game development

Pit People Update 4 – Coming June 22nd

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PIT PEOPLE UPDATE 4: VIBRANT VILLAINS is wrapping up development now. The Pit People Update will release on both Xbox One Game Preview and Steam Early Access on June 22, 2017!

This update has taken us longer than previous updates due to the amount of content Update 4 will include. We have been working on the next part of the story along with a whole new world map that will have 15 new side missions. We’re also happy to announce that we’ve got two new series of side quests in the City, each with multiple parts to the quests!

With everything combined, Pit People players can expect at least another 5 hours of gameplay in Update 4!

We’ve also got additional improvements: The House will have custom gear buttons for the creatures, the Marquette will display how many items you already have for any items being sold, the ability to choose to allow/disallow Auto-battlers from your PVP session, and more! (See the full change list below)

Live Streaming June 19th – 4:00PM to 5:30PM PST

Before we release Update 4, we’ll be giving a sneak peek of the changes we’ve made in the game and the decisions behind those improvements.

Part of the stream will showcase one of our new World Map missions and we’ll also do a task from Emperor’s Orders (which came out in Update 3) — We aren’t going to be showing story, so no need to worry about seeing big spoilers!

Our co-founder & art director, Dan Paladin, will be hosting the live stream on the Behemoth’s Twitch channel and we’re going to do simultaneous broadcasts on Mixer and Facebook Live for the first time!
 

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Pit People VO Spotlight: Ashly Burch

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(See the introduction of the full Pit People VO Cast in “The Voices of Pit People“)

Generally speaking I like to give any creative person I’m working with a good amount of ‘room’. It creates the opportunity for the artist to breathe a lot of their own life into whatever they are doing. With Ashly, my approach remained the same. It’s always fun seeing someone knock stuff out of the park!

I went in very confident as I’ve known Ashly for years now and was certain she’d be able to nail the roles. The spectrum of characters we requested from her was pretty wide – there’s our iconic Recruitador Sofia, who wants to confidently claim everything on the planet for Spain in the gibberish form of the Spanish language. Then we have things like semi-creepy Spidaur ladies or partially insane Vampiresses. Then we have Hailey who has just the perfect amount of sass and tough love mixed together. I really couldn’t be happier.

There’s one recording Ashly made in particular that always makes me smirk a little when giving a female human a destination on the grid: “Ayyyyyyyyy..”

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The Voices of Pit People

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Dan and Ashly during a recording session in the Whisper Room

 

The idea of a voice actor cast is both humorous and daunting within the context of The Behemoth and the breadth of games we’ve worked on. At one point it’s non-existent, at another very minimal, and then eventually it became the most amazing narration, to me at least, I had ever encountered. It’s safe to say Will Stamper’s BattleBlock Theater (BBT) narration is something special on multiple levels. From the writing to the humor and to even the tears. To watch this finely tuned levity weave its way throughout the game with surgical precision, it would be hard to think it was, well, a layer that came much later in the development process.

With Pit People, the process drastically differed from that of BBT in many ways. The gameplay, the story, the voices, the look; everything was started more or less in tandem. There are probably a bunch of interviews of me talking about Dan Paladin’s sketchbook containing these teams with minimal UI. I’ll be clear, that came first, but what followed was not only quick, and to put simply with a term easily overused within these walls… organic.

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