• Register

The world is coming to an end. The cities are crumbling, the fields lie barren, life already gone. In the dark, a fleeting spirit reaches out to a child. Setting out into a world of remnants, they travel together, to save what can be saved, and to understand. Empathy is an adventure game with emphasis on story telling and exploration. A game about emotions, good intentions and desperate measures, where you embark on a journey through a dying world to discover its story and wonders. Together, the Spirit and the Child travel along the Road, a road between existences, filled with memories and echos of the past. Behind them, the crumbling world, in front, a glimpse of hope. Where will their journey take them?

Post news Report RSS Empathy - we're back, with a new gameplay video!

New design, new direction, new gameplay! We're excited to show you what we've been up to this past year :)

Posted by on

Over a year since last update. Damn. Well, we finally have something new to show to you guys! During this time we've been busy and a lot of things have happened, among the other:

  • We've moved to Unreal Engine 4. It gives us new tools necessary for our vision and improved shaders to play around with, as well as access to source code.
  • We've re-designed the game from point and click to first person view. This is a huge change, and may surprise some of our followers, but we felt that the point and click approach was too limiting for us and we wanted to further explore our emotional mechanic with freedom of movement. After a lot of playtesting, we felt it was the right decision and are happy with the change, we hope you will be too!
  • We've introduced several new elements to our emotional switching mechanic, to further improve story telling and puzzles, which we'll showcase in the video below.

So without further delay, check out the video below (watch it in a new window for better quality) and let us know your thoughts! I'll try writing a more in-depth analysis of our new mechanics in a later post.

Post comment Comments
Taco_Guy
Taco_Guy

Interesting gameplay, going over that bridge reminded me of the bridge crossing in Half-Life 2 in an odd way. The way the colours change throughout the levels are an interesting mechanic, what do the colours mean? Good to see it updated after so long!

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
Araklaj Author
Araklaj

The colours are visuals to better represent the emotional state of the memory you are currently inside, and to give player clues about the character. It's mostly visuals, although each emotion will likely have unique hazards/aspects to it besides the world changes.

Reply Good karma+1 vote
Shrektacular
Shrektacular

This looks really nice and I love the concept but I think the colours are a bit too strong like colour-filters on top so it looks kind of artificial, it's better having coloured light-sources in the game instead of semi-transparent photoshoppy filters

but it still looks really nice as a whole

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
Araklaj Author
Araklaj

We'll keep that in mind! The effects are placeholders, and will be tweaked :) Although it is the light sources you see, not filters, a global light that changes its color affecting the whole level.

Reply Good karma+1 vote
Shrektacular
Shrektacular

Hmm, maybe it's something to do with the "blending mode" (like on photoshop layers), but yeah colours are definately important and great for moods. And that said the concept pictures have really good colouring too!

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
Geostationary0rbit
Geostationary0rbit

Very interesting to see how this game has changed and developed over time although I do feel like the backgrounds arnt quite as strong as before although I imagene that is due to placeholders

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
Araklaj Author
Araklaj

It's much harder to keep cool backgrounds in a 3D environment with free movement, since you have to account for all the angles, while in our old approach we only had to account for one single camera angle that we could make perfect backgrounds for. But that being said, the backgrounds will definitely get cooler and more colorful, getting closer to the concepts, in the future as we add more content to the levels :)

Reply Good karma+1 vote
Bambs
Bambs

Cool! I'm glad the game is still in development. I love Empathy's aesthetics and anyone should be able to tell the poetic and artsy potential it has =D

Lycka till!

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
Post a comment

Your comment will be anonymous unless you join the community. Or sign in with your social account: