designer on it grew up in Cody, and Nels Anderson, who is another designer and gameplay programmer on the game grew up in Jackson. During production Sean went back to visit his family a few times and while he was there he snapped a ton of reference photos. Nels wrote a bit about Wyoming for the unintiated in the dev blog. While we didn't go to Wyoming, we did take a trip to Yosemite since it was driveable from San Francisco, so that our team, especially Olly Moss who is from England, could all get a sense of what the American wilderness was like at all! We visited a lookout tower there and went on day hikes for two days early in production, and it was great. I wish we could have taken everyone to Wyoming and I know Yosemite's not the same, but it was not really feasible for us to take the whole team that far for research. Between two of our team growing up there and Yosemite + other camping trips we covered our bases pretty well for a small game team though, I think. Firewatch aims to capture the feeling of National Park / National Forest posters, and evoke the feelings you get from looking at those and wanting to walk inside them, as much as it aims to feel like a real place, so there is a lot of stylizing and exaggeration going on. I don't think the team visited any of the actual lookout towers in Yellowstone but the very very earliest inspiration from the game came from Sean remembering back to seeing fire lookout towers when hiking/hunting with his dad in Wyoming as a kid. We also visited a ton of other lookout towers over production. We made sure to use native plants and rock types, and tons of reference. There are lodgepole pines! They are really hard to make look good in a video game btw because they're spindly annoying things! It's why most games don't have them... but we do I promise! Here are some of our trees, as they looked in 2014. There have been some shader and texture improvements since then, and some more species added but that's an old, early look at some of them for you! There is some wildlife but I don't want to talk about it too much because its more fun to find.  If you roll back through the dev blog there are a lot of posts about building the world of the game, including a lot of the reference we pulled and how we put it all together. Our more recent posts are more about marketing and events we've been doing closer to launch, but if you roll back through the pages there is some pretty cool stuff written up by the team. ja2ke fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Jan 28, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2016 00:53
|
|
|
Accordion Man posted:I want to buy your game now but you guys won't let me. It's here so soon. We're also putting a bunch of stuff up about the launch on the 2nd. (Tuesday!)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2016 19:41
|
|
|
Ahundredbux posted:My only regret is that the game will have a narrative which means I can't play it while listening to podcasts Fortunately this game is hours of two people talking to each other about a mix of throwaway dumb poo poo and surprising things you didn't know about whats going on so ideally you won't notice you aren't listening to a podcast.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2016 20:06
|
|
|
GreyjoyBastard posted:I saw it pop up on my steam discounts emails and was so excited until I rediscovered that it's still a week away. If preordering weirds you out, it'll still be discounted at the preorder price at launch.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2016 02:52
|
|
|
Corin Tucker's Stalker posted:Oh! There's another thing. Someone was asking about FOV. I'm usually sensitive to narrow FOVs but didn't feel like anything was off. This is, however, a game where you have an actual body that you can look down at, Trespasser style. The movement is a bit deliberate and grounded (which really sells the effect of being there) so that might come across as odd in videos. There's a setting to disable the head bob. The FOV is locked because we have an in-camera character. The game looks insane and broken if you slide the FOV because suddenly you can see way more arms and neck than a normal person ever would. THAT SAID we'll be posting instructions on how to modify the FOV value for people who absolutely need to adjust it to prevent sickness. It's hidden but user-modifiable and the game will respect it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2016 19:36
|
|
|
maniacripper posted:Jake can you press the button now? I donated 10 dollars to idle thumbs 4 or so years ago and I really feel like you guys owe me this. The button will be pressed at the same time it was always going to be pressed, but now when it's pressed, it will be pressed for you. Also there's no monster hunting you.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2016 16:52
|
|
|
ja2ke posted:The button will be pressed at the same time it was always going to be pressed, but now when it's pressed, it will be pressed for you. btw when I pressed the button to deploy I told the team "I told a guy on the SA forum that when I pushed the button I'd do it for him, so this is for that Something Awful guy."
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2016 19:09
|
|
|
Varam posted:Oh, I see. Going before she tells you but after she's changed it. Is that possible? I thought she told you about the code as you approached the cache. Spoiler about the above: She only tells you the code if you radio about it (either when you are approaching the cache, or radioing about the cache box itself). You can definitely go open the Cottonwood cache after the code is changed but before D tells you the code, open it and get the radio and delilah is slightly confused. You can also open the cache when she tells you to and immediately report the new radio before establishing a secure line and shes annoyed. Most notably you can 100% go to the research site early on that day and never visit cottonwood creek. If you tell Delilah you're doing this, she is super pissed but eventually relents if you keep radioing about stuff. If you jump STRAIGHT to reporting the binder with the reports on you that you find with the wave receiver, she just freaks out and doesn't have a dialogue line catching that you didn't tell her anything else, so there is no special content for that one instance (we figured Henry saying "I'm reading a binder full of reports on us" would supersede her desire to chastise you about not getting the clean radio), but every other combination of events should have at least some unique content. ja2ke fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Feb 12, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2016 22:29
|
|
|
CharlestonJew posted:tbf their main form of security was a chain link fence with no barbed wire and a sign saying "hey dont come in here please" so I dont think locking the gate would have done much. If Henry wasnt such a fatass I'm sure you wouldnt even need the axe. We had a fat guy tries to climb fence interaction in there for a while but it was kind of a mood killer. It got replaced with the bee in the box which I majorly prefer.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:59
|
|
|
CJacobs posted:He went further into the forest to escape from the fire- or at least, that's what Henry speculates he did. It's flat rate $15 including shipping no matter whats on your roll, so you can always chuck a print if you dont want it after it arrives.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2016 01:49
|
|
|
loga mira posted:I thought characters being wonky kinda whimsical cartoons was a terrible choice for this game, considering its tone. Maybe it's because this flat colorful environment style is so overused that I didn't expect it to deviate from the norm so much in one specific area. It doesn't show you many people throughout the game, so at one point the guy mentions seeing a photo of another character and I got confused for a moment, because all I could see was a dumb cartoon with a huge nose and Disney eyes. Everything else is rendered with realistic proportions or only slightly exaggerated. In the end I just decided to ignore the drawings and imagine the characters as real people. I think if you actually pasted the world art from Firewatch into, say, Uncharted 4 or something, it would look like you walked out of reality and onto the set of Roger Rabbit. I am really proud of the look of Firewatch and consider it incredibly cohesive, but not actually very realistic. I'm not saying that to invalidate your read of the world -- you're more than welcome to have that takeaway and firmly disagree with me! - but I think you're seeing something different than what the people who were making it saw.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2016 23:58
|
|
|
Corin Tucker's Stalker posted:This is dumb, but does anyone have or know how to extract the Forrest Byrnes texture? Good Byrnes face can be found here, though the body is not canon (Byrnes has a fire trench shovel not a flame thrower in the game) https://www.reddit.com/r/Firewatch/comments/486dim/fooling_around_with_vector_graphics_ended_up_with/
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2016 02:24
|
|
|
TheAsterite posted:This walking sim suffers from massive tonal shift in the middle with a forgettable climax and cheap ending that felt like the developers were too lazy to make some 3d models so they could get away with the non impactful closure of the character dynamics. The premise seems great but the execution of the sub narrative was eye rolling. Lazy devs 
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2016 03:41
|
|
|
pseudorandom name posted:I got to the end of Day 79 with all the cassettes marked off on the map, but one empty bubble left in the checklist on the side. Ah yeah you found the one secret track - kiosk 13 on day 79. I don't know quite what you mean about ignoring saves at Delilahs tower. (Though note, you cannot save once the final radio call starts.)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2016 01:50
|
|
|
pseudorandom name posted:So you can copy e.g. 2_Day_33.sav over 2.sav for that terrible moment when you learn that there is a Day 34 that you never knew existed or for when you're too busy looking at the sunset to grab the cassette or whatever, but as best I can tell once you're at Delilah's tower, loading slot 2 ignores 2.sav completely. Weird, will investigate. Really it's a development deal that will hopefully one day yield a movie. (Still exciting, though!)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2016 05:45
|
|
|
synthetik posted:I think this game is on the list for a HDR update with the PS4Pro if you're looking for a reason to replay it. Not HDR. We are updating PS4 to 10 bits per color channel instead of 8 across the board, so there is a bit more range and vibrancy in general in the next patch, but it's not "HDR color." (The games colors are all hand authored in standard range color and moving to HDR would be... weird and not desired in our specific case!) We are also running at 1440p with 4K UI if your Pro is plugged into a 4K TV, with slightly pumped up foliage density. (A Pro plugged into a 1080p TV will see even more dense foliage and some draw distance extensions.) Also the free roam mode (a very light weight but pleasant mode!) is making its way to PS4 with that update. More on it in the next day basically! ja2ke fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Nov 8, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2016 07:40
|
|
|
Dark_Swordmaster posted:Does this extend to the PC release? Will I notice it without a new monitor? The color change is not on PC (and wouldn't require a new monitor anyway). I don't think the color range will be missed on PC. Things always just looked a tad muted on PS4 compared to PC but they don't anymore. PC release already has the new 4K UI (that got patched in last week in a steam update), so if you have a 1440p or 4K display, the UI will now be crisp and not pixelated for you.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2016 16:02
|
|
|
MeatloafCat posted:I'm reinstalling right now to play around with it. Does this include the commentary? Also this is pretty great http://www.polygon.com/2016/2/8/10940370/firewatch-photos-hey-there-delilah Yep! Free roam and commentary (and photo developing, if you're on PC) are all in the "special features" menu on the main menu.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2016 15:41
|
|
|
Hey sorry if this is too much of a plug, but I wanted to let you guys know that we finally got the Firewatch vinyl soundtracks back from manufacturing and they're up for sale in the store. I'm pretty excited about these!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2016 17:46
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 13:04 |
|
|
Cojawfee posted:Is it worth getting? Do the tracks flow into each other in any way? It looks cool but I don't know if it would be worth it to put it on the record player and listen all the way through. It's literally the OST we sell digitally at Bandcamp. I still like listening to it but I'm not going to try and speak for anyone else's tastes.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2016 19:16
|
|