We are amazed by your continuous positive feedback on the game! It’s heartwarming to hear how much you’re enjoying Yu and Kay’s story. We’re releasing today a second patch with some of your most pressing feature requests and some fixes to improve the experience.
We appreciate your feedback, your help reporting those issues and your patience as we fix them.


Version 1.0.165

• Automatic backup save before ending: a save is created for those of you who will want to go back and explore the game before the end. For players who have finished the game already, when loading your epilogue save, a backup save will be created before the take off, giving you a change to revisit.
  
• Co-op with Keyboard & Mouse and one controller: Ability to play co-op with Keyboard & Mouse + one controller (local and remote play).
  
• Accessibility: Option to disable camera wobble.
  
• UI: Ability to choose what button prompts are displayed

• Gloves upgrade: Fixed a bug where Yu says she has enough hyper rust to upgrade the gloves, although this upgrade is not accessible yet.
  
• Combat soft lock: fixed a bug where the characters would become unresponsive after using Help in combat.
  
• Misc bug fixes

A big thank you to everyone who’s playing Haven, we are receiving your fantastic feedback about the game and it’s heartwarming. We also enjoyed your first cosplays and fan-arts!
We’ve prepared already a first patch to cover some of the most urgent fixes. We are working on another one that we will release soon and we will be bringing all of those to PS5 and XBOX (Series, One and Windows) as soon as possible.

We appreciate your help reporting those issues and your patience as we fix them.


Version 1.0.157

Bug fixes:

• Turkish regional settings issue: When playing with Windows regional settings set to Turkish, some menu UI localization would not show up properly and actor voices were missing.
  
• Blocking bug at the big door on Lonako: Some cases where the big door would not open. Running the update should fix the issue for users currently having the problem in their save game.
  
• Unexpected behavior if you played the demo: Some users who previously played Haven demo could encounter a crash or unexpected behavior if they continue playing the game from a save from the demo.
  
• Roaming stutter: Prevent some stutter that could happen routinely every 10-20 seconds while roaming.
  
• Wide screens resolutions improvements: Display options now gives the choices of resolution wider than 16/9 for ultrawide monitor support and fix main menu out of the screen on very wide resolutions.

Hello everyone,

Four years ago we set out to create a game about love, and to build a game system that puts players at the center of a relationship. It was not easy, but all along the game development, we saw interest from players that we never saw before. They were longing for a game that makes them dream about love and fight for love.



This enthusiasm, your support, kept us fueled during the development, and today we are extremely happy and excited to share the game with you.

We hope Haven will make you smile, will make you wonder, and give you the chance to slow down a little bit. If it can bring you closer to the people you care about in real life, allowing for cosy co-op gaming sessions or passionate discussions on what you'd be ready to do for love, it will make our day.

Haven but also Haven Original Soundtrack are now available on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1468310/Haven_Soundtrack

Thank you so much for your support and we hope you will enjoy this journey as much as we did!

The team at The Game Bakers

Hello everyone,

7 days to go before launch! I can tell you the bakery is buzzing here! We'll have ample time to tell you more about the game after launch, but there was something that we really wanted to share, as so many of you have asked: who are the amazing actors behind Yu and Kay! It's time to reveal them...

While casting for Yu and Kay we were looking for actors that would excel at conveying subtle emotions, every day life feelings, and be at ease with intimacy and humour. Those are challenging roles for actors as they require solid performer skills but also enough personal experience to recreate the texture of a relationship with authenticity.
Working in London with the team at SIDE, we were very lucky to meet Janine Harouni and Chris Lew Kum Hoi!





The two actors recorded the 80 000 words of dialogue together in the SIDE studio in London in 2019 and 2020, reenacting the scenes together to achieve as much complicity and authenticity as possible.



Before to meet Yu & Kay in a few days, here is a short interview of the actors behind them!


Janine: I’m originally from New York but I’ve been living in the UK for the last 8 years. I’ve been lucky enough to voice parts in some really fantastic games and I’ve done small roles in fun films and TV series. Next year I’m going to be a series regular in a new sitcom called ‘Buffering’ on ITV2 next which I’m really excited about. But mostly I’m excited for comedy clubs to open up again so I can get back to doing stand up. I did my debut show last Edinburgh which got nominated for the Best Newcomer award. Which was a very lovely thing to happen and means I no longer have to do gigs in the basements of grimy pubs. I now do gigs on the ground floor of grimy pubs. So things are moving up in a very literal sense.

Chris: Not quite sure where to start. I originally trained in a drama school in the South of England and upon graduation left to work in the theatre and gradually building up into screen work - proud to say I'm part of the Dr Who universe. By chance, I stumbled into the voice over world. I was doing a theatre workshop and a friend asked me whether I did voice-over. I lied and told him I had done a few before and he suggested me for a videogame audition. I ended up getting the job and a hop, skip and a jump into the future and here I am doing Haven - a project which I'm very proud of working on.


Chris: From the first readthrough, I was taken by how naturally the script settled in the mouth - it had a simplicity that I hadn't experienced before and that's exciting. The words could go in so many directions. I didn't really know what Haven was going to be but knew that there was a beating soul that needed to be let out into the videogame universe.

Janine: I’m not sure what I was expecting. I had never worked on a game for that long and I had never done VO with another actor in the booth with me. It was amazing to get to spend that much time working on something. I really felt like I knew both our characters inside and out by the end of our recording. And it was incredible to get to work on such a rich and dynamic story. I just feel very lucky to be part of such a fantastic game!




Janine: Lots of times when you work on a game you only record your lines. Sometimes you read with the director but lots of time you just record your side of the dialogue with very little context. Working on Haven was brilliant because I got to be in the booth with Chris. Which means we were able to react to each other and be in the moment. That’s something you rarely get to do when recording games. It made everything feel much more intimate and real. Working with Chris and our brilliant director Damien Goodwin, was a dream - I really felt I was in safe hands and learned so much from both of them.

Chris: So different! In most other videogames, you are in a booth by yourself and rarely do you get to hear what the other actors have created - you have to kind of guess and the director does their best to read in the plethora of other characters (sometimes to a hilarious extent). But with Haven, I got to work with the lovely Janine in the booth. This had a huge positive impact on both our performances. Aside from Janine just being fantastic, there's a chemistry that the characters had to have that you just can't recreate without having both people in the room together. It always made the recording sessions exciting - you don't know what your partner is going to throw at you.


Chris: Kay I hold close to my heart. He's desparate to be cool but can never get it quite right. He's vulnerable and sensitive and a perfect match for Yu. She has a fire that keeps him in check and he has a jokey manner that pokes holes in Yu's armour. I think that's why they work so well. My partner and I share the same sort of relationship - we're so different in our tastes etc. But it's that different perspective that gives both the resistance we need and the freedom to be ourselves. I also definitely have Kay living in me - we're both kind of in awe of the world whilst bumbling through it completely lost. Might as well enjoy the ride whilst on it eh?

Janine: My real life partner is a lot like Kay actually - more cautious and analytical than I am. I’m more like Yu, a jump-into-things-now-and-figure-them-out-later kinda person. Which can be fun, but can also lead to some VERY weird nights out.



Chris: The one that springs to mind are the "R" rated scenes. Performing it was hilarious because I went for it and knew that everyone around me was going to feel awkward. At the end of it, there was a pause, and Janine just said, "is it hot in here?" that for me was the best praise ever. That and Muffin and Cupcake! Can't forget the joy they brought.

Hey there,

On Wednesday, we announced the launch date. Haven will be available on December 3 (3X days left)! This announcement was the opportunity for us the write a new blogpost talking about Haven, in particular about the co-op experience. We let you with the good company of Emeric Thoa, our Creative Director.

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In Haven, you play as two lovers who gave up everything and escaped to a lost planet to be together. It’s a romantic RPG about love and freedom, but a strong characteristic of the game is that you play two characters at the same time: Yu and Kay. It’s first and foremost a solo game, in which you play these two characters, but with such a duo for main characters, we couldn’t pass on the opportunity to make it also a couch co-op experience. In this blogpost, I’ll dive in details about the co-op experience for the first time.



Haven can be enjoyed solo, it’s designed for that. But at any time in the game, another player can join by simply taking another gamepad and pressing a button. The UI will show that co-op has started, it’s completely seamless.



Here, the UI shows another player just joined and triggered the co-op play.

An important part of the gameplay makes Yu and Kay explore the deserted planet gliding over the grass, collecting flow and food, and cleaning the rust in search for resources and new paths (learn more about the gameplay in our previous blog post). While gliding, one player is leading, and the other is following. The character that is following has the freedom to roam around the lead one. Each time you stop, you can exchange the lead, and “take the wheel” like it’s your turn to drive.

However, the following player is not just a co-pilot. They can control what we call a “flowblob”, a circle of flow on the ground that they can project around them to interact with the world as they glide. They can use the flowblob to clean the rust or gather resources. The lead character chooses where to go and the following character helps clean the area.



The flowblob can also be used to slow down a creature that’s chasing you:



In solo combat, the game pad is split in half. You use the dpad to load Kay’s actions and the buttons for Yu’s. In co-op, each player controls their character. The players have to combine their actions.

For instance one can be shielding while the other prepares an attack.



You can exploit temporary weaknesses by having a player stun a creature, while the other prepares an attack that will make critical damage. Or you can synchronize two similar actions on each character to make powerful duo attacks.



Last but not least, if one of your hero is down, the other one can help them stand up again.



While it’s common to see co-op mechanics for action gameplay, it’s much more unusual to see them intertwined in the storytelling. Narration-wise, when the characters talk, the player regularly has dialog choices to make, which sometimes have an impact on the game. When playing co-op, both players have to agree and validate the same dialog choice to progress. From what we’ve seen, it’s very engaging and creates heated discussions between the players on the couch.



We wanted to make a game that can be enjoyed by everyone: solo for a deep immersion with Yu and Kay, or co-op with a friend or a romantic partner. As you read this we are adding the finishing touches to the game!

Hey everybody,

Haven's Original Soundtrack is composed by French electro musician DANGER (whose work was already featured in Furi). Today, we are thrilled to announce we cooked two physical editions: a double vinyl album and a CD digipack. The pre-orders of the physical editions start now!

• Double vinyl edition ($39/€35): https://www.g4f-records.com/en/produit/haven-edition-vinyl-pre-order/
  
• CD edition ($17/€15): https://www.g4f-records.com/en/produit/haven-cd-edition-pre-order/

The vinyl edition is inspired by the colourful watercolours of the game intro movie by Yukio Takatsu (Japanese animator and director). The album includes two vinyl records (180 g), yellow and red, in a “pastel grain” textured gatefold cover.  The double CD edition is a 6-panel digipack and includes an 8-page booklet. Shipment of both editions is scheduled for late January 2021.



In the Haven original soundtrack, DANGER returns to his electro synthwave music style, adding more positive and colourful vibes to it, as well as elements of Vaporwave and Funky music, mixed with a new orchestral dimension.

The digital version of the soundtrack will be available December 3rd on Steam and all music streaming platforms. You can already wishlist it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1468310/Haven_Soundtrack/

If you can't wait, the first single “ 04:42 Still Free” is still available on Steam, Spotify and other platforms. What are you waiting for? Push the volume up and enjoy the music! 😜🎧

Hello everyone,

That's it, we have a release date!!! We're so pleased to tell you that Haven will be available on December 3rd 2020. We are also happy to share with you a brand new story trailer "Can love conquer all?" Watch it below:


The trailer has subtitles in English, French, German, Russian, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish.

Also check those new screenshots from the game:











36 days left before the launch of Haven! We can tell you we are counting the days too!
Looking forward to having you play the game,

The team at Game Bakers

Pierre Corbinais has been writing for and about games for a decade now and he is the writer of Haven. He’s mostly known for Bury Me My Love, a reality-inspired fiction about love and exile, and ‘Til Cows tear us apart, a two-cowgirls’ road-movie in space but also created a lot of other small games during various game jams. Haven is the biggest project he worked on so far (and he can’t wait for you to play it).

What’s your opinion about romance in video games? What is good and bad, from your point of view?

My main opinion about romance in video games is that we don’t see enough of it, and when you think about it, it’s actually a bit baffling. Romances are everywhere except in video games: I don’t know about the other countries, but in France, every year without fail, the best selling novels are love stories. Turn on a mainstream radio and there’s a fairly good chance that a love song will be playing. And romance (whether it is comedy or drama) had always been one of the strongest film genres: While released more than 20 years ago, Titanic still is the third highest grossing film of all times (#1 in France!), how crazy is that? Everything points to think that people LOVE romances, but a bunch of exceptions aside, we don’t have romance in games, at best we have flirting (in dating sims or RPGs). Why is that? There is this idea floating around that video games are mostly played by men and that men aren’t into romance, but I think both these assumptions are untrue. To me, the main reason why there is so few romances in game is that we, game creators, still don’t really know how to make them. It’s “easy” to make a game where you shoot people (“If bullet collides with enemy then enemy = dead”, but how do you program a game about falling in love? Being in love? Falling out of love? Everything must be rethought, reinvented. That’s a tough job, and a lot of work, but what a great challenge!

Where would you like to see the genre go? What kind of romance story or style would you like to see in a video game?

I would like it to go in every directions, form-wise and content-wise. There are so many different love stories to tell, and so many ways to interact with them to invent. Just try to imagine how every video game genre could be twisted to become a love story: What is a First Person Romance? What is a relationship management game? A heart racing game? A love puzzle?
And we’re not even talking about the new genres that might emerge.
As for the content, there is a subreddit called r/relationships where people share relationships stories (romantic or not) to get advice from the community. I love browsing through the posts there. They are sometimes funny, sometimes grave, sometimes relatable, sometimes just plain weird… I think these posts tell a lot about what being human is, about what loving is, and I’d like every single one of them to be turned into a video game.



Haven has quite a modern treatment in terms of dialogs, compared to traditional RPGs. Was it difficult to come up with that? How do people react to that style?

Haven’s dialogue style came up pretty naturally. While you can find some epicness in the game, I felt it was more about the little things, the daily life, and I needed the dialogues to reflect that. Yu and Kay shouldn’t talk like badass-and-somehow-also-super-witty heroes, they should talk like us, with our hesitations, verbal tics, cursing… I’m really into alternative comics that tell “slice of life” stories (Hernandez brothers’ Love & Rockets, Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise, Vanyda’s The Building Opposite to cite a few), I probably draw this style of writing from there.
I didn’t get the chance to see a lot of people playing the game so far so I’m yet not sure how people will react to that style, but the team and voice-actors seemed to like it! The very first dialogue I wrote to try out that style and see if it fitted the game ended up becoming Haven’s first scene.


There’s also a lot of humour in the game. Do you think it’s a way to make the players have fun or to make them get attached to the characters?

Yes, people usually enjoy to laugh and smile, so why not allow that? But humor is also a useful tool for Haven’s narrative structure. In Haven there are a lot of dialogue scenes that aren’t there to make the story advance toward an ending. They’re just slices of life meant to create attachment to the characters, chill moments spent in the Nest. How can you satisfyingly end such scenes that don’t really lead anywhere plot-wise? There aren’t that many solutions: You can end it with something cute, something deep, or something funny. Juggling with the three is the best way to keep the player surprised, and thus entertained.



Do you have a special process for writing dialogs? What’s your one advice for writing dialogs?

Writing is a very weird and personal thing, the more I talk with other writers the more I realise there aren’t two writing processes alike. Some people will tell you that you need to precisely know where your dialogue is going beforehand, me, I tend to just go with the flow and let the characters decide for themselves. Most of the time, when I start writing a dialogue scene, I have no idea how it’s gonna end. This is a terrible thing to do when you work in movies for example, because movies only lasts 90mn and you don’t have one minute to spare. But I think it works pretty well with video games, especially when you want your dialogues to branch in different directions: not having an ending in mind is a great way to allow the emergence of multiple ones.
As for the advice I will give this very simple one: whenever you’re stuck in your writing, drop your pen (or keyboard, or typewriter) and go outside. Walk. Sit in a park. Have a coffee (and don’t forget your notebook in case the inspiration comes back). Breaks aren’t a waste of time, sitting in front of an empty page is.

Finally, everyone wants to know. Are you more a Yu or Kay person?

I put a lot of myself in both characters, Kay got my poor sense of humour and Yu my terrible sense of direction, but I’m probably more a Kay person overall. Yet, when playing the game, I mostly play Yu. Go figure.

Hi everyone,
We want to share with you a recent article by Emeric Thoa (Creative Director) that goes into depth about the gameplay you can expect with Haven. Please enjoy.



I like to pitch Haven as “Romeo and Juliet, but they survived and escaped to a deserted planet to live together.” But that doesn’t say much about the gameplay. So I would like to share more about your experience as you play the game — what you actually get to do.

The game experience in Haven is created by the intersection of three systems:

1. Exploration through gliding
   
2. Combat
   
3. Preparing for your next expedition in the Nest

The story is told during these three types of gameplay sequences. But let’s dive a little deeper in these systems.




In a Japanese RPG, what we call “traversal gameplay” is usually pretty simple. You just move your character without any challenge, until you start a fight or reach your destination. With Haven, we wanted to reinforce the feeling of being a couple, even during exploration. We wanted to make it feel relaxing, beautiful and fun. Going down a ski slope with a friend can really feel like that. Gliding over the tall grass is Haven’s version of skiing together.




In order to explore the planet, you follow “Flow threads” that will fill your boots and gauntlets with Flow, the natural energy that powers pretty much everything in their world. It’s also used to get rid of the Rust, the red crust that corrupts the planet and creatures. Gather Flow, clean the Rust and discover resources: food or medicinal plants, materials for combat or to repair the Nest (your spaceship/home), or even souvenirs and items for your home.

Following a Flow thread is usually as chill as going down a simple ski slope, but sometimes you can find more difficult ones that will require to drift, and anticipate tight turns.



Exploration by gliding will also open up new “bridges” that connect one floating fragment to another, and allow you to reach new areas.

While exploring the fragments of the planet, you might encounter aggressive creatures and have to fight them. Combat is, again, thought of as a couple’s experience. It’s pretty much necessary to coordinate Yu and Kay’s attacks, or have them protect each other.



Combat happens in real-time, but you charge orders by holding buttons. Sometimes you have to react quickly to shield yourself, sometimes you have to time an attack performed by both characters, and sometimes it’s better to chain attacks, one weakening the creature and the other dealing the heavy damage.

That combat system is thought to make you want to optimize your chain of actions so that everything flows, a bit like in a rhythm game. When you’ve found the right pace, it feels very satisfying to chain actions one after the other, minimizing the hits taken and maximising the damage to the rusted creatures.



At the end of the fight, the creatures are “pacified,” meaning they are cleaned from the rust and they go back to a peaceful state.

Eventually, you need to go back to your ship to either heal yourself, cook some tasty meals or bring back the stuff you found. The ship is called The Nest for a good reason: it’s a place for nesting.

In the Nest you can craft different things: cures for improving your health, combat capsules that’ll prove helpful against the rusted creatures, and of course you can cook delicious meals.



As the characters have meals, they are not hungry anymore (when they are hungry they complain and are less efficient in combat). But most importantly, cooking and having meals together is the time for bonding. Cooking, sharing a good meal and taking a little break is when they grow, as characters and as a couple. It develops their relationship, and leads to levelling up.

In Haven, you won’t gain that many experience points in combat, you gain more by just spending good time together. That really makes Haven different, as it’s usually skipped in RPGs. You never see your heroes in their intimity. In Haven, you do.


The story is a key element in Haven’s game experience. Are they going to settle quietly on that deserted planet? Will the Apiary find them and come to separate them?

But the pace of the story comes from that intertwined game experience of gliding together to explore the valleys of planet Source, fighting and pacifying creatures and coming back home for resting, cocooning and preparing the next expedition. All in all, Haven’s game experience is about living with Yu and Kay, every minute of their adventurous daily life.

We’re hard at work to finish the game and we will soon be able to let you know when you can play Haven, so stay posted!

Hello everyone,
We hope you are doing well and enjoying the Steam Autumn Festival.

We wanted to share a video we created where Haven's writer, Pierre Corbinais and Executive producer Audrey Leprince sit down with Trish and play through the demo of Haven.

During the session, they talk about the some of the ideas behind the creation of Haven and why healthy relationships can and should exist in video games.

Please tune in on Friday, October 9th at 8:00 PM CEST / 12 PM PT on Steam, and enjoy!

As always, please don't hesitate to join our Discord channel and let us know what you think! Or just generally hang out with us. :) https://discord.com/invite/thegamebakers