Today, on The Chinese Room’s official blog, Dan Pinchbeck, the game’s creative director, revealed that Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is now in alpha.
The news came after the the studio submitted an alpha build to Sony Santa Monica and were met with thumbs up. All that’s left, according to Pinchbeck, is Beta then Gold. But the road ahead isn’t any easier. Now that the alpha build is in session the game is essentially complete, but far from finished. The world is complete, scenes are done, and the story is finished, but now is the time for polish. The phase of development marks the beginning of heavy QA in attempts to find and remove bugs, clean-up textures, and integrating new files.
QA is being conducted by Sony’s internal teams and The Chinese Room’s internal QA team. For those unfamiliar, members of the QA team will play the game over and over, looking for sloppy textures, game inconsistencies, and most importantly, bugs. Then, the information acquired by QA is handed to the art team who split their times fixing bugs and environmental storytelling. Now that the world is locked in place, this strive towards Beta is all about focusing on the smaller details of the game.
Things that lie ahead for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture include: recording an orchestral score with choir, mixing said score in the studio and integrating it into the game (including voice-overs and procedurals), integration of a brand new AI system (which Pinchbeck remains quiet about), and ambient visual effects that will bring the world to life for players.
Pinchbeck goes on to reveal that The Chinese Room will not be attending Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). No interviews are to be conducted anytime soon, no new trailers or screenshots for quite some time either. News about the game is set to hit in March, but for the moment, nothing else. Pinchbeck promises that Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture will be their best game yet.
Can’t wait till March? Check out this E3 trailer from last year to tide you over until then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj8Bn3A-TVo
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is set for release sometime this year on the PS4.
