And, since I know the suspense is KILLING you: Gone Home is a finalist in the Narrative category, and has been given Honorable Mentions for Audio and Grand Prize!
http://igf.com/2013/01/2013_independent_games_festiva_2.html
We couldn’t be more grateful to all the folks who have given us support, playtested builds, and helped make the game better, so that we could be on this very exciting list of games. See you in San Francisco, folks!
To celebrate our first holiday season together as a studio, we made a special card to send out to friends and family. It’s wintertime at the house on Arbor Hill!
And who’s that, looking so festive on the front step?
Christmas Duck!
Thanks again to everyone who’s given us support and followed our work during this first year. We’re so glad to have you along! Happy Holidays, from:
A couple of weeks ago, the Fullbright team was invited by Cabel Sasser of Panic Inc. to visit the basement of the building their servers are housed in. Which sounds like an odd proposition, until you know that their servers reside in one of the oldest highrises in Portland, which fills an entire city block, and hosts a fascinating history all its own.
The building was erected in 1917, and has been in continuous operation since. One of its earliest functions was to house the offices of The Oregonian Newspaper, the printing presses for which were found in the basement that we would be exploring. The presses are long gone, but what was left behind was truly fascinating.
This trip was a massive dose of real-life environmental storytelling and has been a huge inspiration for us. Check out Cabel’s post on our excursion to see what we discovered… http://cabel.me/2012/12/19/the-basement/
A couple of weeks ago, The Fullbright Company all headed down to San Francisco to let the press go hands-on with Gone Home. We were lucky enough to be able to use the Idle Thumbs office to show off the game and chat with journalists. We thought it went really well– but don’t take our word for it! The write-ups of the event have been coming online over the course of this week. In case you missed any (or didn’t know we’d done a preview event at all!) we’ll round up the articles here.
Along with the hands-on time, we had a lot of great discussions with the journalists who came by, getting into the philosophical side of Gone Home. It was awesome digging into the questions that arose from just half an hour with the game. Hope you enjoy reading the coverage as much as we enjoyed putting on the event!
Kirk Hamilton (Kotaku)
This Game Doesn’t Need Guns Or Explosions To Make You Care. Just A House. http://kotaku.com/5960912/this-game-doesnt-need-guns-or-explosions-to-make-you-care-just-a-house
Nathan Grayson (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
Impressions:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/15/impressions-gone-home/
Interview with the team, Part 1:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/16/fullbright-on-the-90s-how-many-guns-gone-home-has-ready-for-scheduling/
Interview, Part 2:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/17/fullbright-on-personal-stories-the-femshep-conundrum/
Maxwell McGee (GameSpot)
The Tale of Urban Exploration in Gone Home (VIDEO PREVIEW!):
http://www.gamespot.com/gone-home/videos/gone-home-video-preview-6400075/
Charles Onyett (IGN)
Gone Home is Undiluted Adventure: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/11/15/gone-home-is-undiluted-adventure
Jeffrey Matulef (Eurogamer)
Gone Home transports players back to 1995: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-15-gone-home-preview-an-authentic-look-back-at-1995
Tom Francis (PC Gamer UK)
“Warm, funny and disarmingly tender”: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/11/21/gone-home-preview/
Rob Zacny (PCGamesN)
“In many ways, this could be the house where I grew up, and that’s what makes Gone Home’s mystery so much more compelling.” http://www.pcgamesn.com/indie/hands-gone-home
Evan Lahti (PC Gamer)
Interview with the team: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/11/26/gone-home-devs-on-player-agency-we-all-appreciate-games-that-trust-us-as-players/
Marty Sliva (1Up)
“So much of who we are can be extracted through a close examination of the things we surround ourselves with, and the things we choose to hide from the world. I’ve never before experienced this in a video game, and honestly, I never thought I would.” http://www.1up.com/previews/gone-home-preview
We’ll update this post (and the Press page) as more coverage trickles in!
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…
The Fullbright Company 