After saying they were close to the alpha stage back in December, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture developer The Chinese Room has announced that it’s officially in alpha stage.
“Well, we made it,” they wrote on their blog. “Last week we submitted the alpha build for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture to Sony Santa Monica for build approval and they gave us the big thumbs up. This means we’re hurtling straight towards Beta and then Gold.”
In this back half of development, The Chinese Room will be ramping up detail in all angles, polishing, integrating, fixing bugs, doing lots of QA with Sony, and finishing up all the audio. So far, the world and scenes are locked, meaning they know exactly what’s happening in the game and when it’s supposed to happen, but they still need to get it all working properly.
They added:
We’ve just wrapped the first instance of a brand new AI system, which I can’t talk about without giving too much away, but together with the effort now going into ambient visual effects is bringing the world to life around us. The stunning voice-overs recorded last year are being fleshed out with visuals and foley, and we’re heading back to the studio in a couple of months to add the last parts of the game in, and there’s some incredibly exciting news headed your way about that in the near future.
Because they’re so busy with the game, no one is going to GDC, no one is doing interviews, and there aren’t going to be any new trailers or screenshots for some time. We should expect more news on this PlayStation 4 game in March, with The Chinese Room finishing their post by saying, “This is going to be our best game yet.”
[Source: The Chinese Room]
