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[seras]

Hi!

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us...

The Trailer

There’s a reason for the silence - we’re putting together a proper, professionally-voiced gameplay trailer, that will highlight some of the games mechanics, but most of all give you a look on the harsh post-blackout reality. We want you to get to feel a taste of dread and hardship the survivors in the game will face on their journey. We’ll be putting them through some serious shit to give you guys a real challenge! Stick around - we’re getting close to actually finishing and publishing the video. We’ll let you know!

The Game itself

Meanwhile we’re continuing on fleshing out the game with events. This is the core of the gameplay, so there’s going to be lots. Much more than you’ll be able to experience in one playthrough. And we need to make sure they’ll offer much variation, as we want you on the edge of your seat all throughout the game.

So, there’ll be events that push the plot forward, random NPC encounters (think Fallout!), scavenging opportunities that will lead to a special kind of activity, fight scenes to bring down the pain on you, crossroads, region-specific endeavors, character-based quests, and status change events (hunger, sickness, wounds, depression etc.) That’s a LOT of writing and testing. But we want to make sure you’ll have a good reason to play through the game multiple times and that means a new(ish) set of events every time around.

We’ll tell you more about specific event types and activities soon. Now, don’t forget to keep an eye out for the upcoming trailer.

Till next time!

[seras]

Quick note 

in about 1hrs Heliox4 is starting their stream of Survive the Blackout at twitch.tv/Heliox4.

If you've never had a chance to see how the game looks like running, this might be your chance to get a glimpse of the old pre-alpha build that we used to show off at Comic Con Warsaw 2018.

[seras]

And it’s here.

The trailer.

It’s been long in the making. It took more thought and hard work than we ever thought that it would. But it’s here. And with the trailer ready we could finally take the plunge and announce Survive the Blackout on Steam!

Wishlist us on Steam

For a small team as ours, collecting feedback form the Steam community and building wishlist numbers is - of course - a crucial part of our sales strategy. So yeah, we’re pretty much going out of our minds right now. Still, this is the moment to point something out, that we felt was important, but now we’re even more sure that it’s essential.

Professional voicework.

When you have an indie game with simplistic graphics and not that much animation, you’ll be highly depending on words to make the trailer work. You’ll want to capture the gamer’s imagination by just telling them a story. You’ll be breaking one of the first and foremost rules of games marketing (“show, don’t tell”), so at the very least you need to make sure that the delivery of your narrative will be top-notch. You might think that recording a minute-long monologue is trivial. If you do, you probably haven’t tried. We knew better then to even try.

When you think about post-apo narrative, the chances are the very first thing that comes to your mind will be the memorable (and thoroughly, archetypically manly) delivery of the “war. war never changes” line by the man himself, Ron Perlman. We decided to go with a female narrator, challenging yet another rule (or stereotype) of games promotion, that male leads appeal to a wider demographic of gamers. Luckily, we were able to book Katabelle (VACasting.net). Some of us had the chance to work with her before, so we knew we were in good hands. Three takes was all she needed, and it didn’t cost us an arm and a leg. Is the trailer good enough, is the game page going to convert OK, is there a market niche for such a game as Survive the Blackout? Time will tell. But at the very least, we know that the story - our main asset in this presentation - was delivered flawlessly.

Hope that next time, we’ll be able to share insight on dealing with overwhelming attention from gamers, content creators, and the media.


Stay tuned

[bryku]

Good stuff with making that Steam page. I guess that having a place for the people to wishlist your game is the correct move. Did creating that page give you some other features? Like a Steam subforum or something?

About the trailer - I guess in a game that is not very action-oriented (meaning that there's not a lot of flashy, crazy actions to show) having a nice atmosphere is a must, and a voiceover helps with this.

Here's my feedback about the trailer:

- the pauses between the sentences could've been a little longer, just to build up the atmosphere.

- introducing a family with a child as survivors always works good in such 'hopeless' vibe games; good decision with placing a child there instead of an adult.

- that leader person: he would be perfectly alright without having a name ("Mark"). You are killing him in less than a minute after introducing him by name, so it means it is irrelevant for the viewer - if that's so, don't put it in viewer's head in the first place.

- Mark is not present in the team movement animation at 0:21, and the same animation is used at 1:00 - that confused me a little as I thought that Mark should be travelling with them.

- the game is all about choice. Your gameplay footages did not stop long enough to allow viewers to read through the text (or at least through the potential options). I believe you should put more emphasis on showing the players that picking options is the real shit of the game, and that in some cases there is no 'right' option available.

That's just my personal opinion - and remember that it's a matter of taste.

[seras]

Thanks for your comment. It was our first ever trailer so we take into consideration all feedback  

As you pointed, it is difficult to make a good captivating trailer for a narration-oriented game. This War of Mine and 80 days did a pretty good job on that.

We plan to make a second trailer in which we will e.g. work a bit more with the sound (not only voiceover, but also music and special effects) and concentrate more on the gameplay.

Regarding your question about Steam, yes, you can use the subforum, but for us the wishlist was more important. To our surprise conclusions that came from analytics were also quite useful.

[seras]

THE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT IN SURVIVE THE BLACKOUT

Announcing Survive the Blackout on Steam was a huge step for the Baby Bison Games team. A “all hands on deck” kind of situation. But we’ve passed that milestone and the results are satisfying. Time to shift our focus back to development. We thought we’d share some thoughts on one aspect that is absolutely essential in our process: the characters.

When we say that Survive the Blackout is a narrative game, we mean that the core of the experience will be living through the branching and evolving story. To ensure it is as impactful as we hope it to be we need to deliver it in the most believable, relatable way. Human touch is where it’s at. And here’s when the characters come into play.

The fall of civilization in our game was, from the very get go, a story that we need to be believable. While it’s still fiction, we don’t want it to feel far-fetched. And while the scientific basis of such an occurrence as a global and lasting power failure are fuzzy to say the least and are best kept obscure (even if WE know exactly what is happening), there’s always the human, personal perspective to make the whole ordeal FEEL real. To make it work, we need to provide the characters - not only the player characters, but the NPCs as well, to some extent - with enough depth to make them human enough.

That’s how we ended up setting up our little pixelated people with psychological profiles, background explaining their motivation, an axis of development over time, personal values, speaking patterns, and so on. Somehow this aspect of our little indie game doesn’t feel indie at all anymore. We’re doing a lot of extra work designing life-like human beings that we will put through hell, knowing well that most of what we do at this point will stay hidden from the player’s eye - inner workings of Survive the Blackout.

So, that’s what is happening right now. We’re getting to know the survivors as well as we can, because we need to understand them deeply to be able to pass on their story to the player. And so, the world of Survive the Blackout grows more complex, day by day.

That’s it for today, but this might be a good time to remind you, that joining our Discord channel and becoming a part of our pre-blackout prepper community can end with YOU becoming one of the NPCs.


Stay tuned

[seras]

Finalist at Digital Dragons Indie Showcase

Good news everyone!

Survive The Blackout was qualified as finalist of "Best Indie Games" competition at Digital Dragons Indie Showcase.

20 best out of 80 games will compete in finale for the 'Best Indie Game' title. We're honored to be in among such exceptional indie games as Inkulinati, Radio Commander, Occupy: Mars or Counter Terrorist Agency.

Come see us at Digital Dragons Indie Showcase 2019 and play the newest demo of Survive the Blackout. See you there soon!

Alpha tests are comming

This week alpha tests of Survive the Blackout will start finally, so it's basically the last moment to sign up for tests on our Discord channel. If you're interested - don't forget to join our Discord and check out #wanna_be_a_tester channel!


Stay tuned!

[bryku]

Congrats on making it to the finals!

Also, I am looking forward to that alpha version!

[seras]

Bryku, thanks! It's not the end of the road yet, though 

[seras]

GAMESCOM 2019!

Lots of things happening now (as usually I dare to say) and... thanks to courtesy of Indie Games Poland Foundation we are at Gamescom, Germany.



If you're still here, you can find us in building 4.1, stall B071 among other Polish Indie titles.



S.

[tai]

It's been a while!

Finally, we decided on the release date and it seems it's gonna be really soon!

  Survive the Blackout launches on January 23, 2020!


You can read more info here > > >

[tai]

When we learned that a Steam Lunar Sale is starting on the day of our planned release and will bury our game under a giant pile of 90%s we had no other option, but to move our release date.

That was a tough decision, but with the support of our community, we finally made it.

February 6, 2020 is the new day of Blackout!

More details in our dev log on Steam >>>


I'm curious - what would you do in our place?