Hello there! It's time for the last Loco Motive blog of the year, so let's get straight to it!
As I write this blog post, we’re winding down development here and preparing to spend some well earned time with our family over the Christmas holidays. It’s a time of reflection, so let’s look at all we’ve achieved, and what’s left to come for us in the new year!
🧭2023 Recap🧭
2023! It’s been a year of highlights, but let’s look at some of our biggest milestones:
- We demoed at PAX East and EGX 2023 - the UK's biggest gaming exhibition!
- The game became ‘fully playable’ from start to finish
- Loco Motive was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award
- We were officially selected to be part of LudoNarracon 2023
- We debuted our first playable demo on Steam as part of Steam Mystery Fest
- Full controller support was added to the game!
- We reached over 70,000+ Wishlists!
But that’s not all! We had time to squeeze in just a few more things before our Christmas break..
🎤 Voice Acting has begun!🎤
Many of the questions we’ve received so far have revolved around voice, and if / when Loco Motive will feature voice acting.
I am pleased to confirm that we've recently begun recording dialogue with a professional voice cast, who we couldn’t be more excited about! These talented voice actors have featured in games such as The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, Viewfinder, Genshin Impact, Baldur’s Gate III, Starfield and more!
We’ll be announcing the full cast as we record more dialogue and get closer to launch, so keep your eyes peeled for a future announcement. Until then, we'll be keeping you guessing!
⚙️Accessibility Options!⚙️
We wanted Loco Motive to be more accessible and give players more options. We recently spent some time adding accessibility features to the game, including the following:
- ⏪ Subtitle Speed Settings
- 🗨️ Subtitle Backing Settings
- 🗚 Bigger Text Size Settings
- 📛 Display Speaker Name Option
- 📑 Dyslexic Friendly Font Option
- 🎉 Confetti Mode! (Removes Blood!)
- 🎮 Playstation Controller Support!
Here are some new screenshots to show some of these options in action!
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but we intend to listen to feedback and work to make the game as accessible as we can for launch!
🛠️Development continues!🛠️
Loco Motive became fully playable from start to finish in late July, and since then we've all been working dilligently to get more of the written dialogue into the game, adding more music and SFX, polishing the visuals and adding more animation! We've also been able to start exploring those bigger features like voice acting and localisation.
We don't want to give too much away just yet, but we thought we could share some brand new animation work from the game for now!
📅Loco Motive launches in 2024📅
As we mentioned earlier this year, Loco Motive will now be launching in 2024 for PC and Nintendo Switch.
There are a number of factors behind the decision, but ultimately we’re a small but ambitious team who needs a little bit of extra development time to deliver the game we set out to make.
We can all agree that delays are annoying, but we strongly believe this extra time will allow Loco Motive to reach its full potential.
Thanks for your understanding and support. We can't wait to share the full Loco Motive adventure with you, it will be worth the wait!
✨Wishlists!✨
A massive shout-out to you all for adding Loco Motive to your wishlists! thanks to your efforts we recently hit our 70,000 wishlist milestone, and are already well on the way to our next goal! Thanks for all your support so far.
We're excited to continue sharing updates with you as we make progress on the game. We’ll be sharing more progress as we go, but in the meantime, you can follow us for updates on Twitter or join the official Robust Games Discord.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1709880/Loco_Motive/
Don’t forget to wishlist Loco Motive for a notification when the full game launches! It’s just one click, but it really helps us out. We also plan to use this data to decide future language support!
🙌Teamwork makes the dream work!🙌
Before we break for Christmas, we just wanted to thank our entire extended team for their hard work in 2023, and for getting us one step closer to bringing the game to launch!
There's still a bit of work ahead of us, but 2024 will be the year of Loco Motive.
We couldn't be prouder of this team, and consider ourselves very lucky to have this level of talent involved.
Have a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
Adam & Joseph
Robust Games