KickStarter STASIS 2: BONE TOTEM - new isometric adventure in Stasis universe set in deep sea installation

[lightbane]

I like how the writing overtly describes something like a starving dog with something like "ribs that make a stacatto of hunger", while the actual horrific monsters are barely given a description.

 

[Pyke]

Lol. :D

 

[Pyke]

Didn't expect a developer response, this is really cool.
To me this writing comes off as tryhard. And it's extra jarring when every sentence tries to one up the previous one, but then you have stuff like this:

Overly long sentences, the word slowly is repeated 3 times, etc. All to describe mud on the floor. It's a chore to read, so I mostly gave up. If it was limited to just the spooky stuff, it could be fine, but even the most mundane things are described this way. It would be really cool if things were described from character's point of view, like the items are.
This is a nitpick in the grand scheme of things and I'm still enjoying this great game.

We did have the idea to do descriptions from the character pov - but because of how we did a lot of the early production in the game, A) We didn't always know which character would be in which environment, and B) The environmental descriptions were done about a year before the character dialogue could be written - and we didn't want to lock in the 'personalities' of the characters too early - which would have limited how the writer could approach them.

Because of how our work and company is structured, we often do have to silo off certain creative elements from others. We generally try to push writing out as far as possible so that the writers can have as much 'game' as possible to work from. Scheduling when things come in is one of the harder parts of game development, and unfortunately you only really know if you got it 'right' when everything is done!

 

[cioran]

Has anybody played it on a Steam Deck/ROG Ally and if so, how was it? I'm thinking of playing it occasionally in the car/plane/on the throne etc.

 

[kangaxx]

Is your next game a new Stasis game Pyke, and any idea on when it's coming out?

 

[Pyke]

Has anybody played it on a Steam Deck/ROG Ally and if so, how was it? I'm thinking of playing it occasionally in the car/plane/on the throne etc.

I'm biased - but we did extensive deck testing and have gotten a lot of good feedback on it. I've finished on the deck a few times. :D

Is your next game a new Stasis game Pyke, and any idea on when it's coming out?

We will be announcing it this month. It's not gonna be a Stasis game - thankfully Bone Totem did well enough that we can be a little experimental with our next project. Its certainly a big change from what we've done before!

We do have a new Stasis game planned - actually have the full story treatment written and quite an extensive design doc - so we will be returning to this world at some point! Its too fun not to. :D

 

[Alienman]

Big change huh.

Not walking into the territory of Tyranicon now?

 

[mediocrepoet]

Big change huh.

Not walking into the territory of Tyranicon now?

Hey baby, wanna try my Bone Totem?

 

[gooseman]

Finished the game. Characters, dialogue and voice acting are amazing. Characters commenting on logs and other stuff you look at would be very good for the game. Whistling music in Moses' PDA drove me insane. Puzzles were... mixed for me. Some were simple enough to solve as soon as I saw them, while others really confused me as to what I was supposed to do. The genetic engineering puzzle, I didn't find many clues, only "start with A" and the rest were just random letters I found in notes, I bruteforced it, but didn't really understand how it's supposed to be solved.
I decided to skim the descriptions or ignore them for the rest of the game. They didn't work for me. Other than the writing, I also found they draw my attention towards the text box, away from the actual environments. Environments are further hurt by lighting. It's good, but the game is DARK. There's some highlighting of the cursor, but it wasn't enough. There were many rooms where I wished I could see more fucked up/alien stuff, but it was too dark.

nitpicks

There were some things I'd call plot holes and oddities that made story less believable. Primitives surviving underground for 2000 years, building things that resisted pressure of deep ocean, preserving their culture of human sacrifice, despite having no humans to sacrifice for most of the period. I don't recall if they sacrificed their own. I suppose having a microbe record and share the entire culture's memories and isolation from the rest of the world would preserve their beliefs. Then there are all those explosions that the characters somehow survive. I'm no physics guy, but I think that grenade at the end would cause an implosion that would kill you with or without a suit. Especially a suit that's 100 years old and located below the sub's rated pressure. Didn't we have to calibrate a fancy sci-fi suit to the pressure to walk on the ocean floor?
I briefly tried the original stasis, but the pixelhunting combined with darkness and backtracking to look for items through that elevator made me pause. Is it ever explained why Cayne abducts people and then lies about them being criminals, instead of experimenting on actual inmates, which should be trivial, considering how powerful they are?
How would USSR be viewed by the people living in this world? My guess is, either it has become irrelevant this far in the future or erased by Cayne, so characters aren't aware of it, or Cayne would demonize it, since they are both a gigacorporation and a church, and having an enemy as another facet of control, something we see in the real world, makes sense. Maybe they have more relevant enemies, like those leaf guys? But character reactions to soviet things are mundane. Mac, being religious, having what he could view as an "atheist commie ghost" in his head, then finding out he's religious too, could be an interesting conflict.

 

[Durq]

I read that Stasis: Bone Totem is going to be included "free" on Amazon Prime Gaming on October 24, 2024. How do developers benefit from this? Does Amazon pay developers per download or what?

 

[Pyke]

 

[Tyranicon]

Are you guys making a first-person horror game now?

Just saying if you did, on the same quality level as Stasis 2, you would blow most of your competitors away.

 

[lightbane]

Please don't tell me you will join the fad of walking simulators in spooky hallways... That are usually not that spooky.

I was hoping for a Crusader-style game.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Are you guys making a first-person horror game now?

Just saying if you did, on the same quality level as Stasis 2, you would blow most of your competitors away.

Everyone knows that first person vampire porn horror cross overs is where it's at. Are you a bad enough dude to pierce the vampiress with your bone totem?

 

[None]

Please don't tell me you will join the fad of walking simulators in spooky hallways... That are usually not that spooky.

Does anyone actually play these games to get spooked? The most I've ever experienced is some excitement from getting chased, but that's about it. Morbid curiosity is what propelled me through Bone Totem, Amnesia, Penumbra, etc. The types of evil you encounter are far more genuine in this kind of genre than others, and always makes for a better story.

 

[Durq]

Stasis: Bone Totem is "free" today on Epic Games if you have an Amazon Prime subscription. Get your bone on.

https://gaming.amazon.com/home

 

[Pyke]

I can't say too much - but next week I'll chat more about it! But I can say that it is 3D first person, its not a spooky walking simulator (as much as I do love me a spooky walking simulator! :D ), and it is very much in line with our other games in terms of the weirdness of our worlds and settings.

 

[Cyberarmy]

So a Myst-like with even harder piano puzzles?

 

[Pyke]

ARE YOU READING MY NOTES????

 

[ERYFKRAD]

ARE YOU READING MY NOTES????

Nope, just the sheet music

 

[agris]

It worked for some people, and didnt work for others - But it was a conscious (experimental) choice!

With the dust settled, how do you feel about the spiderweb POI indicators?

I played the excavation of hob's barrow after I finished stasis 2, and it struck me that despite the very low resolution pixel graphics, having to hunt the environment for interactables / descriptions helped me soak it in and engrossed me. i thoroughly enjoyed stasis 2, so this is a production nitpick, but i hope in the future we get a setting to disable the spiderweb indicators.

s2 is dark and spooky game, rgb webs sprouting out the center of the screen really clashes with the aesthetic.

 

[Pyke]

Honestly, for me I feel like it works better with how large our scenes tend to be (combined with the fact that you are floating so much further away from the character than a traditional PnC game) and with how much detail I like to add.

I think when you're doing lower resolution smaller areas - there are only 'so many' places to look for things. With the object indicator it meant that I could go balls to the wall with the detail - and not worry about having that conflict with the gameplay.
We also tend to be very 'messy' with our game design - we build areas, play in them, add in puzzles from some places and move them around - its a very fluid way of building things. We've tried the 'design everything, and then build it from the document' style of work - but it just doesnt seem to fit in with either Nics nor my personality or the way we work. So having the ability to add in 'points of interest' without having to worry about art - and then going back and reworking some areas (or not, depending on how we do it) gives us a ton of freedom.

I think something we would experiment with is having it be a little more context sensitive - so maybe you 'sweep' an area - and if there is a POI, it highlights - so its more like the character is looking around, as opposed to being guided towards something. We're implementing something similar in our next game - but in 3D - and its been an interesting thing to play around with.

 

[Alienman]

Could have used a score system, in combination with “context areas”. If you get close to an area, you get an indicator that something can be manipulated. And If you highlight, you lose points. That way you can keep it as it is, but still adding a challenge to those that want to explore. I thought the spider-thing killed the immersion, and limited the exploration.

 

[Pyke]

Its strange - I always saw it as an optional thing, cos you had to actually do a very purposeful 'click' to use it. Maybe people felt that because it was there, it had to be used?

 

[Alienman]

Its strange - I always saw it as an optional thing, cos you had to actually do a very purposeful 'click' to use it. Maybe people felt that because it was there, it had to be used?

Yeah, from what I remember when playing, it felt necessary to use it. But the main issue is how it lit up everything, making the movement feel like you were just walking from one node to the next. Also, you could read text descriptions from rooms you haven't even entered.