Jonas Wæver on 24/12/2013 at 00:31

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Hey :)

I haven't been posting here in a long while (except, I realise with slight trepidation, to promote my own stuff... sorry about that), but I regularly swing to keep a sneaky eye on the community.

Last time I was here, it was to essentially (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=139815) beg for money for the Kickstarter for (http://conquistadorthegame.com/) Expeditions: Conquistador, and that was reasonably well received, but as it's somewhat outside the purview of this board, the thread died pretty quickly.

This time, though, I have something I hope would catch your interest a little better! I'm working on a stealth spy game called (http://www.clandestinethegame.com/) Clandestine, which I'm hoping will be very much in the vein of Looking Glass Studios - inspired largely by the intensity and pacing of Thief, but without light/shadow based stealth. Instead we're introducing a co-op dynamic where another player can join your game as a sort of mission control character, guiding you through the mission and helping you out with Uplink style hacking and by manipulating your environment to create distractions or remove obstacles - or you can join another player's game and be their mission control, of course.

The game will also be playable in singleplayer, where you'll control field agent, but some of the hacker systems will be available to you, and other things will be handled by the AI and the mission scripting. In singleplayer, it's a bit more traditional, but we're quite intent on making sure it's still fun.

We're two designers on the team, and both of us are Deus Ex fanatics, and both of us revere Thief as representing the essence of the stealth genre, so of course I hope that you guys will take an interest in the project. I'd like to stick around this time and keep you updated, maybe talk a bit about what kind of things you would expect from an old-school stealth game, and exchange ideas for how to make certain things work in co-op (for example I'd really like to allow saving any time instead of using checkpoints, but I'm not sure how well that'd work in co-op).

I hope this doesn't come off as too much of a promotion. It's still very early days in the project, and what I'm really looking for is a well qualified wall at which to throw ideas and see what sticks. Let me know if you have any questions, or if you'd like to hear more about any particular aspect of the game. If there's any interest, I'll throw some fresh screenshots at you after New Year when I'm back in the office, but until then, PC Gamer posted a batch of info when we announced the game: (http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11/27/clandestine-asymmetrical-espionage-co-op-coming-to-pc-next-year/)

(And yeah I know the trailer ain't exactly up to Blizzard standards, it was made with in-game assets and we're going to remake the cop model :p )

Jonas Wæver on 24/12/2013 at 01:19

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Hah! Yeah he'll wake up with a headache, but he'll be all right. We'll be sure to support a 100% nonlethal playthrough, complete with Dishonored-style nonlethal ways to take out "boss" characters.

We're aiming to make a ghost playthrough possible as well, though it will probably be very challenging.

ToolHead on 24/12/2013 at 23:07

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Looks very promising. :thumb:

LoLion on 25/12/2013 at 09:21

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I just wanna say that I am currently playing Expeditions: Conquistador and I am enjoying the hell out of it! Its an awesome game and I am surprised it did not get more publicity (I wouldnt hear about it if it wasn’t for your kickstarter thread).

I will definitely keep an eye on this new project as well, it certainly looks interesting!

Jonas Wæver on 25/12/2013 at 16:04

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I'm relieved that you guys are okay with me posting here. I felt a little dirty showing up after all this time just to plug my own project, but as far as I'm concerned this is the community for fans of stealth games, and I would be stupid not to get you guys in on Clandestine, at least a little bit.

I was wondering what you guys feel about the fact that we won't have shadow-based stealth in the game? I was very disappointed that DXHR didn't have that originally, but once I played the game, I found that I didn't really miss being able to hide in the shadows.

Also, how do you feel about the spy part of the game being in third person? We made that decision because of limited resources, not because we think third person is particularly superior to first person in any way. On the plus side it means the cover system (used more for stealth than combat) will fit more smoothly into the gameplay than it did in DXHR.

Finally, and this may seem overly specific, but how important is it to you guys that you be able to pick objects up and throw them around with physics, making a mess of everything? Because that's strangely important to me, but we're somewhat limited by the fact that the game has to run well in co-op, and replicating physics over the network is a little problematic.

Oh and finally finally, what are your thoughts on saving in a stealth game? There are good arguments either way for quicksaving and checkpointing - normally in a stealth game I would pretty much demand quicksaves, but as mentioned in my original post, that gets tricky in co-op (mainly, who's in charge of saving the game? And can you load a savegame at will, or does it happen automatically when the operative dies?) I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.


All bitComposer did for us was get on us Steam and help out with localisation and marketing. We still own all the rights to Conquistador, and in fact we get almost full royalties from certain digital platforms (namely GOG.com, GreenMan Gaming, GamersGate, and Desura). So if you have yet to pick up the game, please be sure to get it from one of those platforms ;)

After Clandestine, we're planning to return to the Expeditions series for a sequel.