WHITE PAPER BLOG

www.whitepapergames.com

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Here is the new trailer our team have been working incredibly hard on! 

The Occupation Gameplay Trailer: Investigating A Lead

Let us know what you think!

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We've finally been able to lock the release date of The Occupation to 5th March, 2019. We've had to wait a little longer to get organised on all the platforms but we've had the green light so we should be able to share our last 4 years of work with you VERY soon.

We have a lot of cool announcements coming and the best place to stay in touch with us is on our mailing list here: https://tinyurl.com/yb859vvs

Thank you for all the incredible support so far - we just have one more push to make before we’re able to share it with you all!

- The White Paper team

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It's been a long journey getting here but the day has finally come, we have a Steam page set up for The Occupation.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/765880/The_Occupation/

It would mean the world to us if you could add us to your 'wishlist' to stay up to date with announcements.

We know that it’s a really busy marketplace with lots of incredible games to play so adding us to your Wishlist means that we can remind you our game is out when it gets to release date.

THANK YOU!!

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We're finally into the month of December which means that it's acceptable to start sending season's greetings!

It's our 5th Christmas as a team and we're incredibly grateful that we get to do this for a living. Sending our best wishes to everyone moving into the holiday season.

Merry Christmas everyone! <3

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INCREDIBLE NEWS FOR THE STUDIO! We’ve partnered with Humble to release The Occupation!

This will be a huge step forward for the studio gaining some incredible support to get the game out to everyone. 

Rest assured, Humble are very focused on getting The Occupation on as many platforms as we’re able to so as soon as we’re ready to announce a date and platforms you’ll be the first to hear! 

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A few recent articles to check out whilst we’re working on finishing The Occupation!

We’ve had some great articles over the last few weeks posted so we decided to link a few of them below.

First up, some techy game development focused articles:

Making it in Unreal: how BioShock Infinite's Elizabeth helped The Occupation

And A Layered Approach to AI Locomotion in ‘The Occupation’ on the Unreal Engine blog.

Some hands on impressions of The Occupation from Playstation Universe:

http://www.psu.com/preview/34388/the-occupation-hands-on-ps4-adventure

There’s also a more personal story of our studio’s past and how it’s affecting development can be found here. It was a really nice interview to do - it’s been a while since we’ve reflected on so we’re glad we got a chance to do it. 

We even got featured on Radio 1′s Newsbeat for 6 seconds! HI MUM!!

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14 sneak previews of The Occupation!

As some of you may have seen over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been posting some small updates of The Occupation to give people a sneak peak of what we’ve been working on! It was super fun to put all the work together so we hope you enjoy them!

You can find the Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/WhitePaperGames/status/903631322874355712 

& as you scroll down, you should be able to see all the linked posts.

We also posted the updates on our Instagram and Facebook pages however, since you can’t link previous posts, it's a little harder to keep track of the thread!

As always, you can follow us on social media so feel free to pick your poison on which sites to follow. On a high level we post:

Day to day studio updates on Twitter

Larger announcement news on Facebook.

Artsy stuff we’re doing in studio & whilst travelling on Instagram 

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Rezzed 2017

We just got back from showing The Occupation for the first time at Rezzed in London’s Tobacco Dock. It was an incredible event, and more than anything, a great way for the team to take a break from working on the game to get some feedback from people. It was great to chat to everyone interested in the game and to meet friends we’ve not seen since showcasing Ether One at different events.

We’ve been working hard on The Occupation for the last 18 months since releasing Ether One on the PS4 (It’s crazy to think it’s been that long!). We wanted to stay quiet with this game instead of talking about it too early on as we learnt a lot of lessons from going through the process with Ether One. When you talk about a game too early on, especially something narrative focused, details can & will change. When these are talked about publicly, it sends a slightly confusing message when the game's released and people can use old information. We feel as though we’re in a strong position with The Occupation now and it’s more about refining the narrative arcs and the game’s design. Visually, we’re pretty happy with where we’re at so you should be hearing much more from us over the coming months - apologies for the radio silence!

We gained a lot of really valuable feedback from people playing the game at Rezzed and it also identified some needed design changes we’re able to make moving forward. We’ll most likely not attend any shows over the summer, and instead work hard on the game and then attending more shows towards the end of the summer.

The two most frequent questions we got, and rightly so, are; what platforms are you releasing on and when it released? To be honest - we’re not entirely sure the answer to either of those questions! Platform wise, we’re very open to all platforms. We’ve had some good discussions with the main console holders and they all seem interested. A similar case on PC, but nothing is yet confirmed. Since we use the Unreal Engine it makes multiple platforms very accessible to us so we’ll do our best to get it to everyone that wants it.

A release date is also a hard question thing to answer as things invariably get delayed. We’re pretty confident we can get the game completed before Christmas 2017. That being said, if we’re shipping on consoles, it makes things slightly more tricky. A good estimation the team feels confident about is shipping around the End of Q1 / start of Q2 in 2018 - around March time.

If you’d like to know more about The Occupation here are a few interviews we’ve done over the past week:

MWEB: https://www.mweb.co.za/games/view/tabid/4210/Article/28626/Why-you-should-take-notice-of-The-Occupation.aspx

God Is A Geek:http://www.godisageek.com/2017/03/interview-with-pete-bottomley-game-designer-and-narrative-on-the-occupation/

GameReactor: http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/525323/The+Occupation+sets+out+to+marry+the+walking+sim+with+Deus+Ex/

Thank you all for the incredible support you’ve shown over the past couple of weeks, we were very nervous about the reception of our new game. It’s been incredible hearing everyone’s kind words about what we’re working on and we’ll be sure to keep everyone updated as development progresses.

From the WPG team.

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It's been a long time in the making and we're so excited to be able to finally announce our new game: The Occupation

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The White Paper Games Store is now live with some Ether One tees! Thank you for all the messages regarding official merchandise - We've had a lot of fun creating these so we hope you enjoy!

https://store.whitepapergames.com/

Please do let us know if you'd like to see anything else on there. We have a few more items in the works but it would be great to hear some feedback on what you'd like to see!

Thanks!

[whitepapergames]

Ether One Redux 1.0.4 Patch notes

This patch update was quite a large one, and as a result of this, we'll be monitoring any game issues very closely over the next couple of weeks. If needed, we'll patch again quickly for anything broken in the architecture and then if no issues arise, we'll patch on console in the coming weeks (since this process takes longer than than on PC). This is a huge shift in architecture in many areas, meaning we're hoping to see increased performance, but this may also be responsible for some bugs we couldn't account for.

Engine update: Unreal Engine has been updated from Unreal Engine 4.8.0 to Unreal Engine 4.13.0

Puzzle fixes: Included a fix for the Miners Dry, Church & Miners Vigil (candle puzzle) for projectors that weren't completing correctly in those area.

Game fixes: Severe culling (assets streaming in) in Pinwheel Harbour and Devlin mine adjusted

Adjustment to end of extraction animation

Added extraction rubber banding

Changed keyboard button prompts to be in red

Fixed timings on subtitles

Fixed possible issues with Ether projector puzzles not saving properly

Removed chances for players getting stuck during extraction sequence Added additional auto-saves to save player progression more frequently. Changed audio in menu navigation

Fixed off centre button prompt texts

Centered item inspect text

Set subtitles to On by default

Included spelling corrections in the English subtitles. Fixed look sensitivity not saving and made slider more impactful, started mouse with higher sensitivity by default

Fixed a corrupted save issue that was occurring when the game autosaved by moving between levels Save Game times in some situations weren't displayed 'Played Time' correctly, as this wasn't reproducible on our end, we believe a fix has been put in place to rectify this.

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A patch note from the team

Hey all,

So we're finally ready to patch Ether One to v1.0.4! My apologies for such a delay in the patch. We've been trying to get it out to you all as soon as we could but we know it's been awhile so I wanted to explain a little bit about the reason why the process took longer than it has done in the past. Hopefully we have a faster pipeline in place now for future patches so if we broke anything in the process, rest assured we won't take this long and moving into our next title thing should be much smoother (we hope!).

A big issue for us was finding a stable build of the Unreal Engine to use. We originally shipped Ether One on Unreal Engine 4.8 and since the engine is making massive (and awesome!) improvements with each update. That means that the existing engine code base is also undergoing huge changes. This is the same with any software, but making sure we got the latest optimisation features was important for us. We locked it down to Unreal Engine 4.13 - one of the latest releases. A consideration we have to make is when we change engines, there's a potential for us to update the SDK's on the console end, which isn't an easy process, so making sure PC and console line up in terms of updates is an important consideration.

We also switched programmers mid-way through the process. This was designed to be as smooth transition as we could make it with both programmers working together to figure out the logistics however our new programmer on the project had to get up to speed with previously written code. Any programmer out there will know what a time consuming process this can take and although we didn't have any huge structural changes to make, we had to be vigilant on any small changes we make so that it didn't have a knock on effect.

Following on from that point, we only have 1 programmer at the studio. We're hopefully going to get another team member on board in the new year (if you're interested in applying follow this link). But since we only have 1 person at the studio, trying to balance our time between bug fixing and also supporting the studio's future needs with the new game, and other misc tasks they have, can be an extremely hard decision. On the one side we have a game out there which requires support where needed, but we're also deep in production on the next title to share with you all. We're trying to make the best use of the studio's time to doing the most important task, and that sometimes means stopping patch work to support the new game, as 3/4 people on the team could be waiting on a specific feature which is a road block stopping our production. We try to work around and delegate these issues where possible but sometimes it requires the programmers full attention for a few days. Our focus is definitely still on our existing community and you guys have spent your hard earned money on our game, and we will always prioritise your support over expanding into new games focusing support on a new customer base, so rest assured we're always working on anyone's issues we have reported.

I hope that gives you a better understanding of the process for those curious. We hope people weren't running into any huge game breaking issues during this process, the forums are a good place to get community feedback. We read these threads as often as we can, however a more direct approach would be to contact us through our website, so that we get the email directly.

We want to thank you all for your generosity and kindness in investing your time and money into our games.

We want to continue to be able to develop more games like these moving forward, so we appreciate the patience whilst we figured out this tricky transition process.

Thanks from all the team,

Pete

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We posted some pictures from our adventures at GDC in San Francisco! We had an incredible time and so thankful to be able to experience it! 

LINK: GDC PHOTOS

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WE'RE HIRING!

Are you a 3D artist wanting to join an independent team working on PC & PS4 in the Unreal Engine 4? COME WORK WITH US!

http://www.whitepapergames.com/2014/jobs.php

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We're co-hosting an @UnrealEngine Meetup with Sony & have a LOT of swag to give away. Who's coming? http://www.meetup.com/Manchester-Unreal-Engine-Meetup/

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We created a small piece of artwork to say thank you for everyone's help and support this past year. It's been an incredible ride and we're glad we could have shared it with you.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all! <3

P.S If you wanted to download it as your background you can find some high-res versions here: http://www.ether-game.com/media.php

[whitepapergames]

FAQs for Ether One’s Redux

So - as some of you may have seen by now - Ether One Redux is out now! If you own Ether One already, you should see this unlock in your game library!

Both Ether One and Ether One Redux are very similar games and we've not changed any of the narrative or gameplay. We rebuilt Ether One from the ground up using the new Unreal Engine 4 so you may notice a few graphical improvements however we have tried to keep it as close to the original as possible! 'Redux' just refers to the updated version of the game so you know what you're looking for in your game library!

Here are some FAQ’s that people have been asking over the past 24 hours:

What is the difference between Ether One and Ether One Redux?

Hopefully not much! But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try it out. We tried to keep both versions of the game very similar. If you see from the before and after screenshots, there are slight visual improvements but we tried to keep the feeling and tone of the game exactly the same and everyone we have spoken to so far has enjoyed it. The gameplay and narrative should be exactly the same minus a few small changes we needed to make but please do let us know what you think!

Why did you remake the game in UE4?

As some of you may have seen, we released Ether One on the Playstation 4 earlier this year. To do this, we had to re-create Ether One from the ground up. We thought it only fair that our fans on the PC should experience the updated version of Ether One - we also definitely didn't want to charge people for this update which is why we made it free. Unreal Engine 4 made it incredibly easy to get the game up and running and without it, we probably wouldn't have been able to continue developing games as a studio! The tools are free to use for people wanting to start creating games so why not give it a go at www.unrealengine.com!

What are the new features?

There are no new gameplay features. Hopefully things are a little more optimised with the Redux version.

We do however have French, German, Spanish, Italian and Polish subtitles so if you were waiting for the game to be localised, now is your chance!

Where is the VR support?

As some of you may have seen, we've removed the VR tag from the store page. When we shipped Ether One, the original Oculus DK was out and we included support for it - we even got a lovely review of 5/5 from VR FOCUS! (http://vrfocus.com/archives/book-review/review-ether-one/). We love VR and it's still very much something we want to get into Ether One Redux and with all of our future games. Since we've released in Unreal Engine 4 - VR actually comes as standard. We've decided not to disable this in the options so if you're the hardcore type of enthusiast, you can technically still use your DK2 on the Ether One Redux edition. Please be aware though, this isn't our optimal implementation and we want to spend time doing a much better job and getting it feeling just right. We still need to get our hands on DK2 but as soon as that happens we can start the implementation - we just don't have a time frame on this.

+1 to Linux and Mac please!

We hear you! We'd love to get it out to you all on the different PC OS's. With the original Ether One, we tried our best to get the Mac build functional but we experienced varying results. On some Mac hardware it ran OK but it was too inconsistent and we didn't get good frame rate a lot of the hardware. Now that we're in Unreal Engine 4 we're hoping this will be a much smoother process - we've not currently tried a Mac or Linux build internally so now that we have the Ether One Redux out we will begin the process of looking into Mac & Linux. We can't promise that Ether One Redux will be coming to Mac and Linux but we will definitely do our best to get it out to you all - we just don't want to deliver an unfinished product to you which isn't as good of an experience on Windows & PS4. We will post more information as soon as we have it. 

THANK YOU!

We'll update this thread accordingly for people that have more questions and queries however sometimes we may miss a few - if you don't get a response and you'd like one urgently, please feel free to email us at pete.bottomley(at)whitepapergames(dot)com.

Thank you again all for your support and we hope you enjoy the Ether One Redux! We also begun work on our next title and we're exciting to show you all what we're creating!

Enjoy!