It’s been an exciting few weeks here at The Fullbright Company, as we’ve been gearing up to submit Gone Home to the 2013 Independent Games Festival. And by golly, we did it!

http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2013.php?id=534

A ton of work has gone into the game recently, filling in the missing pieces and polishing off the raw edges. We made a quick video of the first few minutes of the game, which can be found on the IGF site, or right here:

As you can see, it’s basically an update of the very first video we showed the world, back in May. It turns out that 5 months of development can make a lot of difference! We’ve been lucky enough to bring our Environment Artist, Kate Craig, onto the project fulltime, and she’s been doing amazing work making the house feel like a real, lived-in place. We’ve concentrated on lighting and ambient sound to convey the atmosphere of the dark, lonely house caught in the middle of a raging thunderstorm. We’ve completely replaced our first-person controller, resulting in smoother and more responsive movement. We’ve implemented new interactive systems to allow the player to examine physical objects and place them intentionally in the world (as showcased in our prior company blogpost.) The experience is now punctuated with original music by friend (and Idle Thumbs archwizard) Chris Remo. We worked with Sarah Robertson, an incredibly talented Portland area voice actor, to bring our main character to life. (We’ll share more behind-the-scenes info on the voice recording process before long.) And we’ve been adding tons of touchstones of the era, working with artist friends like Aleks Sennwald to create posters and other ephemera that scream “the 90’s!”

In a couple of weeks we’ll be letting a number of games journalist go hands-on with our IGF build, so look for their impressions next month. We can’t wait to have more people explore the world of Gone Home. In the meantime, wish us luck at IGF! We have our fingers crossed…