Hello from the dev side!
This is Joe the Creative Director.
I was sitting around working on the tutorial, and realized I hadn't posted anything on the blogs for 2 months. I promise we've been working on the game and not slacking off. Actually, we've been really busy with the game. But we did slack on blogs. In our defense, we made TikToks.
Also, everyone on our team got sick. Sort of a biblical plague situation at the office. JOIN US is a weird game normally, but its way weirder when you're running a high fever. Not recommended. We survived.
The good news is that we're feature locked! For a bigger studio, that would mean we're purely handling polish and optimization. For us (11 people with nobody to tell us what to do and a shoddy work-life-balance) that means that we're not going add any brand new mechanics, and our focus is very much shifting to polish and optimization... but also if stuff needs to change to make the game better, we'll probably just change it and then the game will be better. Some of us have been working on this since 2022, so at this point we just want it to be good.
Anyway, here's some notable headlines of the last couple months!
The narrative campaign can progress from one side to the other in co-op. That's 38 missions, with another ~30 side missions. Or you can just sandbox and not see anything we made for you...
There's a narrative campaign. Also there are flamethrowers.
There are now ~12,000 human voice lines in the game that were recorded over 2 weeks with an awesome cast of real people. Around 2,000 of those are narrative lines and the rest are NPC vocals (Followers rambling about The Leader, civilians verbally abusing you for being a weirdo, etc.)
JOIN US is a game about doing cult stuff, but we figured if there was farming then we should shoot our shot at a mini farming loop. You can now plant crops and change out your crop varieties (this ranges from tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, to unlockables like Moon Fruit that only grows at night). Crops can be watered for faster growth. Or if it rains, they grow faster with no need for watering. You can harvest crops or just leave the dirty work to your Followers; the AI will handle grindy tasks without prompting.
Look ma! An acceptable farming simulation!
Players can still issue Teachings that align your cult with various animal types. But now you can tame those animals in the wild by doing a silly cult dance. You can also build Animal Totems that attract animals to the compound over time. The Animal Totem lets you give them stupid hats. All animals in the game have names (some of those names were given to us on our "Be An NPC" Discord server - so if you submitted an abstract name, it'll probably end up on a bear or a chicken). You can still hunt animals.
To ride the pig, one must become the pig.
The weather system has been beefed up, with more immersive fx and better world interaction.
We have a crime system! This has been a long time coming. If you commit a crime in the world, civs call the police. Sheriffs will arrive on the scene, spawning from a realistic point in the world. For example, if you're out in rural farmland the police will take longer to get to you - and they'll respond to the area the crime was committed, not to the player's active location - so you have time to split. If you're in town, they'll get there much faster. If police are engaged, they will eventually call in choppers for support.
There are now 3 types of choppers. A janky crop duster, a police chopper, and a military gunship. All of them can be shot down, and all of them have varying levels of firepower.
We're diving into optimization.
There's arguably a certain threshold where higher fps won't make JOIN US a more fun game, but the more we optimize, the more our perf budget opens up to make the game itself better; a field with 8 deer is more immersive than a field with 2 deer - we just need bandwidth to support the additional actors.
So with elbow grease and continued gains, this hopefully means that the game will be better, more players can access it, and everyone who already had the recommended specs can have a better experience (or just run other programs in background for no reason I guess if you really want idk).
There's a lot more, but we'll save it for now.
If there are specific systems or tech info or even indie studio biz stuff that you'd like to us expand on, just call it out. We make up blogs as we go so we're happy to take requests.
PS. Hit us up on Discord too! We finally got a good pipeline going for the "Be An NPC" server, so you can put yourself in the game, then find yourself, then convert yourself to a cult.
PPS. As usual, thank you so much for the support and interest. We really do appreciate it. The JOIN US gang would love our jobs no matter what, but having cool people interested in our objectively silly game means a lot to us.