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Dear Follower! Due to a change of our privacy policy the fact that we wanted to change our account to be a Primary Tumlbr with all the primary benefits, we won’t update this account any longer. Please follow our new, shiny account for more intriguing Backwoods stories!

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https://gamesbybackwoods.tumblr.com/

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Unforeseen Incidents Finds Beauty in the Imperfect

There's charm to be found in every nook and cranny of this point and click adventure's world.

"It seems like there is charm to be found in every nook and cranny of Unforeseen Incident’s world: in the unique characters you’ll meet, the conversations you’ll have, and the gorgeous locations you’ll explore while trying to wrap your head around its tangled web of a plot." - @kotaku

Very nice article about our game with some insights into the backstory of its development on Kotaku 😍

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Good news! We finally re-designed our homepage. No longer are we slaves to Wordpress! That also means we‘re back to Tumblr! Celebrate! 🎉

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Release Update

If you read this you probably already know a little bit about our game and that we were hoping to release it on February 1st this year. Making games can be hard and a lot of work. Even if always aiming to stay optimistic and positive we as well have to look straight into the sometimes ugly face of reality. This reality is that February 1 is only three weeks away, and we’re not completely satisfied with the state the game currently is in. In the last weeks and months, we’ve worked very hard to create the best experience with the time we had. It took us sleepless nights and days and weeks full of commitment to bring us where we are now, but we want to release a game that’s as technically stable and polished as possible, and it’s not quite there yet.

We’ve decided to extend the beta phase one more time and would like to apologize to everyone waiting for the game. The good thing is that this will allow us to bring you a much better and more polished game. While our programmers are busy fixing bugs, we’re bringing our artist Matt back on the project to create several additional graphics and animations for a richer overall experience. So this delay is not completely bad news!

We aren’t going to announce a new date until we’re sure we will really be done that day. We will soon be ready to hand out press copies (press inquiries here), and we’ll be ready for launch sometime this spring.

You can wishlist Unforeseen Incidents on Steam today and you’ll receive a notification when the game is released.

Sorry for the delay. We hope we explained it well.

Release Update was originally published on Backwoods

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Synchronsprecher gesucht!

Disclaimer: Sorry, the following post is going to be German only. We’re looking for German voice actors.

Wir sind auf der Suche nach deutschen Synchronsprecherinnen und -sprechern für unser Adventure Unforeseen Incidents. Bewerbungen mit Demos bitte an [email protected] senden! Weitere Infos über die Charaktere gibt es dann per Mail. Der Auftrag wird vergütet.

UNFORESEEN INCIDENTS – AUSSCHREIBUNG SPRECHER

Als Hobbybastler Harper Pendrell in seiner kleinen Heimatstadt auf eine im Sterben liegende Frau trifft, begibt er sich unfreiwillig in die Fänge einer diabolischen Verschwörung. Allein er kann das Mysterium um die tödliche und hochansteckende Krankheit, die sich in Yelltown verbreitet, lösen.

Mit Hilfe eines Wissenschaftlers, einer Reporterin und eines paranoiden Künstler ergründet Harper den finsteren Komplott und begibt sich, nur mit seinem treuen Multitool bewaffnet, auf eine gefährliche Reise, die ihn in ein Netz intriganter Fanatiker führt. Findet Harper den Mut, die Wahrheit aufzudecken und eine Epidemie zu verhindern, selbst wenn das heißt, dass er Gefahr läuft, sich selbst mit dem tödlichen Virus zu infizieren?

Unforeseen Incidents ist ein klassisches Point & Click Mystery Adventure in einer liebevoll gestalteten, komplett handgezeichneten Welt. Begleite Harper auf seiner Reise und erlebe fordernde Rätsel, geschliffene Dialoge und triff eine Menge interessanter Charaktere in einem packenden, neuen Adventure-Spiel von Backwoods Entertainment und Application Systems Heidelberg.

Wir suchen nach deutschen Sprecherinnen und Sprechern für Unforeseen Incidents, gerne mit Heimstudio oder im Raum Ruhrgebiet/NRW, Heidelberg oder Berlin. Bitte sendet eure Bewerbungen mit Demos an [email protected]. Weitere Infos über die Charaktere gibt es dann per Mail. Der Auftrag wird vergütet.

Anmerkung: Es ist nicht notwendig lippensynchron zu sprechen, da die Audiowiedergabe von der Spiele-Software zu generischen Mundbewegungen gesteuert wird.

  Synchronsprecher gesucht! was originally published on Backwoods

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Gamescom 2017

Gamescom is ahead and we’re happy to announce that we’ll be part of the infamous Indie Arena Booth this year. Visit us in Hall 10.1, booth A020. We’ll also be at the MFG Baden-Württemberg booth with Unforeseen Incidents publisher Application Systems Heidelberg in the business area, hall 3.2, booth B16/C17.

Please get in touch if you like to make an appointment.

Gamescom 2017 was originally published on Backwoods

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Games Week Berlin!

Hello everyone!

It’s been a while since we published our last blog post. We are still alive and still working on Unforeseen Incidents, the mystery adventure game you are all so desperately waiting for. We now implemented the second chapter of the game and started testing it. Next steps are writing a blog post about having implemented the second chapter of the game and having started testing it, finalizing the implementation of chapters 3 and 4, releasing the game.

Speaking of… games… we will be at the glorious INTERNATIONAL GAMES WEEK BERLIN next week, showcasing Unforeseen Incidents and annoying people at the Quo Vadis game developers conference, the Making Games Festival and the wonderful A MAZE indie game festival. We are very happy to announce that we’ve been nominated for the Best Of Quo Vadis award.

We will be at the Indie Game Expo of Quo Vadis and Making Games Festival Monday – Wednesday and the Indie Arena Arcade at A MAZE on Thursday.

See you in Berlin!

Games Week Berlin! was originally published on Backwoods

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Comeback of adventure games

In an interview together with adventure games legend and Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert, Marcus talked to the German radio station DRadio Wissen about Unforeseen Incidents and the future of adventure games. Sorry, German only. Listen to it right here:

Comeback of adventure games was originally published on Backwoods

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Mediengründerzentrum NRW 2017 Scholarship

We are very happy we’ve been granted the scholarship of the Mediengründerzentrum NRW for 2017:

http://www.mediengruenderzentrum.de/aktuelles/news/artikel/pressemitteilung-mediengruenderzentrum-nrw-vergibt-11-gruenderstipendien.html

Mediengründerzentrum NRW scholarship holders 2017

The scholarship provides an extensive range of seminars for founders, a coaching program, and a grant of 10,000 €.

Thank you, Mediengründerzentrum!

Mediengründerzentrum NRW 2017 Scholarship was originally published on Backwoods

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Call for Voice Actors

Hello everyone!

During the last months and weeks, we’ve made further progress with the development and are now in search of voice actors for the English version of the game.

We are looking for US / Canadian voice actors for Unforeseen Incidents, preferably with a home studio set up and based in the UK/EU. If you are a voice actor, please send your applications and demos to [email protected]. We will provide more information about the characters via email. The gig is paid.

UNFORESEEN INCIDENTS – CALL FOR VOICE ACTORS

A deadly virus. A chance encounter. A cryptic message.

When small-town handyman Harper Pendrell meets a dying woman in the street, he unwittingly stumbles into a diabolical conspiracy – a mystery only he can solve. An unknown disease is spreading across the country, and between them a scientist, a reporter and a reclusive artist hold the key to stopping it. 

A perilous journey awaits, and every step brings Harper closer to a cabal of dangerous fanatics. Before he knows it, he finds himself in a fight for the future of humankind armed only with his trusty multi-tool. Can Harper find the courage to expose the truth and prevent an epidemic, even if it means succumbing to contagion himself?

Unforeseen Incidents is a classic interactive mystery set in a beautifully hand-painted world. Join Harper and experience a challenging investigation, smart dialog and a rich cast of characters in this thrilling new adventure game from Backwoods Entertainment and Application Systems Heidelberg.

We are looking for US / Canadian voice actors for Unforeseen Incidents, preferably with a home studio set up and based in the UK/EU. Please send your applications and demos to [email protected]. We will provide more information about the characters via email. The gig is paid.

If you know an amazing voice actor, please let them know about the call and tell them to drop us a line. Today.

PS: Yes, there will be a German talkie of the game as well. We are still scheduling the German voice recordings right now. We will open a separate call for German voice actors in a couple of weeks. If you are interested, please follow our updates.

Call for Voice Actors was originally published on Backwoods

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Back from AdventureX

We had a good time exhibiting Unforeseen Incidents in London this weekend. AdventureX is one of the most pleasant conventions we’ve ever visited. The atmosphere is very friendly and you get to meet a lot of nice people, listen to interesting talks about narrative games and interactive fiction and play many great adventure games, a lot of them still in development, like ours. For the first time ever, we showed the beginning of the game to the public. The feedback has been very positive, which is really motivating. At the same time, when seeing players play sections of the game you didn’t get to playtest beforehand, you get a lot of helpful information for further development. All in all, we had a very good weekend in London, and it was very nice meeting old and new friends of the international adventure games community. It is really good to see AdventureX is growing more and more and that so many people are interested in narrative games.

We will bring the new demo to more exciting locations in 2017, but before we get to that, it’ll “come home” to a very familiar, but not less amazing gathering once more: Tuesday, December 6th, Talk & Play #22, Games Science Center, Berlin. It’s the last time we show it this year, so come by if you’re in Berlin!

       Together with our publisher Application Systems Heidelberg, we showed Unforeseen Incidents and Alasdair’s Nelly Cootalot

Back from AdventureX was originally published on Backwoods

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AdventureX

In two weeks, we’re going to be at the narrative games convention AdventureX in London. We’re showing a demo of Unforeseen Incidents. AdventureX takes place 19 – 20 November at Goldmiths University of London. If you are in London that weekend, come by and have a look at a lot of great adventure games currently in the making. Check out the line-up of AdventureX right here. See you in London!

AdventureX was originally published on Backwoods

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Music demos

Today we’d like to share some musical demos Tristan created during the last days and weeks. Have fun!

Music demos was originally published on Backwoods

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Behind The Scenes: #1 - Importing the Sprites

In ‘Behind The Scenes’, our new, very accurately named series, we’d like to give you people out there some insights into how we get a finished drawing of a scene into our game and make it actually playable. Attention! This means there are going to be a few somewhat technical posts. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! Are you ready? Still there? OK!

Implementing a finished Photoshop scene is one of the less creative and more annoying tasks we face while working on the game (so why not share that experience with you, right?). Once we finish the scenes we can’t simply drag & drop them into the Unity engine (I wish we could). Firstly, the scenes consist of lots of layers. Secondly, the images are huge. We create the graphics for the game in 4k resolution. To support all graphic cards on possible target devices, we have to cut the images into smaller images. We’re working with a 2048×2048 px restriction.

This means: in each scene image, we have to slice the layers wider or higher than 2048px into smaller pieces, then export all layers separately, then bring them into a format that our game engine can work with and import and implement them there. A format like this would be a sprite sheet – collections of parts and layers in new graphics not bigger than 2048×2048 (I feel like I’m repeating myself. But then, maybe that’s just the spirit of background slicing. Doing things over and over again. Making mistakes. Doing everything again and again and again).

Luckily, we have some tools that help us with all these (annoying) steps. Imagine we want to implement the following scene:

This graphic is has a size of 3840 x 2880 px. What?! 4:3?! Yes, which part of the image gets displayed is depending on what kind of device/display one uses to play the scene. Usually, the game will have a 16:9 or 16:10 (again, depends on what you use) resolution. Parts of the image will be cut then.

This picture consist of a number of different layers, because you need to be able to interact with the scene in the game – the door can be opened, the phone can be picked up, the fire is animated. The characters should be able to walk behind the desks. The layering of the scene in Photoshop looks like this:

You can guess that some of the layers might be too big for our 2048 px restriction. At least for the layer ‘Background’ you can tell without checking – it must be too big. Now we need to slice those layers into smaller ones. We wrote a little Photoshop script that helps us out. It finds all layers that are wider or higher than 2048 px and cuts them into smaller pieces. This little script saves us hours of work. It not only slices the layers, but it also makes sure they have a slight overlap. There’s some kind of floating point precision error inside the Unity engine that causes non-overlapping, clung 2D layers to flicker when the camera moves. Since we don’t want flickerings in the game, we let the slices overlap with a few pixels. After the script ran, the layering looks like this:

In this case, ‘Background’ was the only layer that needed slicing. This is different in other scenes that have bigger objects or more layers than this one. The background in our scene now consists of four parts. To illustrate the result, here’s a spaced out version of the new four background layers:

What’s next? To create a sprite sheet, we firstly export all layers into separate PNG files. The newest version of Photoshop has a function to export layers, but it automatically trims the layers. We don’t want that, because we want to keep the positions of the objects in the room. So what we use is a script that was included in old versions of Photoshop. It’s called “Layers to files” and does exactly what you’d assume:

It saves all layers into separate PNG files (and keeps the positions). In the next step, we use a little software called TexturePacker to create the sheets from these files. After feeding it with some information about how we want them, it helps us creating the sprite sheets. For this scene, the outcome looks like this:

These are now seven new PNG files which work perfectly in our engine. Since TexturePacker works really well with Unity, all we need to do is click one button to export those sheets into our project. After adjusting the import settings in Unity, we’re done importing the sprites. As you can see, TexturePacker now trims the sprites – but it remembers their original position by setting up a pivot point that refers to the previous center of the scene. All objects will be positioned in (0,0,0) in Unity and then appear in their original position. Pivot points in (0,0,0)??! Stay calm, stay calm. If we want to rotate an object properly, we can parent it into a new Game Object that functions as a rotation pivot point.

All these steps need to be processed for each of the ~60 scenes of the game. Fortunately, a lot of work is automatized, which makes the whole thing less error-prone. The photoshop actions and scripts can be executed with just one click for all scenes of the game (batch processing). Then we need to do some manual clicking and waiting in TexturePacker, but it could be much worse, right?

Next task after importing the sprites is getting the backgrounds in objects in an actual scene in Unity. This is something we will cover the next time. Until then, let’s be happy we successfully managed to import that beautiful scene into the engine.

  Behind The Scenes: #1 – Importing the Sprites was originally published on Backwoods

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Update!

Hey everyone,

when we started this new blog we promised to make more frequent updates. You see how that worked out. Well, times were kind of stressful, we had to finish that Gamescom demo, we had to be at Gamescom, we showed our game in Berlin and then we had to catch up with all the work we didn’t get to do while doing all that other work instead.

So what’s the state of the project right now? Tristan is busy making music mockups and Marcus and Alasdair are still working on dialog and puzzles. At the same time, the game is getting implemented more and more and it is fun to see Harper walking around our scenes in Unity. There’s still a lot of work in implementing the puzzles and all the scripted cutscenes of the game.

Matze is still creating background art for the game, he’s currently working on art for chapter 3. Here are two scenes he created for chapter 2 (click to enlarge) which takes place in the big national park Graystone Woods:

We’d also like to point at a Kickstarter campaign for the annual adventure conference AdventureX – a small convention about narrative games taking place in London. We visited AdventureX for the first time last year and can really recommend it to all fans of story-driven games. After two days on Kickstarter, AdventureX already achieved its goal of 2.500 £. They added a lot of stretch goals and are currently very close to making a documentary film happening! So go over there and spend some monetary units. They are well-invested.

AdventureX Kickstarter page: http://kck.st/2c9asmW

Update! was originally published on Backwoods

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Gamescom

We’re currently working on a little demo we’ll be exhibit at this year’s gamescom in Cologne. That’s right, it’s the first playable prototype we’re going to show in public. That’s very exciting and disturbing for us at the same time. Exturbing. We’re going to show a three-room-demo which means people will be able to visit three scenes of the first chapter of the game. There’ll be puzzles to solve, items to pick up, characters to talk to and spoilers to get angry at. Visitors will be able to get a first glance and impression of the atmosphere and feeling of the game. We now have two weeks left to finish this little demo – very fun and stressful at the same time. Funfull. It’s a lot of work but we hope to will make it in time.

We’re looking forward to gamescom and see a lot of your faces at our booth, all the parties (come meet us at the somewhat legendary Adventure-Treff party on Friday) and of course the Indie Arena Booth that should be visited by each and every one of you people who are in Cologne in August.

For those of you who wish to visit us and take a peek at Unforeseen Incidents: We’ll be at the Baden-Württemberg booth in the business area: Hall 3.2, booth C10/B11. We’ll be with Application Systems Heidelberg. Press people: for appointments, please send an email to [email protected].

  Gamescom was originally published on Backwoods

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Greenlit!

YAY! After only two weeks on Steam Greenlight, Unforeseen Incidents has received the green blessing and will be available on Steam next year! It’s been two exciting weeks with lots of feedback from the community. We’ve reached Steam’s Top 100 after a few hours and the Top 10 after about a week. The game has been received very positively, which truly is a big motivation for the next weeks and months of development till the release of Unforeseen Incidents in early 2017!

Thank you all for supporting our game, voting “yes”, and spreading the word about our project.

You’re awesome! 💚

Greenlit! was originally published on Backwoods