Last week, almost out of nowhere, a new survival contender showed up: The Forest<\/em> from Endnight Games. The title shot to the very top of the charts within two hours of its launch.<\/p>\n The reason the game went straight to the top has partly to do with how the game already had a fan base before the alpha ever went on sale. The buzz for the game actually started with a trailer that accompanied the game\u2019s successful Steam Greenlight campaign last summer. The game was promptly greenlit, and a second trailer helped the game gain even more interest.<\/p>\n \u201cApparently people are really into chopping down trees, and getting chased by cannibals,\u201d laughs Mike Mellor, who\u2019s working on A.I., design and programming for The Forest<\/em>.<\/p>\n It also helps that the game is quite pretty, which can be attributed to the heavily-modified Unity engine and the fact that the four people who comprise Endnight come from the visual effects industry for film. The visuals and the survival premise have given players something to rally behind.<\/p>\n The game started as a one-person project by Endnight\u2019s Ben Falcone. Burnt out by the movie industry, he left and took a year to make the iPad survival game, called Endnight<\/em>. Following that project he started The Forest<\/em> about a year ago.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to do something bigger and use procedural generation,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought the forest would be a really good place to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n The Forest<\/em> actually begins in an airplane. In the next seat, a child is sleeping peacefully on your arm, when a sudden jolt occurs, and next thing you know, the front half of the plane is missing and you\u2019re headed for a crash landing in the forest.<\/p>\n As you awake, a mysterious tribesman stands above you, and takes the child away. You lose consciousness again, then regain it and begin your fight for survival against hunger, cold, and some extremely creepy, cannibalistic enemies who tend to show up and do odd and violent things, when all you want to do is finish building your log cabin.\n<\/p>\n Having interacted directly with the community during the Greenlight campaign, the team at Endnight seems comfortable, if not overworked, in developing a paid alpha. \u201cWe\u2019ve had lots of 48-hour-straight \u2018work days,\u2019\u201d says Falcone.<\/p>\n But Early Access was the best option for the team. Anna Terekhova, who works on interface, design, level layout and other areas of the game, says, \u201cAs a team of four people, it\u2019s really difficult to release a full game, and get all the testing that we need. Early Access allows us to get the community involved and get the community involved and keep it going.\u201d<\/p>\n Falcone says, \u201cSpending all that time to get it to a final version is pretty much impossible for us. But we knew we could get a first alpha build.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAt first we were all pretty nervous, but it\u2019s pretty awesome to get a big list of bugs. Just getting a list of a hundred bugs, and just knocking out the bugs we missed is great,\u201d he adds. \u201cYou do have some people who do expect it to be a finished, polished game. And it is strange when some sites review alpha copies of games, which is a bit bizarre. Reviewing the 0.01 version is probably not the best thing to do.\u201d\n<\/p>\n As other small-team game developers have realized, effective implementation of procedurally generated content can make up for the lack of studio personnel. The Forest<\/em> uses a mix of procedural and non-procedural tools.<\/p>\n \u201cThe original intention was to procedurally generate everything, which we did early on,\u201d says Falcone. \u201cThe issue is that it\u2019s really boring. I find that any procedural game you play, you just start to see patterns and it\u2019s just not as interesting when you can handcraft something and really dress it up.\u201d<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t mean everything in the game is handcrafted and hand-placed. The studio uses a system called Greeble, which is a way of procedurally placing objects, based on simple rules. This makes objects and items appear hand-placed, when it\u2019s actually done procedurally. At the beginning of the game, the plane crashes at a random spot on the map as well, each time you play, giving a sense of variety and providing more replayability.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can have really distinct-looking<\/em> areas. We\u2019re such a small team, obviously we couldn\u2019t lay out all that stuff. So it works out really well,\u201d Falcone says.\n<\/p>\n Endnight\u2019s a very young studio, and is approaching game development challenges in its own way, and questioning design tropes constantly.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest [challenge] is just making a game and taking a different path than a lot of games would,\u201d says Falcone. \u201cThere was a point about three months ago where I was saying to Anna, \u2018I wish we had just copied another game.\u2019 Everything we do, we\u2019ve been trying to rethink how it\u2019s being done.\u201d Features such as the 3D crafting system and the game’s survival handbook went through hundreds of iterations before their current form. Everything is being made with VR compatibility in mind as well, adding an extra component of difficulty.<\/p>\n Falcone also says that getting the player to simply do<\/em> something has been a challenge, especially when you want a truly open design that isn\u2019t heavily based on missions and quests.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason games bombard you with missions and pickups and collectibles and things to do is because otherwise the world feels dead. What do you do in a world where you\u2019re not being forced to do anything?\u201d he says. People would play the game and just not know what to do after stepping out of the plane\u2019s wreckage at the start.<\/p>\n \u201cUntil we had enough elements in the game to make it interesting \u2014 lizards climbing trees, rabbits running around, plants all cuttable and destroyable \u2014 there were a few scary points where we thought maybe we should turn it into Far Cry 3<\/em>,\u201d he laughs.<\/p>\n Endnight is instead following its own vision for The Forest<\/em>, and now that it\u2019s selling well, the studio has a commitment to its players. Falcone expects the \u201cfinal\u201d version to launch around six months from now. In the meantime, the studio will be adding features, squashing bugs and learning the lessons taught by launching a game on Steam Early Access.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s what we thought, that it could be as buggy as hell, but as long as the vision for the game came through, I felt that we\u2019d be in a good place,\u201d says Falcone. \u201cAnd I feel like we got there, where it is super, super buggy, sometimes broken, but you can actually see the vision. I think for everyone in the audience, that\u2019s the most important thing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Steam users seem to have quite the affinity for survival-themed games, lately. To name a few strong performers, there\u2019s DayZ, Rust, 7 Days to Die. They\u2019re all sold as in-development games, via Steam Early Access, and all of them give the player one main goal: to survive. Last week, almost out of nowhere, a new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.sickgamedev.win\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/dont-miss-fine-young-cannibalsc297developing-early-access-hit-the-forest.jpg\")
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