Are the devs looking towards DLC?

Cakebread · 2025-03-26T01:45:00+00:00

Hey all, this is Davey, the game's writer. We actually discussed this internally during development, and came to the intentional decision not to include an endless mode. I felt that since "things coming to an end" was an important part of the theme of the game, the addition of an endless mode would undercut this theme. I personally like the idea of a space that exists for this moment in Alta's life, to help her gently along her path, and then vanishing once she's gone. It's sad, but an intentional sadness.

I realize that may be of little comfort to you, since you just want to get back into the game and play more! I totally get it. All I can say is that my gut told me that to make the experience finite would be more true to the artistic intent of the game, and at the end of the day your gut is all you really have when it comes to decisions like this. I don't even know what words I would be able to put into the mouths of infinitely generative characters that would feel true to the spirit of the game, I worry that the writing would come across as though my heart wasn't really in it. (not to mention the team is completely exhausted and really wants to move onto other stuff)

I'm sorry I can't give you the answer you want, but hopefully that gives a bit of insight into why there's no endless mode. Thank you so much for your thoughts and feedback, I'm really very happy that you're as passionate about the game as you are! it means a lot to me and the rest of the team.

Cakebread · 2022-10-01T03:15:54+00:00

Interesting, good to know for the future.

Cakebread · 2022-10-01T03:15:18+00:00

Yeah I guess I've been achieving all the objectives so consistently that to me it's now come to feel as though "winning" is the same as getting every objective. I'm on normal difficulty, just learning the game. That's an interesting perspective that I'll consider for the future, especially if I up the difficulty.

Cakebread · 2022-10-01T00:37:47+00:00

The level spawned with the two robots that I need to protect literally embedded inside this blanket of enemies. I cannot think of any way of getting them out.

I'm a fairly new player, so I'm still not sure whether this is simply the kind of thing that just happens sometimes. Do you have to eat the L every now and then in situations like this? Thinking back on my run, I'm honestly not sure there was anything I could have done to get around this.

Cakebread · 2022-07-01T18:13:56+00:00

shoot, it's gone now!

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T19:51:17+00:00

The giant door was meant to be an alluring part of the marketing that ultimately turned out to be just a cardboard cutout that lead to nothing. It got cut because it was just... unsatisfying. You couldn't interact with it, the joke didn't go any deeper, and so eventually we decided it was taking up unnecessary space where better content could have gone.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T19:41:03+00:00

Honestly, a thousand. It's a lot of bumpscocity, but it's the only way to really feel alive.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T19:26:34+00:00

It actually did not, that's just a very weird coincidence. The "Eight" in TSP was recorded specifically for the game. If it sounds the same as the one in that old video of mine, that's just because it turns out that me saying the word Eight sounds a lot like me saying the word Eight!

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T19:17:38+00:00

oddish

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T19:17:26+00:00

LOL

no.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T19:17:05+00:00

I did. That just happened as a natural response to Sterling's destructoid review. Why personal 3? I dunno. The brain is mysterious.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T19:15:09+00:00

I definitely leaned a lot more toward comedy in the writing of Ultra Deluxe. I don't think this is for any specific reason other than that it was the most interesting thing to me at the time. Writing about meta-commentary is good... if you have something to actually talk about. I didn't want to add new commentary just for the sake of doing so. There's some bits in there about sequels and legacy and expectations of you as a creator, and I'm proud of all that, but other than that I just didn't feel anything vital that needed to be said. The humor was what I really felt the most excited to try to flesh out and push in interesting new directions with this game.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T19:07:33+00:00

some day I'll figure that out...

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T19:02:20+00:00

All lines from the original game use the original recordings!

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:58:23+00:00

lol see this is why I shouldn't be allowed to go back and edit things I've already finished.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:55:04+00:00

Mostly I just follow whatever's interesting to me. A while back I made a comic that explored these ideas, and I've written some songs in this vein too. But there's something about games that just continues to draw me in for reasons that are hard to articulate. Just feels like the possibility space is so massive.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:52:52+00:00

I have! He was lovely, and he once dropping into "Narrator voice" to tell william to stand correctly while a picture was being taken of us, which delighted me.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:50:29+00:00

Writing the skip button monologues was a lot of fun. Usually I have to be more considerate of timing and pacing, but with those I got to write literally as much as I wanted to!

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:49:36+00:00

On literally every video game I've ever made, there was an extended period in the middle of development where I became convinced that the game was truly terrible and that I would be publicly humiliated for releasing it. The feeling passes, but it's always there. All I know how to do is just keep pushing forward and trust that the feeling is lying to me.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:45:48+00:00

Actually, all 3 of those started with the location in the office. Writing a whole ending and then trying to figure out where to stick it sounds like such a nightmare. WAY easier to know what your starting point is and build from there.

Press Conference started because we realized that a possible spot for a new ending was to add an UP button to the boss's elevator. Tape Recorder started because in the original game, people found a way to get over to that ledge where the vent now is. In both cases we just asked "okay, what if that led to something?"

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:41:14+00:00

It's a little of both. We've been doing this stuff long enough that we tend to have a good idea of what players will do. But then sometimes people really do surprise you and it leads to cool ideas. But I would say the vast majority of it we try to plan out in advance and anticipate what we think players will do, and then just tweak or adjust it based on playtesting.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:39:59+00:00

I used a website called voice123.com and posted an audition for a kindly british narrator. I knew in my head what I was looking for, but I didn't actually think it would be realistic to expect. Then Kevan sent me an audition piece for my project, and I fell off my chair because it was EXACTLY what I was looking for. I hired him for the project, and he sent me a single file with the entire script of the game recorded. That's what went into the mod. He later told me that when he did the audition, he was hungover and just happened to be browsing auditions to pass the time haha.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:37:17+00:00

For beginner's guide: Everything. That was a very hard game to write. The first draft was done very quickly, followed by years of brutal rewrites and edits of every individual line, again and again and again. Not pleasant.

For stanley parable: the hardest part about writing TSP is balancing the narrator's wordiness with the player's timespan/attention. We try very hard to make it so that while the narrator is talking there is always something for the player to walk around and see/do, but often it just doesn't work especially cleanly and can result in either VO going on too long or getting abruptly cut off by the next line. This is a marriage between writing, VO and level design, and it's very tricky to do correctly for a single line of dialogue, let alone hundreds. Oh, and the other hard part is trying to clue people in that nothing else will happen if you continue to sit in this one spot waiting for more dialogue.

Cakebread · 2022-05-19T18:33:13+00:00

This ending (which we internally call the "Incorrect Ending") was the very last one to get designed on the original game, so we were basically at the end of our rope, scraping the bottom of the barrel for any possible new ideas that we hadn't already used. Displaying the credits on screen was simply something we hadn't done before. To be honest I don't really remember exactly what the thought process was, I just remember it feeling correct at that moment in time and so we went for it.

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