Panic Blog. The story of Campo Santo and Panic — and how we ended up being a part of a first- person adventure video game for Mac / PC / and Play. Station 4 — starts in 2. How Panic got into video games with Campo Santo – Dave Tach, Polygon. Here we are, a little more than a month after Firewatch shipped. If not just for posterity, I wanted to take a moment to record some of what’s happened since. Reviews. I can’t lie — my stomach was a wreck as launch day approached. Butterflies to the extreme, the kind of butterflies that keep you in bed a little too long, the kind I’m well familiar with whenever I tackle the unknown. But once Firewatch reviews started to appear, the world stopped spinning a little bit. Here were some of my favorite reviews: IGN – Ryan Mc. Caffrey“It is among the very best of the first- person narrative genre, and it reminds us what video game storytelling is capable of in the right hands. It’s a game I can see coming back to every year or two just to revisit its beautiful sights and memorable characters – just like a good book.” 9. Rock Paper Shotgun– John Walker“Firewatch is a rare and beautiful creation, that expands the possibilities for how a narrative game can be presented, without bombast or gimmick. It’s delicate, lovely, melancholy and wistful. A masterful and entrancing experience.”Polygon– Colin Campbell“In the end, it feels like it’s about the emotions and cares of real people, not the animations of puppets.” 8. Panic’s metric for Firewatch’s success was probably calibrated a little bit differently than Campo Santo’s: of course we wanted to make the best possible game we could, but we also had made an investment we really. Panic meaning, definition, what is panic: a sudden strong feeling of fear that prevents reasonable thought and action. Wired – Chris Kohler“It’s an emotional gut- punch all the way through, for many reasons, and largely a pleasure to explore and find yourself lost in—mentally, if not geographically. This is your next must- play story, another voyage to a place games don’t often take us.”The Mary Sue – Marcy Cook“Firewatch deals with love, loss, and how you put yourself together again after trauma. It does all this in a clever and engaging way that will have you emotionally connected to both Henry and Delilah. All of this is wrapped in a fun game that, once completed, I played over again.”The Guardian – Nathan Ditum“The writing is not just believable, it is likeable and funny. Henry and Delilah’s exchanges are full of the familiar tug and tarry of people getting to know each other, of playing and of flirting, and of reaching out to feel less alone.” ! Firewatch’s budget, while huge for us, was modest for a game of its quality and scope, but we made our investment back in about one day. Firewatch has sold around 5. But mostly grateful. Improvements. In many ways, shipping a game was like shipping an app. A lot felt very familiar: no matter how much testing you do on software (we all played through the game so many times on all platforms!) things are either going to be broken for some people or you’re going to think something isn’t a huge deal that other people will feel very much is a huge deal. And again, like an app, the best thing you can do is be on the ball after launch, read tweets, read forums, work overtime, and fix the majority of the friction points as quickly as possible. We watched streams for bugs. We read countless forum posts for bugs. And everybody at Campo Santo worked like crazy to make things even better. For example, a lot of people weren’t happy with the game’s performance on Play. Station 4, so the team cranked and quickly pushed out a PS4 patch that dramatically improved the PS4 experience. And the great thing: we’re not quite done. We’re still fixing bugs. And we’re still working on ways to improve performance all across the board, including on Play. Station 4 and the Mac. Panic is a sudden sensation of fear which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking, replacing it with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and frantic agitation consistent with an animalistic fight-or. A custom color picker designed specifically for developers. Makes getting colors out of Photoshop/Acorn mock-ups quick and easy. Currently supports NSColor, UIColor, CGColorRef, CSS and HTML styles. There’s more to come.(As a side note, there was one big post- launch mental difference for us at Panic: when you make a game, you’re telling a story, and there’s no “patch” in the world that will make a story perfect for everyone. We were fully prepared for this, but: some people really loved Firewatch’s ending, others didn’t. Both opinions are completely valid. But we wanted to tell a . We’re just grateful people played enough to have an opinion!)Fotodome. I don’t know if you heard, but Panic did an insane thing for Firewatch — at one point you find a disposable camera in the game, and at the end of the game, you can choose to upload the photos you took to our server. Here’s a roll that was just uploaded today. And then, if you want, you can actually order physical prints of the photos for $1. Panic makes apps for Mac and iOS, including Coda, Transmit, Prompt, and more. People with panic disorder have feelings of terror that strike suddenly & repeatedly, most often with no warning. The severity of panic symptoms varies. Now, at that price, this was never designed to be a massive profit center. We saw it as a very special opportunity to try something we’re not sure has ever been done before: give users a customized, personalized keepsake from a virtual journey, on demand, when they beat the game. What would that feel like? So far, 2. 14,8. 02 photos have been uploaded, and June (thank you June!) has shipped out well over 1,0. Here’s what it looks like when we ship an order: (A little implementation trivia: those QR code separator sheets, when scanned, . So not only do they help us separate out the print jobs, but with a single scan we print postage and a shipping label! Also, for you web devs, Patrick, who built the Fotodome website, describes it succinctly: “vagrant ubuntu ansible django nginx gunicorn redis rq pyqrcode cups (oh god cups) gutenprint stripe s. Ok!)Here’s my favorite anecdote from making this crazy thing. We knew the conceit here had to be consistent: since the game takes place in 1. Maybe it’d been lost in the mail for 2. Intro : Panic Is Coming . Panic comes to us from French panique, which in turn derives from Greek panikos, meaning literally 'of Pan.' Pan is the pipe-playing, nymph-chasing Greek god of fertility, pastures, flocks, and shepherds. PANIC is an animation studio rocking the world from Riga, Latvia. Meg got behind his chair under pretense of smoothing the wrinkles out of his tired forehead, and standing there, she said, with her panic increasing with every word. So Neven and I spent a good deal of time dreaming up how it should look and feel, starting with what we would name our fictitious photo printing company: Once we decided on Fotodome — Neven drew a nice circle logo, I suggested we give it some aperture lines for a bit of a (not- exactly- Olly- Moss- level) visual pun, we both hunted for good period fonts — our new fiction was ready and we started to design the perfect retro photo packaging to sell it as authentic. Later, Jake pointed out that, in the game, there’s a line of dialog from Delilah when you get the camera: Try not to snap anything that would scar a photomat employee. We knew what we had to do. Cissy was in the studio to record a few miscellaneous pick- up lines for Firewatch, and Sean had her very quickly record a brand- new replacement line: Try not to snap anything that would scar a Fotodome employee. And just like that, Fotodome was now a complete part of the world of Firewatch.(I’ll take a moment here to point out just how lucky we were to have Cissy Jones as Delilah, and Rich Sommer as Henry. Such a significant amount of the game’s depth is solely thanks to their great acting delivering great writing.) This whole thing wouldn’t have happened without people like Ben and Jake at Campo Santo who said “Sure, let’s give it a shot!” and worked overtime to design the in- game UI and put together all the uploading code. It was a true and very fulfilling collaboration. And it’s been so cool seeing the response. We wanted the packaging to be a surprise, so we did very little promotion beforehand. Here’s Lazy Game Reviews doing an “unboxing” of their set of photos. Our presentation was so good, he thought Fotodome was a real company! Writings. It’s nice to make a thing, but nothing has been as fulfilling in this process as watching people talk about the thing we made. Seeing people discuss the story, what it means to them, what they think happened, how it related to their lives, how it made them feel — another thing we’re not used to in the “I’d give it zero stars if I could until they add Mosh support!!!!” world of making apps. Here is some of my favorite Firewatch writing. It’s safe to say this is spoiler city. But if you’ve played the game, you’ll probably enjoy reading these pieces: Firewatch: Story Explanation and Analysis – Ewan Roxburgh, Press Start. Firewatch Am I A Good Man? Thoughts On Firewatch – Alec Meer, Rock Paper Shotgun. Learning to Love Nature with Firewatch – Gita Jackson, Paste. Firewatch Took Away Our Ability to be Good People, That’s Where it Shines – Olivia White, Polygon. So what about the men? A deeper look at Firewatch and Catherine – Katherine Cross, Gamasutra. On Firewatch – Dina Abou Karam. Firewatch, Projection and Isolation – Reid Mc. Carter, Paste. How Firewatch Reminded Me to Remember – Jefferson Geiger, ZAMTeam Bucket – The Incomparable. Moments You May Have Missed In Firewatch – Hayley Williams, Kotaku(Did I miss any good ones? Drop me a note in the comments!)Fan Art. Once again, sorry to beat a dead comparison, but with very few hilarious exceptions, we don’t really get to enjoy much fan art when we release a new OS X file transfer client or whatever. It was extremely fun to see what people created after they played Firewatch (or watched a Firewatch stream). Here are some of my favorites.(Click any piece of art to visit its creator.) To everyone who took the time to write, draw, or play something inspired by Firewatch: thank you so much. It’s hard to overstate what it’s meant to all of us. Notes. I figured it all out — how to find the publisher(s) of a song, how to find who owns the master recording of a song, how to find the right contacts at those two companies to start negotiations to license — but no matter how many voicemails I left, one side wouldn’t call me back. I ended up hiring a licensing expert, who contacted the samepeople I found, and got it done in a couple of days. LA: It’s Who You Know. But it seemed to be really effective — we still hear people talk about it — and I think it helped set a tone of “oh, this game is the real deal”. There were a lot of unexpected bumps — a surprise Steam sale during our launch, the delicate business of navigating Sony certification — but the people behind both of these companies were extremely helpful and supportive, not to mention excited about our game. We didn’t let preview streamers or press write about it, we never showed it at events, and the only people who learned of it before launch was a packed house at Pixar.
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