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[James H]

We decided to release our full game on August 13th! Play the prologue freely on Steam:https://store.steampowered.com/app/1325290/Ever_Forward_Prologue/
New trailer！！：


First trailer!!:


After Planet Explorer released and before My Time at Portia announced, our team is always trying new type games，there are tons of failure that we met and our team had a very hart time at that period.
Anyway, our new game is a type that we haven't try before； the art style,  and the feeling we want to bring to our players is totally different from My Time at Portia and Plant Explorer, we hope it can bring most people ten hours cool game experience and touch the softest place in your heart.
Here are some concept art and screenshot:

[Schrompf]

I love the colours. Can't say much about the gameplay.

BTW: your signature has a typo in your past game.

[James H]

I love the colours. Can't say much about the gameplay.

BTW: your signature has a typo in your past game.

Hahaha I saw that! And I changed it, Thanks man!

[James H]

Protoform was the original title of our game; we started with the goal of creating a pure puzzle game, and from the get go, we worked extremely hard to make our puzzles feel good.

Our first major milestone was reaching a point where we liked our puzzles, felt like they were not just unique among puzzle games, but also unique from puzzle to puzzle within the game.

Four years later, we’re close to releasing our finished title, aptly named Ever forward, representing the journey of our character moving forward through her simulated world, and the journey of us moving forward as a development team. Developing the puzzles was the first step, but it became clear to us that we needed more than just pure puzzles to make the game really stand out.

We started writing the script then, it was all very basic at that time, but the idea of a mother and daughter, themes of controlling and being controlled, these were all there from the beginning. 

[James H]

We, like pretty much every other puzzle dev team were inspired in no small part by the 2007 hit, Portal. The one issue with that being… Portal came out in 2007.

Though we didn’t feel the need to greatly innovate graphically for the puzzle genre, since Portal, there have been plenty of other breakthrough games in design: Journey, The Witness, What Remains of Edith Finch, just to name a few. These games, among others, represent a vast evolution of game design philosophy, and we didn’t want to be left out.

A few things we took away from the success of all these games were: a good single-player game has its story woven directly into the gameplay, separating the two was unacceptable, and a simple, linear experience with no world-building wouldn’t be tolerated either.

[James H]

In the beginning,
it was hard to see the forest for the trees.
Our first versions of Protoform were… alright. But we felt like we were making a silent film in the era of modern blockbusters.
We committed some of the very sins we noted & promised to avoid at the beginning of the development process: our puzzle gameplay felt completely disconnected from the story.

[James H]

Looking all of our puzzles in a Portal-like lab interior was confining and boring. Overcoming technical problems, design issues, graphical issues, we now think of Protoform, and the metal laboratory in which it was set, as the cocoon from which Ever forward emerged.

Our first attempt at breaking out of the cocoon was with an over-world like what you see here:
A clean and tidy island with soft white sand, and black buildings holding unsolved puzzles.

[James H]

The idea here was to create a duality of freedom/confinement as players solved puzzles & made their way through the game.

Ultimately, this over-world idea was scrapped, yet the aesthetic ended up being something we’d hold onto all the way into the final stages of dev.

[James H]

The problems with this over-world were numerous: the open space was too nice and made players hate the puzzles. Our script was linear, which made the whole “open-world” aspect meaningless. There was nothing to do in the over-world except awkwardly move between the puzzles.
And finally, a somewhat minor issue, some of our puzzles taking place in strange spaces didn’t really make sense on the map.

[Taugeshtu]

The visuals are striking! I'm yet to play the prologue, but I'd definitely like to learn more about your process Feels like you're holding yourself back - don't be afraid to elaborate more on your team's vision and thoughts!

[James H]

Thanks, dude! We are crazy busy in recent days and we are going to release it on August 13th! If anyone hasn't played our demo, that's pretty shame...