Just as promised, Black The Fall is out now on the Nintendo Switch eShop for Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, available for purchase at 10% discount, after a successful launch in December for United States, Canada and Mexico.

Grab your Joy-Con™ controllers and prepare for some emotional time travel into a dark world inspired by Romanian Communism and 90’s Sci-fi universe, as you take control of an old machinist who manipulates his way out of The System.

After a short debate, The Party has unanimously agreed to open a new branch this Winter, in order to enable more workers to serve the country. After being successfully launched earlier this year on Steam, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Black The Fall is coming to the Nintendo Switch system on December 14th in United States, Canada and Mexico and, in early January, in Europe.


Grab your Joy-Con™ controllers and prepare for some emotional time travel into a dark world inspired by Romanian Communism and 90’s Sci-fi universe, as you take control of an old machinist who manipulates his way out of The System.


Check out the trailer HERE and the Nintendo Switch™ game page HERE[www.nintendo.com].

We are thrilled to let you know that, starting today, Black The Fall makes your RAZER Chroma[www2.razerzone.com] devices light up! The RAZER Chroma integration for Black The Fall centres around offering hints regarding what controls to use when and marking occasional challenges in a celebratory way.

Get ready for some red, white and yellow lights to dance on your desk when playing as Black.

Black The Fall Patch 2.0 notes:

Updates:
- Razer Chroma integration for keyboard, mouse and mouse pad
- The Halloween mini-game is included in the Main Menu under Extras.

Fixes:
- Having multiple controllers plugged in works now
- additional key mapping for playing with the arrows and surrounding keys (press 0 / Insert to interact)

My name is Cristian Diaconescu. I'm a 3D artist, game designer, motorcycle rider, and the creative director at Sand Sailor Studio[www.blackthefall.com], with over 15 years of experience and university studies in both programming and graphic design. My game Black The Fall, a communist-inspired puzzle-platformer title, was funded on Kickstarter and backed by Execution Labs. The award-winning title was published on July 11, 2017, by Square Enix Collective on Steam, PS4 and Xbox One.

Black The Fall was born in 2014 as an art project: a black and white stealth-platformer set in an alienated world. The game concept came as a means to illustrate and express rebellion against the mechanisms of a heavily corrupted system, rooted in the decades of communism Romania has endured. In the months that followed, myself and co-founder Nicoleta Iordanescu discovered that there's much to envisage about the communist mentality: distrust, dehumanizing work environment, and uniformity.
We chose to enter the arena of puzzle genre, using it to illustrate what it means to cope with a restrictive regime. We lived in times where there was no freedom of speech, intellectuals were thrown into prisons and tortured, food was subject to rationing, there was no access to contraception. Access to western culture was minimal. It sounds Orwellian, but unfortunately, this was the reality in most communist countries.

The worst part is that it's still happening in some parts of the world. Additionally, as we explored this path we realized that the oppressive mechanics apply to the western world today, where a lot of people feel forced to conforming to a system they don’t believe in.

The journey from conception to release was a crazy ride, with ups and downs. We learned so much, made a few mistakes, and scored a lot of successes:

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1. Cohesive Team

The development of Black The Fall as a puzzle-platformer inspired by Communism began at the end of 2014, after the Kickstarter campaign, with five team members: two programmers and one artist who joined myself and Nicoleta, both artists and founders. After almost a year, two more artists and a community manager joined. Then, almost a year later, one last and much-needed team member joined: a programmer dedicated to console porting.
This little piece of studio history shows that we began our journey as a heterogeneous group that, in time, after tens of Jira sprints, daily stand-ups, weekly meetings and tens of ad-hoc brainstorming sessions, built a dynamic together.

Two of the most important parts of the development dynamic were: 1. the designer-friendly interface created by Razvan, one of the programmers, in order for level designers to be able to create diagrams easily, and 2. the scene ownership rotation approach we opted for, in favor of the specialization on broad activities.

For example, rather than having one person dedicated to environment art, we’d have one person responsible for a scene in terms of environment, puzzle mechanic, light, camera angle, readability etc. This would give a type of work autonomy which moved things along faster. Then the scenes would be tested by the others, and eventually be moved into someone else’s queue for a fresh view.

As we neared the final stage of polishing, our team was already on a roll and we realized that, for the next project, everything would run much smoother, from planning and forecasting to role assignation and collaboration.

2. Independent game concept under Square Enix Collective publishing deal

We were lucky to sign a publishing deal with Square Enix Collective which gave us complete creative freedom, but with much needed fixed milestones. On top of that, Square Enix offered high-quality QA which got us through the pains of consoles TRC (we'll talk more about this in challenges below).

3. Getting the story out there

This is an area where we really can’t complain. Around launch, we had pretty much every big publication we ever dreamt of covering Black The Fall. A big thank you goes to our PR experts: Craig (Kartridge), Stefano and Keith (both from Renaissance PR); and Square Enix’s lovely community managers Amy, Cat and Ria, with whom we had a nice and smooth collaboration. A couple of months before launch we created a long brief on the game concept so they could pitch it to people interested in the topic. The requests coming their way together with all the review requests coming directly to us made for a nice mix to keep everyone busy day and night for a couple of weeks. As well as that, in 2016 we showcased Black The Fall at more than ten events in US, Europe and Asia, getting to meet many of our players and introduce our game to puzzle aficionados all over the world.

4. Brainstorming and brushing up

For every game character and new game chapter we had a brainstorming process that worked really well for us (thoroughly described here). This helped us choose, in a democratic and meritocratic manner, the winning concept and throw away the useless ones. This is vital, especially when you’re working on your first game and you want your all-time favorite game elements to be included.
Talking about keeping clean, we also developed a system that would help us brush-up the scenes to get the best possible player experience.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. Early Access is not for everyone

When you’re new in the development and the publishing business, you feel like trying it all, but some actions have long-lasting consequences. For example, launching your game on Early Access as a way of testing it out and see how the audience receives it. But we didn’t consider the game’s replayability, the prospect of completely changing the initial prototype after a couple of months or that we might launch the final game three years after Early Access.

Our Early Access ran for about three months, but we had to close it as we were about to launch our Kickstarter campaign, which doesn’t fit in at all with the idea behind Early Access.

Additionally, a bug we couldn’t have anticipated is that somewhere in the Steam back-end the game is recorded to have launched on July 4, 2014, rather than July 11, 2017. This severely affected the game showing up on any Steam chart or list. That was a worry because a lot of websites pull their data directly from Steam, and it also meant the game showed up as having launched in 2014 on Humble Bundle as well.

We slowly figured all of this out after the launch and got it fixed, but the visibility you get on Steam for clean launching the game was forever lost to us.

However, there’s plenty of documentation on Steam visibility and strategies to adopt, so there’s still work that to be done.

2. Launch Timing

The perfect launch date is something of a mythical sweet spot: it doesn’t actually exist, but you can plan to get as close to it as possible. Common sense is to avoid launching shortly before or immediately after competitors, or around triple-A games that are everyone’s sweethearts like Overwatch or Battlefield.

Another obvious one is to avoid winter holidays and end of November, but a sneaky one is avoiding spring and summer sales.
If you want to launch on three platforms at the same time, then you’ll need to make sure you find a date when all platforms can support your launch with a banner on the homepage, a blog post, or some sort of promotion.

3. Console port planning

Speaking of consoles, even though Unity is our best friend when it comes to porting, do bear in mind the TRC’s you need to meet for each platform. Complying with this thick set of rules can take longer than polishing to get a decent frame rate on Xbox One.

Porting to consoles took us around four months -- double the anticipated two-month window we’d allocated for it -- though we had two strong allies: Adrian, our programmer dedicated to working on porting the game, and our second ally: Square Enix’s QA team, based in Canada. I can also dare to assume that if Square Enix Collective hadn’t been our publisher, somehow this TRC compliance thing would’ve taken even longer.

4. Steam marketing strategy

Steam is not something you can tackle overnight, nor is it a platform that you can trust will work to your advantage.

It’s a brilliant, dynamic creature that can act as either your ally or your enemy -- it really depends on how well you read the documentation. Try and build a strategy and use it to your advantage, and bear in mind the algorithm changed significantly once Steam dropped Greenlight.

One key takeaway is that Steam tends to push games that sell well and/or have raving reviews. These are the two main indicators that indicate to Steam that the audience loves you -- an important measure, given Steam wants its customers to be happy. So encouraging your community to leave a positive review if they enjoyed the experience around launch is an excellent idea that will help you in the long run.

Conclusion

Overall, our biggest takeaway is that we should’ve followed Little Finger’s advice to Sansa: Fight every battle everywhere, always, in your mind. Everyone is your enemy, everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events are happening all at once. Live that way and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before.
Final pieces of advice to have in mind, both in business and indeed in your daily life if you can:

1. Hope is not a strategy
Whenever you draft a plan, be it development or communication, if the word ‘hope’ sneaks in, that should serve as a big red flag. Hope is just an indicator of our inner desires and it has nothing to do with real-world factors that can and will influence the outcome.

2. Always ask, never assume
Any collaboration you have, from a device acquisition to closing contracts, always try to anticipate gray areas and ask the right questions just to rain check if things can go as you expect them to. More often than not we have expectations based on best-case scenarios, and real live development of events can leave us disappointed.
Also, never assume you’re the first person in the world that’s had a particular issue or need. Anything can be Googled and there’s a nice indie community online that will share recommendations or give a piece of advice if they’ve encountered something similar.

3. Waiting is not an action
If you need something from someone else, don’t expect them to drop everything and make you their priority. You don’t know what their agenda is and sometimes our initial messages can get lost. If you urgently need something from someone else, don’t be ashamed to follow up with them, or their colleagues, by email or phone. Or ultimately look for alternate solutions. Too many people are opting for silence instead of a clear cut answer like “I can’t”, or “I’d like to, but I don’t have time” or something. So, please, don’t wait! Waiting just causes frustration when the stakes are high.

All in all, it was a glorious adventure; we’ve met creative-kind people, we learned a lot professionally and, boy, we laughed so hard during these thousands of hours of game development. We’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Actually, this summer we’ve wrapped our heads around a new project. Can’t wait to share more about it in a future article.

To spice things up a bit for October’s sake, The Party has decided to pay its respects to Halloweeners by efficiently preparing some pumpkins for export. However, it seems that not everyone is on board with the decision and a sabotage is being planned among the workers. Destroying the pumpkins would act as an SOS message sent to the other countries, that things are not as happy and bright as presented by the Party to the outside world.

Will you join the movement and help destroy some Halloween pumpkins?
If you already own Black The Fall, just check the game menu for the Halloween mini-game. If you don’t own it, you might reconsider that, given the 33% discount. And, you know, if you’re happy with Black The Fall, it would help us tremendously if you’d leave a review.

May you have a Black Halloween!

To wrap up the melancholic journey we started with in the FAQ section and continued with the Communism related blog posts[www.blackthefall.com]. shaping the context of the real life events that inspired some game scenes, characters and mechanisms, we thought of sharing with you a couple of real life photos, that served as inspiration for some game scenes.

Communism intended to be the religion of efficiency, pragmatism and equality through hard work and community values; the ideal sharing economy. Within this paradigm, the individual, the soul, the mind, the spiritual, were all considered distractions from the path they drafted for humanity: progress through physical work and equality for everyone. Sounds awesome? Well, perspectives: consider being equal to the ones on top for a few seconds. Lovely right? How about being equal to the less fortunate? This is a question we usually forget to ask ourselves when we think of equality, thanks to our illusory superiority[en.wikipedia.org] & friends[en.wikipedia.org].

The Church

With this purpose in mind, progress through hard work, factories were built in the urban areas and farmers were brought to the cities. Old houses and churches were wiped out and blocks of flats were built instead. And this is pretty much where the Romanian story breaks apart from how religion and the regime got together in the Communist bloc. Although the Roman-Catholic church was severely persecuted by the regime (churches demolished, priests thrown in prisons and tortured), the Orthodox Church was quite a strong ally of The State[en.wikipedia.org] (lots of priests were agents of The Securitate). It was a win-win deal: the submissive Church would continue to keep their lands and exert power, while also supporting the Communist doctrine, like a bad-ass marketing agency that has the best influencers, and an audience reach the size of internet access market in developed countries.

[WARNING: spoilers ahead! If you’re the type who likes to be surprised, you’d better stop reading.]

There’s still a romanticized view of how Communism persecuted the Church in Romania, but there's also the harsh reality of the snitches. Some confessions went directly to the files of The Securitate acting like an ancestor of web cookies. For such a a sneaky maneuver we just had to allocate a secret room and an achievement in Black The Fall.
The Queues

The State had monopoly over any type of production and distribution, that was the rule and it was ok-ish for a while, but in the ‘80s the sugar hit the fan[en.wikipedia.org]. Rationing made everyone’s life about survival. The rations for one portion were: half a bread a day, one kg of sugar/flour/rice and oil a month. On Christmas each person could have one kg of oranges and half a kg of chocolates. Store clerks had real power through their direct access to food, so the exchange network grew very strong among them. In the 80's offering bread to get some darn eggs was a victory for you and your family.
Besides the lack in food variety; electricity, hot water and heating were also scarce. Moreover, each family could have the gas tank refilled once a month. You’d have to wake up at 2-3 am and queue for that as well. Queue can sometimes be fun. Look at Gamescom queues: fun! However, the ones I’m talking about didn't involve weather chit-chat, nor celebrity gossiping, but lots of quarrels, especially around Christmas when the pressure bringing your family together for a warm meal in a heated room was so high.
Public transportation was not breezy either. In this frenzy of saving money through resources scarcity, people had to hang on the trams or buses on their way to work. Just like modern Japan, without the fancy people pushing you inside the train.
The Revolution

The Romanian Revolution[en.wikipedia.org] is a mystery not yet entirely solved in terms of who was shooting who and why. It’s maybe an event too recent and to hurtful to be openly discussed. I mean not out of shyness, but for safety reasons for those involved.
Anyway, there are a few undeniable facts: the high number of injured and killed[en.wikipedia.org], the burning of the National Library[en.wikipedia.org] and consequent loss of thousands of books and manuscripts, the confusion, the hasty trial and shooting of the Ceausescu couple and the high hopes of the Romanian people for a normal life: abuse free and independent.
And just like any high quality set of expectations, this one was filled with all the positive aspects of the new happy life to come. Some people were ready to take on the responsibilities that come with the power of choice. While others became melancholic for the times when the state used to provide some food, a job and shelter, like a conscientious authoritative parental figure that always knows what's best for you.

#FreedomIsControl

We're happy to let you know that we're bringing Black The Fall again at Gamescom 2017, which this year takes place on 22-26 August, in Cologne.
We'll showcase the game as part of the amazing Indie Arena Booth[indiearenabooth.de] (Hall 10.1, Booth A-030), the world’s largest shared game developer showcase. We'll be close to our friends, the creators of Oh My God Heads, FAR: Lone Sails, Orwell or Frost Punk. But there will be so many more fun, quirky, artsy games worth checking out (full list here).

If you plan to be at Gamescom this year, we'd really love to see you, so do stop by our booth to say hi or try the demo we prepare especially for Gamescom, together with a little surprise.

PS: If you're into Romanian games or you just want to see what we've got, do check out the Romanian Game Developers Association booth (Hall 10.1, Booth D-061) where you can meet Killhouse Games[inthekillhouse.com], Rikodu[www.rikodu.com], Angry Mob[www.angrymobgames.com], White Pond[www.urbanstrifegame.com], Carbon Incubator[carbon-incubator.com] and Holotech[facerig.com].

See you there!

Hi all,

It’s been two weeks since the launch of Black The Fall, thank you so much for taking the time to give us consistent feedback during this time. We have been listening and working hard on the first patch for Black The Fall, and although most of the feedback has been positive we wanted to make the experience as smooth as possible for players and address some of the minor gripes you’ve been having with the game, so this introduces us to our first patch.

Patch 1.0
Settings options:

• Added Vsync option in Settings.
  
• Additional keyboard mappings: CONTROL for crouch, Left SHIFT for running.

Fixes:

• Fix for player letting go of the ledge if pause menu is deactivated (via keyboard - Escape key or controller back button).
  
• Fix for game menus appearing off-screen on ultra-wide monitors.
  
• Fix for the resolution not changing when selecting a new value with the same width but different height.
  
• Fix for the resolution values displaying incorrectly if closing the game (Alt-F4) while in the settings menu and then restarting the game.
  
• Fix for input not being received from additional connected controllers.
  
• Fix for the EyeSentry getting stuck on the player when running rapidly in and out of cover.
  
• Fix for the EyeSentry in Revolution, when you bypass the bus sequence by breaking the EyeSentries with the designator

If you experience any other bugs, crashes or suggestions, please continue to post here on the steam forums, or grab us on Twitter and Facebook.

Cheers!

PS: To have access to the latest Black The Fall build, you need to exit the Steam desktop app and log back into Steam.

July 11th will be remembered in history as the day The Party has launched Black The Fall. There will be yearly parades with people cheering and walking synchronously. Some will dance and sing about the greatness of Black. But until then you can watch the launch trailer

Black The Fall is out, but Black is still trapped, help him break the chains of oppression today!

We’d love to hear your thoughts! For game feedback, gamers all over the world, are invited to unite
here. If you encounter any proletarian bugs, please report them here.