🎃🎃🎃 HAPPY HALLOWEEN from our cult to yours 🎃🎃🎃
To get into the spirit of the season, we tried out spooky compound designs using the modular building system. We added some new decorations like torches to juice up the nighttime atmosphere.
Spooky Halloween compound builds.
The transition from day to night has also been a big consideration for JOIN US. A lot of Teachings in the game revolve around times of day (your cult is stronger at night, you rest at sunset, etc) so we wanted to make sure that the game is equally playable at all points in the day/night cycle. The idea of an oppressively dark night didn't feel correct in a game where players might commit to a nighttime-focused play-through. This has lead to a lot of tweaking of moon size, moon intensity, and shadow contrast. Unreal has a quirk where the map can get very dark at the point where the sun and moon are both below the horizon and there's no direct light source - so we added a workaround that scales the brightness during those dawn/dusk windows.
We also tweaked spawners so that towns are less populated at night. Before that change you could go to a town at 3am and the streets were filled with civilians. Bedford Country doesn't really seem like a place with an active nightlife so we wanted to reflect more immersion with that system.
Being in Halloween mode got us to implement a test of GHOSTS; one branch of Teachings dives into 1920s spiritualism (seances etc) and lets you conjure the ghosts of your dead Followers. At first, they're about a useless as you would expect a ghost to be, but if you turn them into Poltergeists they can perform basic tasks on the compound.
We couldn't decide if the art test looked more like FromSoft ghosts or the ghosts in Lord of the Rings.
We also added a Halloween-adjacent Teaching where UFOs can show up at night to fry your enemies.
Showing proper respect to the aliens has its perks.
That's it!
PS. We're over on Discord at https://discord.com/invite/joinusgame, the devs have been streaming on Tuesdays at 10:30am pt and showing off gameplay footage etc. We're friendly. Come hang out. PPS. our lovely composer Ben Bostick has released a Hero Suite OST that features some of our favorite themes from the JOIN US score all in one place!