I’m back!! Well it’s definitely been a while since I’ve made my presence known! Actually, it’s been about 6 months since I’ve done anything with the game… Unfortunately life has gotten in the way of development. Making this game is something I’ve been doing in my free time and due to my regular career and relocating to a new city I haven’t had much free time to work on it. But I think I’m at a point where I can get back at it! So let me update you on what I’m doing and the future of They’re Gone.

Right before I stopped working on the game I realized there was just too many bugs in the current build and trying to find the reason for why they were happening would be extremely time consuming and super frustrating. A lot of it probably has to do with the way I started making the game and not knowing certain things back then that I know now. There’s mistakes I made that I will never be able to find and fix because the project is too big. So I’ve decided to take a few steps back and start with a clean project, import the scenes and models and rebuild a lot of the game. I’ll be able to use pretty much all the scenes I’ve built but the foundation of the game (the character controller and interaction system) is going to change a bit. I’ve already started working on the new controller and interaction system. Remaking that forces me to change how doors, interacting with objects, etc work in the game. A bit of a chore but totally doable and the first level is almost completely rebuilt.

I’ve also decided to rewrite the story. Actually, write it properly is more like it. When I first started I made an outline of the basic story and how I wanted it to go. It’s been a little difficult planning how to guide the player with having just a small outline. Now I’ll be writing it all out and creating story boards to use. I’m not an artist so the story boards will be pretty hilarious looking and nobody will EVER see them, LOL! But it will help me make the levels better and create a better player experience. Since it seems to be putting off quite a horror vibe to players I’m going to expand on it a little and possibly change a bit of how I wanted the original story to go. I’ll see how it goes as I write it out and go with what feels right.

That’s about all I can talk about right now, I just wanted to let everyone know that development is still going on. Unfortunately I’m way behind where I wanted to be at this time. I was hoping to release it this year but I’m not sure if that’s going to happen. Thanks for reading and I’ll write another update as soon as I have something new and interesting to share!