Hello everyone!

It has been a few months since our last update, and a lot of things have been going on behind the scenes, so we wanted to give everyone a status update on the current state of Interstitial.

The success of the demo!

When we released our demo as part of Steam NextFest, we set our expectations somewhat low due to our lack of proper marketing. With these low expectations, we were so excited to see the feedback on the demo, and how much everyone loved it. Over the course of Steam NextFest, we saw over 1200 downloads and over 200 wish lists! We really want to say thank you to everyone who played it, and to everyone who gave feedback. We hope that the full release performs just as well, if not better.

So what have we been up to?

We have been working on a lot, so lets go over it below!

More Optimization:

Can a game be too optimized? We are trying to find out! Over the last couple of months we have really been honing in on the player experience. Around the time our Demo came out, we were seeing a level by level average of 74.6 FPS with frame times of 12.2 ms, on Epic graphics settings. After our recent optimizations, we are seeing these values increase to 96.6 FPS and 8.9 ms, at Epic settings and uncapped frame rate, and at 2K resolution. We are very happy with this, considering we are aiming for high realism and deep atmosphere. These values of course may vary based on the hardware, and we will continue to look for room to optimize further.

Save System:

More recently, along with the improved UI, we have been overhauling the current save system (if you can call it that). At the time of the demo, the only saving features were for the game settings. There was no progression saving or checkpoints, and we know that failing the doors section and having to restart was no fun. We really wanted the player to enjoy the game and not worry about losing all their progress, so this new save system fixes that. We see some of this in our UI section below.

Finishing Up The Prologue:

We have been working on the 3rd and final level of the prologue, Recalculating Route. More below!

Controller Support:

In our previous roadmap we stated that controller support would ship after the full release. With the integration of our new UI, we decided it would be best to have controller support ship alongside the full release!

UI Refresh

The Demo build of Interstitial had a very simple UI system, which to be honest, was not horrible and got the job done. The biggest thing we have been working on is completely overhauling the UI. When you load up Interstitial, it will feel like a completely different game than the Demo. While we are still working on it, we wanted to show off some of it today! See some images below (UI subject to change):

Recalculating Route

This is the third and final level in the prologue, where Max sets off on a what seems like endless highway in search of Sam. What lies at the end of this highway? The Interstice Facility. This facility is a research complex built by the Interstice Corporation to run fear experiments on children, for reasons currently unknown. See below a picture of this facilities visitor center!

Our Social Media Drought

A few months ago, we would post videos to social media platforms like TikTok, and the videos would perform normally. Some would get thousands of views, and some only a few hundred, as normal. Like many people who wish to have a presence on the platform, we would pay to promote our videos, for increased reach. This was all fine until one day we were notified that our recent video was unable to be promoted. We were not sure why, but we just overlooked it. Then the next video was the same, unable to promote. Once this started happening, we noticed that all the videos we were posting were getting no views, like less than 20. We knew this was a possibility, but for multiple videos back to back, we knew something was up. We decided to contact TikTok directly to see if we could get an answer to one, why we couldn’t promote, and two, why this seemed to be causing our videos to have absolutely no reach on the platform.

TikTok support reached back out to us asking for more information, which we provided, and they stated that they would reach back out soon. So we waited. And waited. About a week went by and we had not heard back so we reached out again. They finally responded, asking for the same information they previously asked for, which we had already provided. We provided it again, and were told that it was escalated and we would hear back in 72 hours. 72 hours goes by, and we do not hear back. Over the course of the next 2 months, we continuously reach out, to no response from TikTok. A few weeks ago we decided to email them, and a few hours later they wrote back saying that it should be handled in the ticket. We let them know that we had a ticket open that had not gotten a response in 2 months, to which they apologized and said to be on the lookout for a reply soon. That reply never came. The most recent update actually comes from today, where we noticed that TikTok had actually closed our ticket.

As a result of this, we have decided to pause posting on our social media platforms until the issue with TikTok is resolved. We will continue reaching out to them, and will provide updates when we can.

Looking Ahead

We previously stated in our roadmap that the full release was scheduled for this Fall. While we are still pushing for this, we wanted to communicate that it will likely be late fall, and may spill to early winter. We are still confident that it will release this year, it just may be more towards the end. We hope to have a solid release date late next month (August).

Thank you for reading, and we hope to see you soon at the Interstice Facility!

- Verity, Lead Developer