Happy New Year! We're excited to announce that Chasm 1.050 is now available. While the major feature is language support for 5 new languages (Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese), we’ve also made improvements to the world, backtracking, item drops, and much more. A huge thanks goes out to our community for all the feedback and support!

Here is the full list of changes:

• added translations for Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese
  
• added chance for Unique and Legendary item drops with bonus stats
  
• added new shortcuts in Mines and Catacombs to help with backtracking (new games only)
  
• added Savepoint to Mines shortcut hub
  
• added Inventory sorting by Name, Value, and Type
  
• added 4th treasure chest room to Mines, Catacombs, Gardens and Keep areas (new games only)
  
• added several new rooms (new games only)
  
• updated to FNA 19.01 with new audio engine (fixes "Out of Memory" crashes on some machines)
  
• changed Portals to ask for destination after more than 2 unlocked
  
• changed Map screen Area connection labels from words to icons
  
• various improvements to UI
  
• various tweaks to drop rates, player speed, spell upgrades, etc
  
• fixed rare glitching into ground when walljumping in corners
  
• fixed interaction status message spamming
  
• fixed item descriptions sometimes overflowing box bounds
  
• fixed stray character on Name Entry screen when opened with keyboard
  
• fixed Temple Guards glaive not being destroyed on death
  
• fixed missing boss flag before final boss
  
• fixed wasp buzzing playing after death
  
• fixed crouching in spikes without taking damage

We'll have more coming soon, so please stay tuned!

It's 1992, and the arcade is the place to be for the most advanced and challenging experiences around. A mysterious new game has appeared that has all the kids at school talking. This game is different every time you play it, and the leaderboards reflect only those with the quickest wits to combat its twisting dungeons, ferocious enemies, and unpredictable nature.

When people first play Chasm, many don’t realize that there is a robust world building engine powering it. After all, it plays like a good old fashioned dungeon crawling Metroidvania. We had tons of ideas of ways we could leverage the procedural dungeon creation engine, so we set to work and built our first DLC for Chasm: the Guilean Arcade Pack. And best of all, it’s free!

Unlike the main mode, which generates a full world map when you start up your campaign, the new Arcade Mode generates a new layout of the world on the fly. Leave a room and come back, and it’ll be a completely new room. You have 8 minutes to explore each area of the world. If you don’t reach the next area or die along the way, your game is over.

The Arcade Mode is really three modes in one:

• Daily Challenge: Every day you get one shot to leave your mark on Karthas history. Stay alive, progress as far as you can, and rack up your kill count and reach the next area as quickly as possible for maximum points to earn your spot at the top of the daily leaderboard.
  
• Weekly Challenge: Same idea as the Daily Challenge, but you can take your time and get to know the map. Play through as many times as you like, finding the best shortcuts, loot, and power-ups along the way. Your highest score for the week will be recorded for posterity.
  
• Practice: No one’s keeping score but you, so just have fun in this mode. Use the randomly generated seed to explore a new dungeon just for you, or enter your own seed number to explore a dungeon you’re already familiar with.

The Guildean Arcade Pack is currently only available on Steam, but we are working hard to bring it to all platforms as soon as we are able.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

In addition to the new Arcade Mode, we’ve been adding a bunch of improvements to the game based on player feedback since launch. Combat should feel a lot more responsive, and enemies will react more realistically. (Well, as realistic as we think a zombie in an underground catacomb might react!) We won’t go into all the little tweaks and adjustments here, but if you’d like to find out all of the detail, you can check out our release notes page.



Lastly, we'd like to quickly mention that we are participating in the Steam Halloween sale and the game is currently 10% off. Grab it while it's hot!

Happy hunting!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shTHtaF4ASA

That’s a wrap everyone! Chasm is done, and it’s now being played by people worldwide. To say that it’s a surreal feeling would be an understatement. I’ve done pretty much nothing but Chasm for the last 5-6 years and now it’s out of my hands.

Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. Some of you may have heard about us years ago and some just recently. Regardless of when you became a part of this community, you were part of something special. Even in the indie scene, it’s rare for a ragtag group of aspiring developers to be able to keep hammering away at a project year after year until it was done right. We learned a ton along the way and never compromised. With the help of my best friends and teammates, we all made Chasm the best we could.

I wrote a retrospective recap of our development journey for the PlayStation Blog, which you can read here. If you’re too PCMR to check out a PlayStation blog, the tl;dr version is that the Bit Kid team is composed of old friends. Our lead programmer, Tim, and I have been friends since high school. Our composer, Jimi, and I have been friends since college. And the rest of the team - Glauber, Dan, and other Dan - have all become lifelong friends too.

Even though Chasm is now officially out, we’re not done yet. We’ve already got ideas for new game modes we’d like to add. New platforms to be on. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop every step of the way.

Thanks for being a part of this journey, and stay tuned for more!

James

Unlike some other games that are developed in secret and then announced about 6 months before launch, Chasm has been in the public eye pretty much from the beginning. Our first post about the game was on IndieDB.com back in January 2013, and we launched a successful Kickstarter campaign just a few months later. It is with a combination of pride, exuberance, relief, and fear that I am hereby officially announcing that we will be launching on July 31, 2018 for $19.99! We’ll be doing a week 1 discount on Steam so keep an eye out for it. And if you haven’t done so already, please add us to your wishlist! (And be sure to tell your friends!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BL162RQXKg

As you probably know, one distinctive feature of Chasm is that the world map is procedurally generated when you start up a new campaign. That feature has led to a lot of questions and confusion, so I’d like to address exactly how it works and why we designed it that way. The latter part is easy to answer: Our entire team is composed of Metroidvania fans! Whether it’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Axiom Verge, we’ve played through our favorite games so often that we’ve long since memorized the maps. We love how those games play but wish we could wipe our memories so we could get that experience of exploration all over again. It’s our hope that people who love Chasm the way we love our favorite games can play it over and over and still have it feel fresh. But at the same time, people who only play the game once should have no idea that there’s anything procedural about it.


Wake up Daltyn, it's almost time!


But that’s not to say that everything’s completely random. The way our system works is that there is a fundamental structure to the game that never changes. If you’re familiar with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night you may recall that first you get the Jewel of Open, then the Leap Stone, then the Soul of Bat - in that order. As you get these upgrades, new areas of the map become accessible. Chasm, like all Metroidvanias, follows this structure. When you start up a campaign, the game always has these key upgrades and plot points in the same place. What’s different is how you get from one key point to the other. Chasm has a bunch of pre-designed rooms that are slotted in modularly in different combinations. So you won’t have any rooms that feel like they were designed by a computer - instead, you’ll encounter rooms in a different order and even encounter new rooms you never saw the first time, and your path will be different each time you start up a new campaign.



Getting that to feel right was way easier said than done. There was a ton of balancing we needed to make sure the procedural engine took into account when it builds a world map. There’s pacing - you don’t want to have a string of combat rooms with lots of enemies and no platforming to break it up, nor do you want the opposite. You don’t want the system to block your progress by requiring a certain ability upgrade that you don’t have yet. You don’t want to have the save points too far apart. (To address a common misconception, Chasm is not a roguelike with permadeath, though there is an option for that for veteran players. Permadeath combined with the changing dungeons makes for a tense experience since you never know how many more rooms you need to make it to the end.) And you want to make sure that there’s just the right amount of treasures and surprises along the way to encourage exploration of every little nook and cranny of the game.

There are some people who like the comfort of getting to know a single map by playing it over and over or being able to follow their favorite YouTuber’s walkthrough of the game. We have an option for that too. Everything randomly generated by the game engine is based off of a seed number. If you enter a specific seed number, you can guarantee a specific map. So if you want to follow a walkthrough, just check their seed number and enter that when you set up your campaign.



We’re very excited - and not a little bit nervous - to send our baby out into the world. We’ve polished and fine tuned every little bit of that game to make sure there were no compromises to our original vision over 5 years ago. We can’t wait to hear what you think on July 31st!

A look at the latest updates to the Tavern.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to let you know that we’ve achieved a major milestone - PRODUCTION IS FINISHED! Here’s what still has to happen between now and launch. First, we've already submitted the game for certification on PlayStation 4 and Vita. While that's in process, we are taking care of pre-launch tasks like prepping all of the text for localization (which might be released as a post-launch update), getting our public bug reporting system back up and running, catching up on paperwork (and a million other small tasks) we've put off for the last few months while we crunched, and, most importantly, coordinating with Sony and Valve to pick the ideal launch date so that we’ll be able to give Chasm the exposure it deserves. The primary factors that we’ll be looking at are dates that are relatively not too crowded and making sure we give ourselves time to reach out to press so they can write up reviews in time for launch. We’ll make a follow up announcement once we lock the final date down. In the meantime, if you have any friends who haven’t heard of Chasm, please be sure to let them know to add it to their Steam wishlist!


Gotta collect them all!

It’s been a little while since our last update since we were just laser focused on finishing up everything in the game. Here’s a quick recap of some of the tasks we completed in the last few months:

• Lots of sound effects added. With the boss and enemy SFX finally completed, we turned our attention to environmental and scripted SFX. It's always amazing to see how much more immersive just a few sounds can make a scene.
  
• Weapons and items improved. We added a bunch of new weapons and items, as well as re-animating the majority of the weapons with more detailed and higher frame rate animations (around double the original frame rates). In addition to the visual side, several improvements to gameplay have been added like the often requested attack cancelling (cutting your air attack short so you can immediately attack again after landing on the ground for two quick hits), as well as new Rod and Pole weapon classes.
  
• Remaining environment art completed. The town was the first area created for the game, and fittingly enough, the last we worked on at the end. Room had to be made for a bunch of new NPCs, as well as some re-organization to make your trips to town as convenient as possible.
  
• Tons of detail in NPC side quests. I think the NPCs really bring the story and game to life. All of their quests are optional, but completing them all makes the town of Karthas feel alive.
  
• Bestiary completed. The Bestiary is a fun little side addition with extra information about the enemies you fight. Each enemy will take a pre-determined number of kills to unlock, and if you unlock all of them you will receive the Zoologist achievement. Please note their item drops cannot be seen until you've gotten them!
  
• We got our ESRB rating! We’re officially E10+ with Fantasy Violence, Simulated Gambling and Alcohol Reference descriptors. So if you were 5 when we did the Kickstarter, you’re old enough to play Chasm today. (ha ha… ha ha… sigh…)
  
  
  
  First look at Rod weapons and attack cancelling.
  
  That’s not even to mention all of the little plumbing details - improving load times, fixing edge case bugs, testing achievements and trophies, etc. - that are part and parcel of releasing a polished game.
  
  We plan on getting Alpha-tier backers access to the full game as soon as possible. As mentioned above we have many post-production / pre-launch tasks to wrap up first, but we are moving as fast as we can. We're looking forward to everyone finally getting their hands on the game and giving us feedback for fine tuning. We anticipate it will be a couple more weeks, but we're not far off now.
  
  
  Taking a break from adventuring with a card game.
  
  Our next update will be a confirmation of the official launch date. That update could come next week, or it may come a few weeks from now. As soon as we know, you’ll know. Thank you again for sticking with us over these many years!

Today’s a big day for us. After years of work, we’re finally confident enough in our estimates for the remaining tasks that we can officially confirm a release time window of this summer! To commemorate this occasion, we put together our first new trailer since around the days of our Kickstarter. Hope you like it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ihs1Sd9ILk

The good folks at Sony were nice enough to let us announce the summer release window on their PS Blog, which gets tons of visitors every day. I know this is the Steam forums, but if you have any friends who play consoles, be sure to point them there. And of course, please let your Steam friends know to add Chasm to their Steam wishlist!

Speaking of Sony, I should also mention that they were gracious enough to include Chasm in their booth at PAX East. So if any of you are going to be in Boston next week, please be sure to stop by and say hi to Dan, our business and marketing guy! Even though only the PS4 version will be playable on the show floor, the full game will be the same on PC.

For those of you who are curious about what we’ve been up to since our last update from a game development perspective, all of the spawn system changes are now done, as is the key background art, placeholder animations and enemy sound effects. We still have to polish the sound effects for the final boss and final cutscene, beef up the items, and polish out NPCs and side quests, along with general balancing and game polish. And then we’re done!

This has been an incredibly arduous undertaking - one that I’ve loved (almost) every minute of, but one that wound up being an even bigger challenge than I expected. I’m grateful for everyone’s support and patience. This community is what has been driving me. I know you guys are all looking for the most kick-ass action-adventure ever to grace a gaming system, and we’re doing everything we can to deliver on that promise. And now, we’re almost there!

Today’s a big day for us. After years of work, we’re finally confident enough in our estimates for the remaining tasks that we can officially confirm a release time window of this summer! To commemorate this occasion, we put together our first new trailer since around the days of our Kickstarter. Hope you like it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ihs1Sd9ILk

The good folks at Sony were nice enough to let us announce the summer release window on their PS Blog, which gets tons of visitors every day. I know this is the Steam forums, but if you have any friends who play consoles, be sure to point them there. And of course, please let your Steam friends know to add Chasm to their Steam wishlist!

Speaking of Sony, I should also mention that they were gracious enough to include Chasm in their booth at PAX East. So if any of you are going to be in Boston next week, please be sure to stop by and say hi to Dan, our business and marketing guy! Even though only the PS4 version will be playable on the show floor, the full game will be the same on PC.

For those of you who are curious about what we’ve been up to since our last update from a game development perspective, all of the spawn system changes are now done, as is the key background art, placeholder animations and enemy sound effects. We still have to polish the sound effects for the final boss and final cutscene, beef up the items, and polish out NPCs and side quests, along with general balancing and game polish. And then we’re done!

This has been an incredibly arduous undertaking - one that I’ve loved (almost) every minute of, but one that wound up being an even bigger challenge than I expected. I’m grateful for everyone’s support and patience. This community is what has been driving me. I know you guys are all looking for the most kick-ass action-adventure ever to grace a gaming system, and we’re doing everything we can to deliver on that promise. And now, we’re almost there!

Time flies! Between the holidays and cranking away at our task list, I just realized it’s been 2 months since our last update. Lots of progress has been made, so here’s where we are right now.


Working on my cannonball in the Gardens.

As I described several months ago, the entire team was given a couple weeks to play through the full build and write up all of our comments, required features, bugs, etc. The agreement we had as a team is that we would synthesize all of that, discuss what’s really important, and put together our final task list out of that. No new features were to be added beyond that list. We went through that exercise back in August and have been working off of that list ever since.

I’m happy to say we’re ticking tasks off of that list at a very steady pace, and we’ve been disciplined about not adding anything new. Just to recap the progress that’s been made, here’s a partial list of what we’ve completed since going through that exercise:

• Improved backtracking and world traversal system
  
• Implemented a system for players to upgrade their Spells
  
• Implemented auto-formatting text system for multi-lingual support
  
• Programmed and animated the final boss battle
  
• Animated all boss intros and deaths
  
• Animated custom deaths for most enemies
  
• Reworked and improved Minibosses
  
• Sound FX for all bosses (except the final) and half of the enemies
  
• Improved Visual FX
  
• Improved scripted scenes
  
• Polished the Map Screen and other UI elements
  
• Improved pacing by interspersing some “breather” rooms with less challenge and more resources, as well as balancing combat, platforming, and puzzle rooms throughout the game

There’s also a ton of other work - a lot of which took even longer to complete than those features listed here - that we got done in that time, but some of it just wouldn’t make sense as a feature in a list. Suffice it to say, those improvements make the game feel a lot tighter and encourage players to continue exploring the world.


The final background art for the Save Rooms.

We’re now about 50% of the way through that final list. We have a date in mind that we think the game will be done and ready to ship, but I’m going to hold off on saying it here just in case my estimate isn’t accurate. Here are some of the remaining tasks:

• Replacing all remaining placeholder animations and background art
  
• Improving the enemy spawn system to make sure that every enemy type shows up in every game, as well as maintaining a healthy variety
  
• Sound FX for the enemies in the second half of game, the final boss, as well as environmental sounds
  
• Beefing up secondary quests
  
• More Items & Weapon system improvements
  
• Additional variation in environmental art & Landmarks
  
• Populate secrets in all areas
  
• Polish NPC dialog and sidequests
  
• Main Menu art
  
• Economy improvements
  
• Difficulty balancing (this will be one of the last things we do)

Again, there are some other tasks on our list that probably only make sense to us, so I’m leaving them off this list for now. Whereas we often felt like the more progress we made the further the finish line pulled away, we’re now seeing it get closer and closer.

As we cross off each of these tasks as we complete them, the list keeps getting shorter. As always, thanks for your ongoing support and patience. We’re getting close and I’m hoping you’ll feel that the wait has been worth it!

Time flies! Between the holidays and cranking away at our task list, I just realized it’s been 2 months since our last update. Lots of progress has been made, so here’s where we are right now.


Working on my cannonball in the Gardens.

As I described several months ago, the entire team was given a couple weeks to play through the full build and write up all of our comments, required features, bugs, etc. The agreement we had as a team is that we would synthesize all of that, discuss what’s really important, and put together our final task list out of that. No new features were to be added beyond that list. We went through that exercise back in August and have been working off of that list ever since.

I’m happy to say we’re ticking tasks off of that list at a very steady pace, and we’ve been disciplined about not adding anything new. Just to recap the progress that’s been made, here’s a partial list of what we’ve completed since going through that exercise:

• Improved backtracking and world traversal system
  
• Implemented a system for players to upgrade their Spells
  
• Implemented auto-formatting text system for multi-lingual support
  
• Programmed and animated the final boss battle
  
• Animated all boss intros and deaths
  
• Animated custom deaths for most enemies
  
• Reworked and improved Minibosses
  
• Sound FX for all bosses (except the final) and half of the enemies
  
• Improved Visual FX
  
• Improved scripted scenes
  
• Polished the Map Screen and other UI elements
  
• Improved pacing by interspersing some “breather” rooms with less challenge and more resources, as well as balancing combat, platforming, and puzzle rooms throughout the game

There’s also a ton of other work - a lot of which took even longer to complete than those features listed here - that we got done in that time, but some of it just wouldn’t make sense as a feature in a list. Suffice it to say, those improvements make the game feel a lot tighter and encourage players to continue exploring the world.


The final background art for the Save Rooms.

We’re now about 50% of the way through that final list. We have a date in mind that we think the game will be done and ready to ship, but I’m going to hold off on saying it here just in case my estimate isn’t accurate. Here are some of the remaining tasks:

• Replacing all remaining placeholder animations and background art
  
• Improving the enemy spawn system to make sure that every enemy type shows up in every game, as well as maintaining a healthy variety
  
• Sound FX for the enemies in the second half of game, the final boss, as well as environmental sounds
  
• Beefing up secondary quests
  
• More Items & Weapon system improvements
  
• Additional variation in environmental art & Landmarks
  
• Populate secrets in all areas
  
• Polish NPC dialog and sidequests
  
• Main Menu art
  
• Economy improvements
  
• Difficulty balancing (this will be one of the last things we do)

Again, there are some other tasks on our list that probably only make sense to us, so I’m leaving them off this list for now. Whereas we often felt like the more progress we made the further the finish line pulled away, we’re now seeing it get closer and closer.

As we cross off each of these tasks as we complete them, the list keeps getting shorter. As always, thanks for your ongoing support and patience. We’re getting close and I’m hoping you’ll feel that the wait has been worth it!

Hello once again Chasm fans! We've had a very busy fall and have quite a few things to show off in this update, so let's dive right in.


Battling a Phantom in the dark.

In the last update I mentioned Glauber was working on death animations for all of the existing enemies. He wrapped those up in the early part of November, and then we began working on the final set of enemies that would fill in some of the sections you backtrack to later in the game. I'm proud to say we now have 90 fully animated creatures (including bosses) in the game for you to battle! With the enemy animations completed, Glauber will now turn his attention to animating the final boss battle, as well as some lower priority stuff like the boss intro and death sequences.


Getting pwned in the Arena by a Gelatinous Cube.

Dan has been working away on the last of the large backdrop pieces, and I'm happy to announce that the Arena has been completed! I mentioned it briefly in a previous update, but rather than make the Arena an additional mode, we decided to make it an optional challenge in the main game. If you want to work your way up to Grand Champion and win the grand prize, you'll have to battle through waves of beefed up enemies, as well as a couple unique creatures. The only remaining crowdfunding feature that hasn't been completed yet is the Crafting stretch goal, which we plan to tackle after the new year when we revisit the weapons and items.


The final look of the Map screen.

In addition to all the new content we've been adding in, we've also been doing final revisions to various UI elements like the Map screen. It received a bit of a visual overhaul making it more compact and easier to read, while also getting a couple new features. One in particular we're excited about is items or journals that you may have missed or couldn't reach are now marked on the map with a dot ala Super Metroid.


Auto-formatted bubbles, signs and journal entries.

One other slightly less glamorous thing we've been working on is full support for other languages. Many of the in-game text interfaces like the conversation bubbles, journal entries and signs were being manually formatted for display while we figured things out, but now that all the designs are finalized Tim began adding pre-processing routines to automatically format text for each of them. This mostly entailed adding automatic line breaking and key term highlighting, alignment options, and scrolling support. Now it should be fairly trivial to support any Latin-based language!



Our final convention for the year will be at the PlayStation Experience 2017 in Anaheim next week. Chasm biz guy Dan Adelman and sound guru James Stevulak will be there manning the booth on December 9 and 10, so be sure to stop by and say hi!


Well, that's it for this year. We'll be continuing to crunch towards the finish line throughout the holidays, but we'll be back in touch in January to let you know how things are progressing. Thank you once again for your patience and support while we strive to make Chasm the game we know it can be. Have a great holiday season, and we'll see you in 2018!