0.2.1: English voice acting, 30 languages, rebuilt nights

Update 0.2.1: Voices, 30 Languages, and Nights You Can Actually See

It has been about two months since the last big push. Most of that time went into three things: getting real voices into the game, getting the text into 30 languages, and rebuilding the night lighting so the dark is atmospheric instead of just broken. There is also a long tail of fixes, including one embarrassing one we will get to.

Full English voice acting

The entire opening arc is now voiced. Dad and Ozzy both. We recorded, listened back, and re-recorded hundreds of individual takes until the delivery actually sounded like two people in trouble rather than two people reading.

• Dad now mutters to himself during normal play, not only in scripted scenes.
• Ozzy's dialogue was rewritten from the ground up to sound like an actual 8 year old.
• Notes are narrated, with the background audio ducking underneath the narration.
• Radio static, interjections, hunger barks, threat barks, safehouse and campfire ambience.
• The first zombie kill got a rewritten and fully voiced reaction. Shock first, then the weight of it.

30 languages of text

Subtitles, UI, quest text and item names are now localized into 30 locales. To be completely clear about what that means: the voice acting is English only. The 30 languages are text. We are not going to blur that line in marketing copy.

• Arabic right to left support with proper reshaping and font fallbacks.
• Several QA passes for text overflow, missing glyphs, and lines that read fine in English and fell apart everywhere else.

Readable notes

There is a proper paper note system now, in the spirit of the ones in The Last of Us. You pick a note up and read it in world, with page turning, on screen control hints and a fade in overlay, and narration over the top.

Ethan's letter is in, and we rewrote the story canon around it so it points toward the hunters.

Night lighting, rebuilt

This one was overdue. The night lighting volume was invisible to the gameplay camera entirely. It was a bug, it had been there a while, and it made the whole game look wrong.

• Torches and fires light correctly the first time you equip them. They used to stay dark.
• Fire and torch shadows no longer dance, and light no longer leaks through walls.
• Volumetric fog is enabled on the Low and Very Low presets, which used to render nearly black.
• Bloom blowout, night fog, godrays, moon rendering and exposure all retuned.
• Deer eyeshine sits in the eyes now instead of floating in front of the face.

Ozzy

The kid was fighting the level geometry. He is not anymore.

• He fits through narrow doorways instead of snagging on his own ragdoll.
• Sitting on chairs no longer jitters or loops forever.
• His feet stay planted on slopes and stairs.
• Composable commands on the L1 command wheel, follow, wait and more, with an input guard so kid commands stop fighting your other bindings.

Enemies and wildlife

Fixing the obvious one first: zombies would chase you and then never attack. They just followed you around. If you played the earlier build and wondered why you never died, that is why. Sorry.

• Zombies attack, and vocalize when they swing.
• Active hunting zombies have red glowing eyes.
• Spawn logic reworked. No more spawning inside rocks, on the wrong NavMesh, or directly on top of you.
• The tutorial zombie now spawns at a sane 20m instead of in your face.
• Wildlife NPCs have species locked behavior and proper locomotion.

Performance

We went after frame drops rather than the average number, because the average was never the problem. The spikes were.

• Physics timestep and ragdoll cost cut substantially. Calm zombies no longer simulate full physics.
• Blood decals stopped rewriting projector properties every frame, and draw distance is capped.
• Point light shadows stripped on streamed terrain tiles.
• Font atlases pre-warmed during the loading screen, so the first subtitle does not hitch.
• Resident world streaming, so terrain around you stays loaded without stalls.

Quality of life

• The death screen tells you what actually killed you.
• Controls rebinding panel fixed.
• Resolution dropdown populates reliably.
• Q and E cycle building pieces, including free placement, not just modular.
• Gamepad glyphs no longer show raw text like TRIANGLE.
• Options tabs, subtitle size and placement, and the notes panel overflow all cleaned up.
• Saved settings are re-applied when gameplay starts, so your choices stick.

One rename

"Soldier Vision" is now called Focus. Same ability, better name, carried through all 30 languages.

PvE Fest

We are taking part in Steam's PvE Fest. If this is your first look at the game, welcome. It is a single player survival horror game about a father walking his son through a world that came apart, and it is in Early Access, so it is still moving.

If the mood suits you, wishlist it. And if something breaks, please tell us. Every fix in this list exists because somebody reported something.