Hello Rangers,
It is time to give you all another status update on Wasteland 3! As we mentioned previously, we are deep in our pre-production phase. We have a set of core team members working to build out the vision for the game. In the coming months we have a set timeline to ensure our future team members will roll onto the project smoothly. Lead Designer George Ziets and the content team are hard at work hammering down the overall storyline, as well as working on area design and coming up with all kinds of quirky characters and companions to populate Colorado.
Beyond area and system designs, a key goal for our pre-production period is to get working prototypes for our internal use. These are focused on major gameplay elements, such as combat, missions, exploration, skill use, and so on. A lot of those designs are heavily rooted in Wasteland 2, which gives us a firm basis in the kind of rich reactivity and systemic depth we want. Our prototype work will focus on answering larger questions about new gameplay elements, such as vehicles, multiplayer, and ice and cold. We showed some of this prototyping work in our crowdfunding campaign, but for pre-production it is essential to create prototypes that explore the riskiest gameplay elements, and this will be our focus in coming months.
Since we now have a good idea of the basics, our humble team has been growing. The art lead on Torment, Charlie Bloomer, has begun work on Wasteland 3, and will be concepting and prototyping scenes to figure out how we can maximize the aesthetic of our unique, wintery setting. Dan Jenkins and Chris Wiedel, engineers who worked on Wasteland 2 and Torment, have started exploring Wasteland 3's programming needs, such as integrating useful code from Wasteland 2 and Torment, as well as investigating our requirements to get multiplayer off the ground.
But that's not all we have to share. Dating back to the Interplay days, our studio philosophy is to create a vision document for each of our projects. This document contains the game's core elements and features, and serves to remind us of our high-level goals throughout production, as well as to give new team members an introduction to the game’s core features. On Wasteland 2, we shared our vision with you early in the development process, and we're continuing that tradition with Wasteland 3.
You may recall, our previously released concept renders were done by the highly talented duo of Chris and Nic Bischoff, of The Brotherhood studio. Although they've been a great help to us in these early Wasteland 3 days, they've also been hard at work on their own projects. First, they followed up on their critically acclaimed STASIS adventure game with a free isometric horror adventure game titled Cayne, available on both Steam and GOG.com. "Give away a game for free, are they mad?" you ask, to which I answer "that's not a very nice question, but yes, quite likely they are, and also you should probably play it!"
But there's more! They've also been building their own post-apocalyptic adventure called Beautiful Desolation, a stunningly beautiful game featuring a unique African setting. Not too long ago, this project hit Kickstarter, and with less than two weeks to go, is closing in on its funding goal! If you like what you see, we encourage you to take a closer look and consider supporting their efforts.
