The Chinese Room’s highly anticipated adventure title for the PS4 Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture has been on the downlow for the past year or so but studio head Dan Pinchbeck has announced that the game has finally entered the alpha stage.
Writing on the company’s official website, Pinchbeck said, “Last week we submitted the alpha build for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture to Sony Santa Monica for build approval and they gave us the big thumbs up. This means we’re hurtling straight towards Beta and then Gold.”
An alpha build is really only the beginning since plenty of work still remains. “OK, so it doesn’t get any easier – the back half of development is all go, ramping up detail in all angles, intergrating stuff like crazy, polishing the hell out of anything we can… and the bugs. It’s all about the bugs. So by this point the world is locked, scenes are locked, we know what is happening where and when and why and how, but there’s a big difference between that ‘it works’ and ‘it’s a great game’, which is where we all want it to be.”
Pinchbeck outlined upcoming work for the game’s score and visuals, and the studio has already wrapped up the first instance of a new AI system. Sadly, this may be one of the last major updates on the game in a while.
“Nope, we’re not going to GDC. Nope, we’re not doing any interviews at the moment. Nope, there’s no new trailer or screenshots coming your way for a little while yet. It’s heads down time, the unglamorous bit of development where you just grind away, making it as good as you can – the bit where you understand game development is about craft as much as it’s about art. We’ll surface again sometime around March with more news, but for the moment, we just wanted to let you know where we are, and that we’re making something we’re really proud of. This is going to be our best game yet.”
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