- Speedrun Contest! - 4 March 2023
Hi! SongofSoil is hosting a speedrun Contest for WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests. SongofSoil is an avid member of the speedrun community over on speedruns.com and is offering a challenge for those who love speedrunning! The Event starts on March 5th and ends on March 31st! All the Infos and Rules of the Event can be found over on SongofSoils Event Thread on Speedrun.com (Link) It has been really cool for us to see the creativity of the speedruns of WHALIEN and we are excited what the fastest run will be like! For a taste of it you can join our discord and coordinate with other runners. To mark the occasion we released a patch (v1.0.2) that added the ability to delete your savegame from MainMenu->Options->Game Settings The Speedrun challange is a community contest hosted by SongofSoil and is not sponsored by Forbidden Folds. Forbidden Folds is not responsible or obligated to enforce any rule…
- Patch v1.0.2 Hotfix - 4 March 2023
- Fixed an issue where players were unable to access the options menu after manually resizing the window
- Patch Notes for v1.0.2 - 4 March 2023
Thank you everyone for playing reporting bugs, if you encountered any - here's the next set of fixes! Patch notes: - Added the ability to delete your savegame from MainMenu->Options->Game Settings - Improved performance in final level - More minor bugfixes
- Patch Notes for v1.0.1 - 25 January 2023
Hey everyone, thank you so much for playing WHALIEN! We've addressed a few issues that came up during the release. Patch notes: Prevent players from manually toggling fullscreen mode using F11 Fixed bug in video options menu Fixed some minor gameplay bugs
- WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests Release 🐳 - 24 January 2023
We’ve been eagerly awaiting this moment! After a ton of concepting, designing, programming and testing, WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests is finally ready for the public. We are so happy to finally have all of you playing the game and hearing your feedback! Release Patch Notes: General performance improvements Added Achievements Fixed a few visual bugs Fixed potential crash in latter half of game Improved overall experience We wish you a fintastic adventure in the Whale, the team at Forbidden Folds P.S.: If you encounter any bugs or glitches, please do report them to us in the forum. That way we can continue making WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests the smoothest possible experience!
- Release Date Announcement! - 5 January 2023
There are unexpected guests on the Doorstep! In WHALIEN you Push and Pull your way through a heartfelt adventure! Fin, the mechanical whale you call home, is plagued by mischievous Squiddies. As Ernest Hemingwhale you set out on a Fin-tastic journey to help your friend with his unexpected guests. We are overjoyed to announce that WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests will be released on January 24th. Wishlist now to be notified on release.
- DEVELOPER LIVESTREAM - 7 October 2022
WHALE HELLO AGAIN! For the second time ever, we are going to do a Developer Livestream on Saturday 8th October! Join us playing the Demo of WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests LIVE directly on Steam! We are going to play through the demo a few time and will talk about the game, our development process and everything else you would like to know! See you soon! In the meantime you can wishlist WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests and play the demo yourself, just go to our store page and press the big green download button.
- Next Fest Demo Infos! - 6 October 2022
Hi! Here are a few things we would like to share with all the people interested in trying the new demo for WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests. Please be aware that the game is still in development and some things are still expected to change. You might also encounter one or two bugs along your playthrough, if so we would love to hear about them. Please feel free to reach out to us either through the steam community forum or in our Discord server, we love to help if able. For the best experience, please check your settings first! We do our best to detect the best settings for you from the start, but sometimes a little tweaking of those goes a long way. Especially if you experience some hickups during playing, we recommend setting the overall graphics to a lower setting and check your resolution settings. Please feel free to tag us if you are livestreaming or recording your playthrough! Seeing p…
- DEVELOPER LIVESTREAM WHALIEN @ NEXT FEST on Wednesday 5th October - 4 October 2022
Hi everyone! HERE IS THE BROADCAST LINK https://steamcommunity.com/broadcast/watch/76561198047591323 We are going to do a Developer Stream on Wednesday 5th October! (9am PST, 12pm EST, 6pm CEST) Join us playing the Demo of WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests LIVE directly on Steam! We are going to play through the demo and you can ask questions about the game, our development process, our studio or anything else! In the meantime you can try out the DEMO for yourself! Download it right now on our store page!
- WHALIEN @ SteamNextFest - 3 October 2022
WHALIEN - Unexpected Guests has a brand new DEMO just in time for Next Fest! Push and Pull your way through our heartfelt adventure and delve into a world full of charming little details. Fin, the mechanical whale you call home, is plagued by mischievous Squiddies. As Ernest Hemingwhale you set out on a Fin-tastic journey to help your friend with his unexpected guests. Play the Demo! Download it here right now! Our new Demo lets you experience the beginning of the game and it will be live during Next Fest (Oct 3rd to Oct 10th). We are overjoyed to share it with you and would love to hear your thoughts! Please also feel free to stream the game! For questions or comments you can reach us on social media @forbiddenfolds (twitter, Instagram, TikTok). Important Information: For the best experience, please consider adjusting the graphics and language settings to your needs! If you encounter a…
- Update - 20 July 2022
This time we have more of an announcement than development insights. Starting this week, we are going to take a break from our biweekly DevLog because WHALIEN is entering a crucial development stage. But don’t worry, when we return in fall we will have some exciting new things to share, alongside more amazingly pixelated gifs. To brighten up your day in the meantime, here are a few impressions of Ernest’s last vacation:
- Devlog #013 - 6 July 2022
Throughout WHALIEN, there are lots of actions that are triggered when the player (or any other character/object) reaches a designated area. Such actions can be noticeable for the player - like triggering a scripted sequence or the camera zooming out - but some actions are also unnoticeable – like saving the game and setting a new checkpoint. Most frequently we need to trigger multiple actions at the beginning of a new level, such as saving the game updating the latest checkpoint loading/unloading other levels starting a scripted action displaying some dialogue unlocking an ability and displaying the corresponding tutorial video unlocking an achievement etc. All of these actions are ideally executed at the same time, but there are cases where some of them need to be executed in a predetermined order. For example, we might want to first display a dialogue and afterwards unlock a new abili…
- Devlog #012 - 22 June 2022
Idea Last time we described our SpringPeople in all their different variations. Since some of them are important for the main story, to guide the player towards important POIs they need to be able to move around the place. To this end, we came up with a rail system. Core We based the SpringPeopleRails on an older system we called ActorFollowSpline, which consists of an actor reference and a spline, along which the actor is moved bit by bit. For the SpringPeopleRails, we had additional requirements like moving multiple Springies in different directions on one spline. So, we changed the ActorFollowSpline code accordingly and created a BP child-class to handle the specifics for the SpringieRails. For our additional requirements, we created the struct ActorToMoveData, which consists of an actor-reference, the current distance along the spline, the movement direction and a flag bIsMoving. (T…
- Devlog #011 - 8 June 2022
(Happy Springies enjoying their vacation) Idea Since all human inhabitants except for Ernest have left Fin, his interiors would feel a bit empty without anyone else around. To counteract this, we came up with the SpringPeople, automatons that were built by Ernest’s ancestors to help them with their work. SpringPeople were invented to help accomplish tasks like cooking or gathering items. Although they look and behave human-like, they can be easily identified by having a spring instead of legs, which makes them bounce around whenever the humans would push or pull them. After all the humans (except Ernest) had left Fin, the SpringPeople began claiming the whale for themselves and built small villages and communities. Core The basic functionality that unites all SpringPeople is their reaction to the player’s actions. Each SpringPeople owns a WhaliumComponent (as described last week) to rec…
- Devlog #010 - 25 May 2022
In this final entry of our core ability series, we will cover our WhaliumComponent. Every object in WHALIEN can be made influenceable by Ernest’s “magnetic” abilities through adding a WhaliumComponent to it. The thought behind the component was to unify how we manage actors that we want to be influenced by Ernest’s abilities. We chose to implement this with an ActorComponent instead of a base actor, because the component approach made more sense considering the wide range of possible objects or parts that we wanted to be influenceable. Take for example an actor that should have two individually influenceable parts: The basic WhaliumActor class would only be able to accomodate a singular influenceable part, so we would need to create a separate DoubleWhaliumActor or fiddle around with ChildActorComponents (which is never fun). In the component-based approach, we can simply add one Whaliu…
- Devlog #009 - 11 May 2022
After we’ve covered Ernest’s glove in the last post, we will now take a closer look at our pearl magnets, Mrs Pull and Mr Push as we call them. While Ernest can only manipulate objects in his direct surroundings with the gloves, he can throw Mrs Pull and Mr Push which allows him to influence objects that are far away and otherwise unreachable. (Mrs Pull and Mr Push in cooperation.) Core Custom radial force component At its core, the pearl magnets consist of a custom RadialForceComponent. The RadialForceComponent provided by UE4 can exert a force based on the distance between the component’s center and the influenced object. Since we needed a little bit more control over the radial force, we created our own RadialForceComponent and adapted some of the code to our requirements. We determine which objects to influence by performing a query from the pearl’s center with its radius each frame…
- Devlog #008 - 27 April 2022
In the next few weeks, we are finally going to talk you through the core mechanics of our game. WHALIEN is all about pushing and pulling. For this, our protagonist Ernest Hemingwhale owns a set of gloves to grab and push away objects in his vicinity. Later, he also finds two magnetic pearls that can be thrown and suspended anywhere in the level and thereby push and pull objects located farther away. We can make any object influenceable for our gloves and pearls by adding a WhaliumComponent to it. This first post is going to give insight on the idea and inner workings behind the glove ability. Basic Glove CollisionBox At its core, our Glove consists of a collision box that overlaps with all objects that have a WhaliumComponent. Each frame, it iterates over all overlapped WhaliumComponents and applies a force towards the box’ center if we want to pull the object, or away from the center i…
- Devlog #007 - 13 April 2022
In WHALIEN, Ernest communicates with Fin using the phonebook he’s always carrying with him. We took this as an opportunity to convey our story in a more charming way than regular subtitles, by displaying the conversations between the two as text chats. (Basic look of a chat bubble in game) Design, UI We had the following requirements for our chat system: each chat entry should display a picture of the current speaker that properly conveys their current emotion the conversation partner should be able to react with their own chat message after a certain amount of time the chat log should automatically scroll down to the newest message and old messages should fade out after a while. In order to dynamically add and remove individual chat messages, we split up our chat system into three different widgets: W_Subtitle to display a single message on the screen. W_SubtitleContainer to keep track…
- Devlog #006 - 30 March 2022
As you may know, the whale that WHALIEN takes place in is infested by slimy little Squiddies - it’s why the player takes on his adventure in the first place. In order to properly convey the infestation, we needed to be able to place large masses of Squiddies that don’t have a significant impact on the game’s performance. Therefore, we created the SwarmSquiddies which are spread all across the interior of the whale, covering walls, floor and decor. Implementation: Having large masses of Squiddies means rendering many of the same mesh simultaneously, which instanced static meshes are predestined for. In UE4, instanced static meshes are managed using the UInstancedStaticMeshComponent, which can dynamically add or remove instances and can be used to adjust their transform. We split up the logic between the SwarmSquiddieManager, which controls the rendering of the meshes, and the SwarmSquidd…
- Devlog #005 - 16 March 2022
Idea: In order to make the world of WHALIEN more lively and immersive, we decided to make our music diegetic, meaning that the audio sources are actually located in the world. We accomplished this by placing loudspeakers all over our levels. So, the players can determine what direction the music is coming from and how far the speaker is away. We first tested this idea in one of our elevator levels, where we wanted the elevator to play its smooth elevator tunes by itself. The player should hear the music fade in as they approached the lift. We liked this concept of localized music so much that we decided to implement it throughout the entire game. (The current model of the LevelMusicPlayer is a gramophone) Implementation: Conveniently, UE4 already provides a lot of audio functionality so that we were able to implement the entire system without the need for any middleware or the likes. At…
