Posts Tagged ‘ Lone Survivor

the next game from superflat games is…

… LONE WARRIOR

thankyou to those who’ve played and supported super lone survivor. i’m glad some of you enjoyed it, thankyou to those who took the time to give feedback, and share their stories, and those who painstakingly discovered all the secrets and wrote / filmed walkthroughs.

i’m now back in development mode on a new game in the series, with a different protagonist. it’s going to be a bit different in gameplay terms. this time it’s less of a focus on stealth and survival and more of a focus on action / panic scenarios. aliens to lone survivor’s alien, if you like. there is more of a range of combat options, but not really anywhere to hide. it’ll probably be a shorter but (hopefully) more intense game than lone survivor.

i actually started this before super lone survivor before deciding it would be more sensible to rerelease the original game first. i’m still not sure if that was the right choice but i’m glad to be back in the flow of making this.

SUPER LONE SURVIVOR is out now

after three years rebuilding the game from scratch, and adding a world of new content, i’m happy to announce this new version of the game is live right now on Steam, priced $24.99. it’ll be coming to Nintendo Switch on 8/11/22, next tuesday.

here is the steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1907440/Super_Lone_Survivor

i hope you enjoy the new version of the game. it’s meant to somehow capture what i would like to see in a remake.

~jasper

HAPPY 10NE SURVIVOR!

hey friends. it gives me great pleasure to share with you this new teaser trailer for SUPER LONE SURVIVOR on this day, the 10th anniversary of the original game. happy birthday, LONE SURVIVOR!

i remember this day very well, a decade ago, having been up all night fixing last minute bugs, watching the sales and reviews come in with excitement as people seemed to really connect with the game. i was down to the end of my funds, was recently made redundant from frontier developments, and had a 2 year old daughter. it HAD TO work out.

somehow it all worked out! it’s still the last game i released, despite working on another for over 8 years. it is my biggest regret in life that i was not able to release that game yet. i want to talk about it publically for the first time soon, but it is a somewhat raw subject for me. i do still want to release it after LONE WARRIOR (it’s basically my life’s work at this point) but i feel like i might need to expand from a solo operation to do so … we’ll see … anyway, it shows to what extent LONE SURVIVOR has kept my family going over the years, along with my music. so thankyou all so much for your support.

SUPER has been over two years in the making now, it’s rebuilt from the ground up. it really is more of a remake than a remaster at this point. though i have tried to keep the main experience very true to the original game for purists, there is a lot more to discover and the presentation is subtly enhanced all the way through, from the remastered audio to the improved shaders, lighting and scrolling. it should both be more accessible and challenging through the difficulty modes, something i feel improves the game (my views were quite different a decade ago.). i look forward to seeing people rediscover the game, and hope it finds a new audience too. most of all i hope people feel as i do that this is the definitive version!

once again, thankyou for sticking with me over the years, I hope that LONE WARRIOR (the followup which is half complete) will be coming out in less than a decade!

and who knows, maybe even <SECRET_GAME> too.

~jasper

SUPER 10NE SURVIVOR

hey there, it’s coming up on the 10 year anniversary, March 27th 2022, and i’ve got some pretty exciting news: if all goes to plan, i should be launching the brand new, remastered version of the original game, until now codenamed Lone Survivor Remastered.

i’ve actually decided to go back to the SUPER LONE SURVIVOR title for it, despite it not containing the new protagonist and their scenario, which i’ll now be doing as a full length game entitled LONE WARRIOR, once SUPER LONE SURVIVOR is released.

i’m hoping to release SUPER LONE SURVIVOR on PC and Switch at the same time, depending on how long certification and bug fixing takes. the game is in great shape and i’m super excited to share this new version. at the very least i want to drop it on PC on the anniversary.

the game features full joypad support on PC for multiple pads and has customisable button prompts as well as other options like scanline strength, and whether to enable the new blood effects. there is customisable rumble support on all Xbox pads.

the other huge new feature is the 4:3 presentation. all the original art has been painstakingly redrawn to make use of this taller aspect ratio, using the original methods, while adding parallax scrolling layers for additional depth. the game is switchable from its original 16:9 presentation to 4:3 at any time with the touch of a button. as low as 640×480 resolution is supported, so vintage CRT’s that support VGA / 31Khz type signals should be able to play the game. i may look into a 240p mode too – it works, it’s just adding the UI for it if the demand is there. it would be cool to play it on an old TV though.

here you can see the additional height 4:3 adds, as well as the new parallax layers..

the lighting and shaders have been massively improved over the original game, there are now realtime shadows, the scrolling is now ultra smooth and the game supports all monitor aspect ratios with appropriate bars. the game supports up to 8K resolutions and beyond, making it hopefully more future proof. the higher the res you run it, the smoother the scrolling and lighting effects.

all of the music and sounds have been painstakingly tracked down and recreated in full uncompressed audio, compared to the original’s 128kbps mp3’s.

i’m now working on a couple of optional secrets, and possibly even a few secret locations, we’ll have to see how it comes together, but i’ve got a few ideas to expand the game without hopefully upsetting the balance at all

i look forward to sharing it with you

LONE SURVIVOR: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT for Mac and PC

Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut is out on PC & Mac today!

 

i’ve decided to release The Director’s Cut of Lone Survivor slightly earlier than planned so that the fans who own the Mac and PC versions can play The Director’s Cut together with the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita fans on Halloween.

despite taking ten months (and at times being a challenging project), i am really happy to give away The Director’s Cut as a 100% FREE update to anyone who has previously purchased the game on Mac or PC previously, in any form, including the Humble Bundle. it’s my way of saying thankyou for enabling me to make games long into the future by supporting the original release.

it really is a huge update, with a great deal of new content, new areas, complete remastering of visuals and lighting, new music, a new enemy, two new endings etc.  i very much look forward to hearing your thoughts about the new edition, and interpretations of the new content… especially the secret endings!

also, the Mac and PC versions of the game will now include access to both the Original and the Director’s Cut versions of the game. you can continue your game from The Original Cut in the new version (*see IMPORTANT NOTE at the bottom of this post.)

anyway, to all the players who have supported the game and myself over this last year and a half, to the journalists whose kind words have helped the game reach new people, to the hardworking folk behind the scenes at Valve, Curve and Sony, to the many testers and supporters and of course to my family who’ve supported me all the way, i’d like to say what may be a final thankyou for your help with this game.

it’s been very long journey to reach this point, but i guess i could almost say i’m proud of the final result, and look forward to what the future may hold!

anyway i hope you enjoy the game, and…

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

– jasper

    today Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut is available for:

LSICONALT2_256

    Lone Survivor’s Website (DRM-free)

   Steam

    Good Old Games (DRM-Free)

psn-sony-entertainment-network   

Sony Entertainment Network (PS3 and PS Vita Cross-Buy)

   A Pumpkin (actually can’t buy Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut here)

*IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT SAVED GAMES & THE ORIGINAL CUT

Just a quick word of warning regarding moving from one version of the game to another. I wanted to include access to both versions of the game for purists.  However, please be aware of the following when playing The Original Cut:

  1. You can continue your saved game from The Original Cut in The Director’s Cut at any point, without any issues.
  2. However, loading a saved game from The Director’s Cut will cause you to LOSE ALL NEW NEW GAME+ SIDEQUEST ITEMS.This is because The Original Cut does not include these items, and they will be trimmed from your inventory should you load the game in The Original Cut. All other aspects should work fine, but: BE SURE NOT TO CONTINUE A DIRECTOR’S CUT ‘NEW GAME+’ GAME IN THE ORIGINAL CUT.
  3. One other point to note is that you will not lose your ending collection should you decide to play through The Original cut, so don’t worry about starting a new playthrough to check it out!

To get hold of The Original Cut:

  1. On Steam, right-click the game in your library, select ‘Properties’, go to the ‘Betas’ tab, type ‘sleepycat’ into the password field, and select ‘The Original Cut’ from the menu. You can opt-out of this version via the same menu at any time.
  2. GOG has The Original Cut available as an optional download.
  3. The version on the official website has the Original Cut game packaged in a folder called ‘TheOriginalCut’.

100th Post

wordpress informs me this is my 100th post! and with it comes exciting news…

thefinalfrontier

Lone Survivor – The Director’s Cut is coming to Mac and PC on

Halloween, the 31st October, 2013

i have quietly been beavering away over the last few months to bring this enormous update back to the format it began life on. it was originally going to be a very slightly updated version of the original game, but turned into a ten-month odyssey. i was able to add all the little details which i wasn’t able to squeeze in the first time round, so that i could bring my original vision to you with no compromises, and with them a whole load of new ideas that emerged as i worked on it.

almost without fail, business-minded friends and colleagues, as well as the players themselves, expected i would release the game as a brand new version, requiring the players of the original game to purchase it again, or at the very least to release the update as paid DLC. i gave it a huge amount of thought, and eventually i realised i would rather just give the update away for FREE to all 800,000+ customers, to say thank you for your support… and that’s exactly what i’m going to do!

yep, you heard it right: Lone Survivor – The Director’s Cut is going to be 100% FREE to anyone who has bought the game so far (even for $0.01 in the Humble Bundle!)

to offset some of the (quite large) costs of making it, i will be having a small price increase on release, although i’ll be running a sale for the first couple of days so that it’ll still be possible to purchase at the original price before the increase. exact pricing TBA on release day, as i am still talking to the various vendors. on the subject of which, i am very happy to announce that the game will also be coming to Good Old Games, a fantastic site doing great work to preserve the classics of yesteryear, as well as releasing the greatest of the latest.

what’s really cool is that your saved game from the original version will still be compatible with The Director’s Cut (but not the other way round.)

the response to the PlayStation versions has been wonderful, with the game earning not-too-shabby 84% on Metacritic. i am so happy to see a new generation of console players discover the game, which marks the end of a massively important chapter of my life. thanks so much to Curve studios for their fantastic ports, and especially to all the players who have supported the game.

i really hope all my PC and Mac owning brethren enjoy The Director’s Cut,

love and peace to you all!

– jasper

ps if any journalists, bloggers or streamers would like to get an advance review copy of the game, please hit me up!

pps if you’d like to see the full list of changes in The Director’s Cut, please see my previous blog post.

LONE SURVIVOR: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT

it gives me great pleasure to present to you the new and extended version of Lone Survivor which is now entitled:

‘The Director’s Cut’

first, allow me to let the launch trailer* speak for itself:

 *(trailer by childhood friend and collaborator Caspar Newbolt of Version Industries)

so what is The Director’s Cut, exactly?

i won’t try to describe the original game again, much has already been written and said about it, and i prefer to leave the interpretations up to the players. especially with interactive media, everyone’s perception of a story is different and, to me, equally valid.

Lone Survivor has been lucky enough to have found a following, all of whom have their own interpretation of the game. and for those fans especially, i have made The Director’s Cut. it contains some elements which didn’t quite make it to the original game because they seemed too elaborate and i needed to get the game out, it contains a lot of new ideas which i’ve had since releasing the last update a year and a half ago (and having since had time to think more about my own interpretation), and it has a sort of meta-narrative which ties it all together which emerged as i began to work on it.

on top of this, the game has been polished, fixed, tweaked and honed in hundreds of different ways. i spent weeks improving the look of the lighting, and even found and fixed bugs that the 800,000+ people who own the game had hadn’t yet reported! 

the PC + Mac release, on Steam and the game’s website, won’t be far behind. in other words, it will be out as soon as i can physically do it. it will take time as it’s not a simple port, but it is my next priority and i will have more news about this soon.

PlayStation

i originally planned to do a fairly straight port of the original game, but when Sony said they’d be interested in new content, i started to think about whether i could implement some of these ideas. and i got a bit carried away with it. i thought it would take about six weeks, but it ended up taking around nine months!

i’ve been working tirelessly alongside Curve Studios for the whole period, not just creating the new content, but making sure the ports and all their related marketing materials are up to my (i now realise) stupidly fussy standards: drawing PS3 background images and store images myself, searching 7 years of old hard drives to re-source all the audio so that we didn’t convert from the .mp3 format the original game uses to the .ogg format that the PlayStation uses, rather, from the original .wav masters – for a marginal improvement in audio quality that only musos will hear. i’ve spent many a night uploading endlessly tweaked Photoshop marketing images to the Curve servers at 3am, or rewriting the cloud-save interface to look more ‘Lone Survivor’, repeatedly redrawing the PlayStation button images until i found the most beautiful ‘6/7/8/9 pixel circle’, playing the different paths through the game time after time alongside the QA department. i have had endless email debates with the production team and Sony on how to make the trophies as cool-yet-unobtrusive as possible, i have designed the competition prizes by hand, the list goes on and on… and that’s to say nothing of the hard work Curve put in on their side!

to my knowledge, anything that could be done to make the experience better has been done, and Curve totally got that these kinds of details were important to me, and humoured me time and time again when i asked for things to be tweaked. Sony were amazing to work with (and i must send special love out to Shahid Kamal who helped make it happen in the first place), listening to my outlandish requests, and even allowing me to be one of the first ever third-party games to mess with the Trophy format, certainly the first predominantly made by one person… yes, it’s been an almighty task, but we got there in the end.

Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut is out today on PSN in USA + EU

(priced $12.99 / €12.99 / £9.99)

i hope you enjoy the game

– jasper

The Changes

i knew the fans would be the most sensitive to changes in the game, so to me the challenge was to go back and improve the original game without in any way changing or spoiling the original vision. for this reason, i decided to make the majority of the new content, including the two new endings, only accessible in New Game+. so when you play the game for the first time, it should feel as before, only far more polished and nicer to look at and listen to. but when explore it for the second time, you may discover an entire extra layer to it…

it’s been really hard to keep the details to myself for so long, but the game’s secrets are no doubt being discovered right at this very moment by the fans. i greatly look forward to hearing what you think of the new content, so be sure to share your thoughts here (or via email, see address at top-right, if you’d prefer) if you do get a chance to play it.

anyway, here’s a rundown of the new features of Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut (without spoiling the specifics of its content):

general features:

  • whole new lighting engine, also supports 1 extra hardware light
  • many locations have additional lights and / or tweaked lighting
  • anamorphic lens flare for the flashlight
  • new sleeping and game over music
  • new title screen and game over screen
  • 2 additional locations
  • new gamma settings, saving of gamma and aspect settings
  • new expert mode
  • hundreds of small bug fixes, balance tweaks and improvements
  • automatic monster-facing on gun-draw
  • a few small easter eggs
  • new short sidequest
  • ending ‘collection’
  • ‘The Ritual’

specific to New Game+:

  • around 6 new locations
  • 2 completely new endings
  • 3 new songs
  • over 20 new items
  • 2 new sidequests
  • new enemy
  • new dialogue for all characters in the game
  • many other easter eggs that are better left unspoilt

specific to PlayStation:

  • trophies (including a platinum)
  • cloud-save (cross-play)
  • French & German languages (EU)
  • Cross Buy (buy on one format, get both PS Vita and PS3 versions)
  • controller support!

specific to PS Vita:

  • touchscreen controls for inventory, option screen & textboxes

specific to PS3:

  • rumbbbbbbbllllle

(new titlescreen on PC, to show it is actually in the works!)

Competitions! Competitions! Competitions!

we are also going to be giving out prizes that i designed myself, to the press to run competitions and so on. i spent a long time on them to hopefully make them really exclusive and unique:

 5 super-limited ‘First Aid Edition’ art-card prints, signed and individually numbered by myself

(now only 5 more exist and i’ll be keeping them for posterity!)

super limited edition physical prints of the game soundtrack in vintage PS2 survival horror style (i had fun making these and they look really cool in the flesh)

 

actual Sleepy Cat plushies (from my original sketch on the right) made by sukisuki.co.uk

(… yes, Sleepy Cat is real!)

for more information about the competitions and prizes, or to request a press kit / review code, please contact:

 pr@curve-studios.com

date

Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut is coming out on PlayStation 3 & PlayStation Vita on

Tuesday, 24th September (USA / EU)

enjoy

won’t be long…

won’t be long now, my friends…

won’t be long now.

What I’m Doing About Trophies

After months of back and forth, and what ended up being one of the largest internal discussions at Sony on a game’s requirements for such things in the history of such things, I am now allowed to reveal What I’m doing About Trophies.

Achievements. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re here to stay. They don’t motivate me personally as a player – I prefer to play entirely within the ‘world’ of the game – but I completely respect and empathise with those who enjoy them.

For this reason, I wanted to ensure that Lone Survivor’s trophies were as unobtrusive as possible, but also a very deep additional challenge, free of grind, for those that wished to explore the game beyond the surface.

It is especially important in a game such as this where immersion is critical to the experience, that I don’t let them get in the way of that: the last thing you want is to be taken out of the adventure by a system message.

1. Trophies Will Be As Unobtrusive As Possible

For this reason, after many months of discussion, I have persuaded Sony to allow me to:

a) … not show any trophies during gameplay. They will be displayed only when the player goes to sleep, or on the completion of the game.

b) … display the following message at the start of the game (I’m very glad that Sony have recently allowed players to disable Trophy notifications via the System Settings in the latest firmwares, I also recommend disabling Friend Notifications, although I would still lobby for developers to be allowed to change this setting from in-game, on a per-game basis… hopefully Sony are listening and at least considering this in future as it isn’t currently possible.):

notrophy

c) … let all but a few trophies remain secret to ensure the first playthrough of the game is not coloured by trophy hunting.

2. Yes, there will be a Platinum Trophy.

(… but it will be hidden, deep.)

I worked hard on the Trophy designs, so that it would be a rewarding additional layer to the game, if you choose to explore it.  Particularly so that your repeat playthroughs are interesting and varied.  The idea is that the player will be rewarded for exploring the light and dark corners of the game, not for simply making progress or for repeatedly doing the same thing.  There is a huge amount to see in this game, especially in The Director’s Cut, and the Platinum Trophy takes you on the widest possible tour of that content.

Not only will Lone Survivor will have a Platinum Trophy, but this Trophy, if pursued, will be rewarding and open up new aspects of the game. It will not be an easy one, but it’ll hopefully be an interesting one!

However, I still hope that players who are new to Lone Survivor will disable trophy notifications on their first playthrough so that they experience the game as deeply as possible.

– Jasper