Project Sense - 不祥的预感: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story

Quick Mid-Season Updates
about 4 years ago – Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 01:57:47 PM

Hey Everybody, 

Just wanted to drop in to let you all to know that we will have an update on the status of console releases; we are currently going through individual distributor QA/tech requirement approval processes and as of now have no new information. These tend to take arbitrary amounts of time. However, we can promise everything is currently going smoothly and there is not much to worry about. As soon as we have an update we will be to sure share it right away. At the moment it is really just a waiting game at this stage; however, we are sure the game will be released within a reasonable timeframe. We will have finalized estimates for physical copies soon too; do not worry on that front, as we have confirmed everything is still going well and smoothly in that regard.

We will also have a patch for PC pretty soon as well, we are just waiting on some necessary Japanese localization fixes before we push it out. The game will also soon be coming to more PC platforms following this update.

Sorry for the silence, we are just as anxious as you! 

Update 1.1 is live now!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Sep 04, 2020 at 05:14:38 PM

Hi everyone,

We're happy to announce that we have launched the updated 1.1 build of the game now on Steam, based off of the user feedback the game has received over the past few days. A full changelog can be seen below:

NOTE: For build stability, you should delete any save files from the previous build and start a new game. Continuing a save from the 1.0 build will bug several interactions and possibly prevent you from beating the game.

Some older save data may not carry over to your new game (whether from 1.0 or from the older iterations of the Sense Demo), so it is recommended that you start a new game.

We hope that everyone who has supported Sense and given feedback, whether positively or negatively, will enjoy the game more now that this update has been rolled out. We will continue to collect feedback regarding the game daily. If you enjoy Sense and would like to support us, we encourage you to leave a review for the game on Steam. While the game's PC launch was not ideal, we thank everyone for their patience and hope you will enjoy 1.1

Temporarily Pulling Sense from Steam
over 4 years ago – Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 11:20:28 PM

This morning after looking at player feedback and negative reviews from over night, we came to a hard decision with our publisher Top Hat Studios to temporarily pull Sense from sale until the apparent design issues and bugs can be fixed and adjusted. We have contacted Valve to facilitate this, and this should be done within the next 24 hours. The Steam page will remain up. This is pretty crushing for us in a lot of ways, but we are doing what we think is right. Although this is a monetary hit, we have decided the game is not up to par with what we expected to ship, and that QA feedback rounds did not fully reflect player experiences.

When we set out to make the game, I wanted to make a game in the method of old school survival horror titles like Fatal Frame , Resident Evil, and most importantly Clock Tower. This meant very limited saves, deep exploration, repeated trial and error, punishing deaths, and a reliance on careful reading and planning your actions are the things; things I find engaging about those older titles. I wanted to bring those aspects back first and foremost.

At this point it is pretty clear that I failed to do those systems justice and in adhering to these design tenets made the game too frustratingly hard. While most of the minor bugs and issues can be fixed easily, we realize gameplay chains and systems cannot. However, we can add tools to help smooth out these issues, and make the game better for everyone involved.

Sense will return to sale on PC once everything has been fixed with an update to version 1.1. It will contain, in the very least the following fixes:

- The resolution settings bug has been fixed. Your chosen settings will now save and not reset when opening the menu or moving the window to alternate monitors.

- The method for escaping in the elevator on the first ghost event in the lobby will have it’s failure state removed, forcing the elevator to open by the ghost’s proximity. You will no longer need to spam the interact button to succeed.

- We are adding default journal items with clear explanations of controls, saving, use of the sword, and other apparently confusing aspects. These will be unlocked and in the journal tab from the beginning of the game, and the player will be prompted to check them.

- We will either add an auto save/checkpoint at the beginning of each floor, OR allow quick saving anywhere from the main menu. We will keep the tapes/save stations as is for people who want to try the challenge of limited saves. We have not decided which option is best, but are leaning towards quick save.

- the death screen audio bug has been resolved.

- the “Sweet Home” achievement not unlocking has been resolved.

- the esc key now brings up the pause menu instead of enter.

- we are also looking into various reported smaller interaction chain bugs which were not found in QA

Separately, we have also discovered a problem related to save data corruption that occurs if you have save data from the old demo which has now been removed. If you have already purchased Sense and have yet to play, but played the demo. Please make sure that you delete any files related to the demo before playing the full game as it causes some strange issues with flags in the early game. We apologize for this.

Thank you to everyone who showed up on day 1 and gave us feedback. I am personally sorry that our launch stumbled like this and hope that you will give the game another chance once we get this update out. I especially am sorry to backers to whom may have been disappointed by this launch. I take responsibility for this and apologize. We will fix this, as we want players to know we care about their experience with the game.

For those wondering or worried about console releases, this will not affect anything related to console nor physicals. Our console releases will launch with these things fixed. This also does not effect the PSVita release or timeline.

PC Digital Release Launch Day!!!
over 4 years ago – Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 10:48:21 AM

Hello everyone! 

I am beyond excited to be here today, 2 years and 2 months after the Kickstarter and Sense is finally fully complete and will be in customer hands on Tuesday August 25th! While I am pretty disappointed that we couldn't launch same day digital for all platforms, to even have gotten to this point feels like a gigantic achievement, especially for how small of a team we are. 

I want to first thank everyone involved on the development end;

Kayi , my wife, best friend, and co founder of SUZAKU. Without her initial push to make the game in May of 2017 I never would have done it to begin with. Sense would have been a random collection of doc files and sketches in a long forgotten sketchbook. For the first year and a half or so all Kayi could do was support form the sidelines, but once the time came, she knocked out a huge chunk of the task list with us. She not only helped with the cutscene animations, some 2d art, and business development stuff, her 3d assets pushed the look of the game into much more than it could have been. We have already started early work on the next project and can't wait to show you what we have coming! 

Al Tan, our code wizard sacrificed a lot of time to build an engine within Unity specifically to help me be able to build Sense in the easiest way possible, with no coding necessary on my end. He then turned that script base into a plug-in called the Fieldwork Toolkit which he plans to release to the public soon! Despite being 13 hours apart, when it counted Al pulled all nighters with the rest of us and helped turn my terrible, buggy code into something professional and tight. Al is an incredible coder and one of the hardest and most reliable workers I've ever met. 

Andi Han, the composer of Sense's one of a kind soundtrack. Many of Sense's memorable moments would be far less impactful without Andi's incredible music. All but one of the tracks in the game are Andi's and his passion for the project is easily apparent. Andi also helped us give the ghost Voice Overs a unique and creepy distortion, and mixing some of the key sound effects helps give each action Mei performs a weight that we were earlier struggling to find. Thanks to Andi we also were put into contact with Top Hat, and his work on social media boosting Sense's visibility was a huge benefit. Andi is an incredibly driven and passionate musician, and we are proud to have him on board with Sense!

Top Hat Studios / Joe , I can't really express just how grateful I am to Joe and Top Hat. Before Sense and SUZAKU I was working contract gigs in concept art and illustration. I had worked on some 18 titles but never had to deal with the business end much. Frankly I am pretty bad at that part, so Joe taking over and covering some of the early development costs and PR was a huge piece of how we got here. His ridiculous amount of patience with our delays and development issues, as well as the amount of attention he gave us despite having plenty of other teams to worry about is a testament to how awesome of a publisher they are. We were definitely difficult to work with at times, I am sure, but as we've worked out many of those issues and move forward to the future, we would be proud to continue working with them in any way we can. 

I of course want to again thank all of you who backed us here on Kickstarter as well. This is only the beginning for SUZAKU, and only the first part of a trilogy for Sense. 

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Next up I want to tell you a bit about the Game and what to expect! 

- All backers getting a PC digital copy will be sent both a STEAM and a DRM free download code for you to download how you wish in the next few days. PSVITA and Console Digital codes will come when they are available!

- At launch only English, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Russian language options will be available. We are still exploring options for localization of other languages we can apply via Patch post launch and will update everyone as quickly as we can. 

- A "Dev mode" speed run of Sense clocks in at about 3 hours. That means no deaths, no reading journals, skipping all text, knowing every puzzle answer, skipping non essential sections, and optimizing trips while backtracking. Our testers tended to complete the game between 4.5 - 7 hours, though these times vary wildly due to reading speed, mistakes, deaths, etc. On top of that New Game + and New Game ++ have some unique events. In order to see the secret ending, unlock all the shinrei shashin, and costumes you will need to beat the game 3 times. The Yotsuya chapter of the game is also between 15-20 minutes on top of that. In total I can confidently say that Sense has around 15 hours of gameplay to explore!

- Not all interactions have hint markers. Make sure you are paying attention to this little red light on your PDA so you don't miss anything!

-  We have avoided showing any ghosts outside of "Ed" from the original demo (with the exception of one in the new trailer) even here so that your first playthrough is filled with surprises and scares. That said, our brand of horror is slow burn and built on atmosphere and storytelling, don't expect a lot of jump scares (though we threw a few in where it worked). We are really excited to see what your thoughts on which spirit haunted you the most!  Speaking of which, you can view our NEW launch trailer below:

We put everything we currently have into Sense, and hope that everyone enjoys and loves the game just as much as we do or more. We also want and NEED strong critic in order to improve for our next projects. Let us know your honest thoughts wherever you can. Some things, like art direction, we may never change but we will be listening carefully and taking notes over the next few months. I have never been so nervous for something in my life! I think we made a great horror game that people will remember, but if something doesn't hit the way we thought or work the way we intended we can only use that feedback as an opportunity to grow. 

I will be writing up the post mortem that will go more in depth on our future and the overall development process from the last 2 years and will likely put that out sometime in mid September.  

Mini-Update on Console Release
over 4 years ago – Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 11:05:03 PM

Hello everyone, we've got some frustrating news to share today, albeit not terrible or anything, but we wanted to share for transparency. 

Due to a change on Nintendo's end, because of us sorting out both physical & digital simultaneously, the approval window has changed to around 60 days, so we are unable to release Switch simultaneously with PC this month. This means the Switch version will release in October instead. We are unhappy with this development but this is out of our control at the moment. To be clear there is no cancellation or anything of the sort, just a slight delay. However, this means our console releases will likely all release at the same time (more details below);

So just to clarify:

- The game IS complete and going through the various approval processes for platforms - unfortunately because of differing approval processes and standards this means things are staggered a bit. Development is 100% complete and this is not an internal delay on our part. The ports for all promised consoles and the respective localization are complete and ready. 

- PC digital is still coming out this month. We have submitted to Steam already and are awaiting approval. We anticipate an August 25th release date! 

- PSVITA is unaffected and will launch in September as outlined in our previous post. Physicals are, of course, still on track as promised. 

- We will have an update on PS4 release window very soon, but anticipate a simul-release with Switch in October. This was because of some back-end stuff with Sony due to operational changes on their part.

-  XBOX version will be done soon and we are hoping to match the new Switch/PS4 release of October.

- All physical versions are still on track.

We will update everyone with more specific dates soon. Thank you again everyone!