Hello World
Hello again! We are LunchHouse Software, the team behind PUNT. We know that it has been quite some time since you’ve last heard from us, and we’ve never addressed our affiliation with PUNT. You might be wondering what LunchHouse has been up to with PUNT. We know a lot of you will have questions, seeing as normally when a team goes silent about their product, it's not a good sign. However, contrary to precedent established by decades of gaming history, PUNT has not quietly been shelved. Since 2018, the game has remained in continuous development, even if we didn’t discuss it much publicly. We have made many great strides towards getting the game launch-ready. So here and now in this brief update post, we’d like to give you a bit more insight into the current state of affairs with PUNT, and what you can expect from its future.
The Reboot
In 2018, the project was restarted. A duo of passionate developers took what the game was at its very core, and started to build it again with the new founder’s vision in mind. This iteration had the smallest team by far, with only two developers: a level designer and the game’s designer. That earlier team opted to scale down their technology drastically, abandoning the complex systems that they couldn’t maintain for lack of an engineering team. As you can guess, doing a project on the scale of PUNT with only two people, things were slow and the end wasn’t in sight. When making this version, unlike other iterations, they focused exclusively on one goal: to make a complete and playable puzzle campaign. And, while successful, the final product wasn’t ready for the world to see. It was largely incomplete and was lacking significant components. However, it would go on to become something much greater.
A New Beginning
In the winter of 2019, a team of friends that would go on to call themselves LunchHouse Software began developing PUNT, again, entirely from the ground up - this time, with an entirely new production team and philosophy. We worked to reimagine PUNT to be a true reflection of the original vision: the year 2000, as imagined by somebody from the 70s. The world of tomorrow, clad in wood grain, concrete, plastic and synthesizers. We borrowed the 2018 build’s gameplay mechanics and elaborated on them in order to build a complete campaign that challenged puzzle solvers to think in abstract ways. LunchHouse would go on to expand into other enterprises, but PUNT remained our flagship title.
PUNT Now
That brings us to PUNT as it stands now. After over three years of development, a mountain of caffeinated beverages and antidepressants, tears, sweat, and lots of yelling at our computer monitors, we can proudly announce that PUNT’s puzzle campaign is complete. All of our core puzzle designs are final. From here, we’re working on implementing our introduction, ending and intermission sequences, to provide a more cohesive and narrative-driven experience. These additions will still take some time, but we’re aiming for a release some time this year. In the meantime, here’s a collection of screenshots from our campaign to give you a sneak peak at what we have to offer. Keep in mind we are still working on improving things before we release and these screenshots wont represent any of those changes in the interim. But we do hope you like what you see!
PUNT’s Future
Now you are all caught up with what has been the journey to the point we are now. That brings us to what is still to come. Upon completion, we intend to release PUNT as a commercial product on Steam. The final game will have 2 - 4 hours of gameplay, depending on your puzzle-platformer expertise.
The game is planned to feature Steam Workshop support, in an update following release. Unfortunately, at LunchHouse, we believe in deploying the game first over DLC. As a result, custom asset creation tools will be treated as such, and will deploy at a later date shortly after launch.
We hope you are as excited as we are for what is still to come in this journey. But while we still have no definite release window, this post is the first of many as we come back out of our silence and begin to post more updates on our progress and other exciting news we have to share with the community. Thank you for sticking with us. We hope you will love the game as much as we do.
But for now, from all of us here at LunchHouse Software, we hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, and an even better tomorrow!
Until Next Time,
LunchHouse Software
I've been following this project, since you took over it the environments and these textures are so good almost remind me of Portal 2! Yeah it's stressful to re-start a project, which I relate that a lot otherwise good luck on PUNT and great works :)
Portal 2 is quite pretty at times, so, in my opinion, that's quite high flattery! Thank you :)
By the way, is this Alien Swarm engine branch or CSGO one?
Neither. It's a custom engine branch distantly based on Portal 2.
This better have some PTSD mod references in it
It better, or else I will have to make PTSD 3.
This is it luigi
This is it mario
Super juiced! Keep us updated!
Wtf punt is no longer a meme. I'm glad that its finally getting some well deserved love.
The current art style seems to be in-between Blue Portals and Quantum Conundrum. I like it. That said, the contrast between the realistic potted plants inside and the cartoonish-looking tress outside is weird.
Thanks! As for the contrast, it's intentional. There's a reason for it being that way, but I won't spoil it here.
Found about the update a tad bit too late. Still, the (new)first impressions are just HOLY **** WOW AAAAA
I love the redesign of the mod page, still im gonna miss the old one just a little bit. Game design wise, no wonder it took so long in between updates. It just looks stunning and (In my opinion) is the best PUNT has looked ever since Reepblue started it's development all those years ago. Can't wait for this to release. Even if it's gonna be short, I and many other people will enjoy every single microsecond of it. I also secretly hope beta builds will be included with the final release to see how the game evolved (A very big lot) through the years for all of the beta-nerds out there. You guys have a guaranteed success on your hands.
Looking good!
I'm very excited about this. Take your time and let us know when you have a clearer picture of a timeframe for release in mind. Greatly looking forward to it!
Looks good! It was first announced in 2011 by reepblue, 11 years in development overall (I used to consider this mod being in development hell, because of that). The development was handed over to you, Box&Rocks;. When the mod's released, I suggest to give us explanations of why it took so long (obviously lead designer being way too ambitious, like Ken Levine of Bioshock fame; this is why he lied to players about various stuff in Bioshock Infinite seen in trailers). Valve has already notoriously rough development cycle.
I'm not Reepblue, and have not been developing this game since 2011. I started developing PUNT in 2014, when I had little actual game development experience or team to speak of. Every time I'd get somewhere substantial with PUNT, I'd have improved my skills and vision for the game, and chose to start over due to what was created not meeting my goals.
There's been multiple iterations of PUNT that I've created, with and without help from the Source community, and none of them were really something I could be proud of releasing. They lacked a proper story, structured puzzle campaign, and the gameplay mechanics lacked depth.
That's why in 2018 I rebooted PUNT for the final time, with a structured puzzle campaign and tightened mechanics. Then LunchHouse Software came to exist in 2019, and PUNT began a three year development cycle. That brings us to where we are now.
There will likely be a developer commentary, but we won't be going into depth about the past iterations of the game.
It's nice to hear that.