Hey there! What’s going on? Last week Lake Ridden was featured on Polygon’s front page with this exklusive, new eight minute long video showing parts of the beginning of the game! We’re so excited to share this sneak peek with you and our friends at Polygon.
We’ve noticed a lot of the comments on Polygon and their YouTube channel refer to our game as a “walking simulator”. Well it’s true that the beginning of Lake Ridden is a bit chill, but the rest of the game features a lot more of puzzles and traditional gameplay elements. We really want to create a nice mix of suspense, storytelling, interaction and beautiful vistas for you to experience. Our hopes are to feature a bit more gameplay than let’s say Gone Home or Firewatch.
In the past we have always refereed to Lake Ridden as a “horror” game. After visiting Game Developer’s Conference and showing our game to a bunch of people and having them react to the game we’ve decided to move away from labeling the game as “horror”, and instead moving towards “thriller” or “suspense”. The thing about horror, or calling your game a “horror game” is that it can potentially alienate a lot of potential players that could have enjoyed the game, simply because a lot of people simply feel like anything with the word “horror” in it is not for them. The reasons for that could be that people don’t like blood and gore, and they perhaps associate “horror” with gruesome images. Lake Ridden will not feature any gore or blood. A lot of people also don’t like to get afraid. We believe that the term “thriller” better describes our game. We’re aiming for a mix of adventure, suspense and creepy, not pure “horror”. So from now on we’ll do our best to communicate this to you guys!
Another thing that came out of visiting the GDC last month was that we have decided to move the release date until the spring of 2018. I’m sorry that you have to wait for the game a bit longer, but we believe this is the right thing to do. The reasons for this delay are threefold: we want to investigate the option to release Lake Ridden for at least one console as well, we want to make sure the quality of the game is as good as it could possible be and we need to be totally sure that we have squashed as many bugs as possible. On top of this you generally don’t want to release new games with unproven IPs in December or January. In December Steam runs it’s yearly mega sale, and in January very few people buy games since everyone’s busy playing all the awesome games they got for Christmas. I hope you understand our decision : )
This week the team has been hard at work creating lights and shadows for the daytime for the game. Lake Ridden will have both a day and night, which requires different light and moods.
At the studio we’ve been hard at work tweaking and crafting lights for the daytime. When playing Lake Ridden you’ll experience both day and night, and we have to make sure they look equally good. Different kinds of gameplay will take place depending on what time of the day it is.
Oh! Almost forgot! Other than making games we also had the time to play some Magic and craft mini terrariums during lunch hours! Sign up for the Midnight Hub Newsletter or follow Facebook for more news and screenshots. Find us on Twitter where we post new screenshots and behind the scenes stuff!
Cheers,
Sara & The Team