Hello Everyone!
It’s been a wild, long ride for the team. Kind of similar to the flow of the game itself, it was surreal and shocking, but we made it to release and beyond.
We have spent months after release working day and night to address the issues of the community, and we’ve done a tremendous amount of work adding free content and polishing what we already had.
It feels like a good spot in time to look back at what we’ve done since release, and a good spot in time to thank every single one of our players and our community who gave us the courage and hope to keep going and make our game.
You’ve been with us through thick and thin, and put your faith in us, helped us improve the game and get the message of the game across more than we could ever hope for.
Since release, we have drastically changed the game in every aspect possible, and we have learned a lot.
The first issue we addressed was the motion sickness some of our players were experiencing.
Now we all knew that making a Psychedelic experience into a video game was a towering task, but we were determined to do it anyways. We also knew that going through an acid trip while not actually being on acid might cause some… “Inconsistencies” between the players’s reality and the in-game experience.
What we were not expecting was how much a real psychedelic experience differed from a person’s normal visual patterns and how seeing the same things through a sober eye can cause actual, physical pain to the watcher. Bummer, man.
We either had to recommend to our players to use psychedelic drugs before playing the game, or actually make the game playable while not under the effect. We obviously had to choose the latter.
Then rose the monumental task of preserving the insanity and the corrosive acid experience while making sure our sober players could actually enjoy the game without experiencing various degrees of motion sickness.
And we did it.
A month later, everyone could experience an actual acid trip without needing to use some themselves or suffer motion sickness. We had struck the balance.
The next thing to tackle was the actual game experience itself.
After listening to the feedback from our community, we set about editing every. Single. Second. Of the game. We calculated every moment, rethinked every cinematic, every dialogue, to make sure we delivered the best story-driven experience possible.
We tweaked waiting times, tweaked puzzle difficulties, added and removed hints, added scenes, removed scenes, changed camera directions, etc.
When we were confident that the flow of the game was to our player’s liking, we worked on adding new content.
And we did it.
Hundreds of hours of ceaseless work later, we had a dozen new achievements, minutes of new cinematics, several new endings, new dialogues, new gameplay bits, new puzzles, and even a new bossfight.
We tore the game apart, added dozens of player choices where there was none before, we changed the direction of the story and allowed the player much greater control over the outcome of the game. In practice, a linear story was now a responsive story that shaped up to the ending based on the smallest decision you made.
We added secret endings and easter eggs, we added new alternatives, we added more content and we added more videos. We did our best, and it worked.
And now, on this day, 9th of November, 2020, in the smoldering heat of the U.S Elections, we bring you a brand new What Happened, and we hope you have a nice trip!