WALLS CLOSING IN

Northbury Grove 3

A year ago on October 1st, our team released our first game after years of half-finished products. That game was Northbury Grove. And here we are, just two days out from the year anniversary, ready to release WALLS CLOSING IN. If you've played Northbury Grove and it's sequel, King's Comfort, you're familiar with the Slasher, aka the Butcher of Northbury Grove. Well he's back, and at long last we finally get to see what happened to Grace Bailey....

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Introducing our team: Programmer Kaleb Alfadda (he puts everything together and gives it the nice atmospheric sheen of fog, lighting, and so much more, scripting the killer's AI, etc. etc. etc.), Modeler / Level Designer Blake Reible (he makes all those pretty things you see, designs these immersive buildings and locales, and turns the visualization of the story into reality) and me, Jon Reilly, with music, SFX and the story / scripts. We've poured over 1000 collective hours into this horror game; our hearts, souls, blood, sweat, tears, and at times our sanity.

Scythe Dev Mercenaries

Our team of 3 full-stack developers were joined by over a dozen friends and associates who all came together to make this happen. (Most notably Kyle Brauch CRUSHING IT with multiple voices such as Kevin Murphy throughout the radio broadcast, Unsealed Wings for providing a great plethora of voices as well, and friends from various communities we interact in, notably Church of What's Happening Now and the killer termites + hd_fatty Twitch stream crew.)

The Ultimate Slasher Horror Gaming Experience

If you like '70s and '80s horror, most notably slasher and giallo films, this game will bury you in nostalgia and then stab you through the dirt. If you like horror games in which you need to outwit a unrelenting killer, this game will be skin you and make some sort of messed up bathrobe. In short - we hope this scares you, we hope it feels fresh, exciting, yet at the same time, nostalgic. We have attempted to craft the ultimate slasher horror gaming experience. Think: Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Maniac, The Burning, Black Christmas, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and so many more. Horror is one of the collective passions of our team!

Grab It Now!

It's available for preorder until Tuesday at $7.99, then goes up to $9.99.  Be sure to play Northbury Grove and King's Comfort first! All three games take place on the SAME NIGHT. The first two games are free! (Originally this was all envisioned as one giant project, after all.) So come visit Northbury Grove, again, one last time, at the tattered ends of sanity and trauma...we hope you survive your stay!

Much love to all you gamers and devs out there. Have fun, stay scared, and as always...be kind to one another.

Cheers,
Scythe Dev Team

PS: If you wanna chat, join us in our official discord! (ONE OF US! ONE OF US!)

Thanks to Itch.IO for helping us launch our Game Dev Studio, giving us the extra space for this MASSIVE game, and featuring our past titles Northbury Grove, King's Comfort, and Cultists & Compounds on the front page. You guys and gals rock!

Additional News Incoming!

At Scythe Dev Farms, er... Team, we didn't want to push this game out as an early alpha. We believe that delivering a finished experience is essential to proving to you guys (our fans) that we mean business. Because of this, Walls Closing In is ultimately a finished product. But that doesn't mean we're going to stop supporting the game, or you can't expect future updates.

Walls Closing In is our fifth game we've released, so we've done this a few times. With that experience you can probably expect bugs, and perhaps a few of them. We've rigorously tested the game to ensure nothing is game-breaking, but these things happen.

Development Roadmap

Phase 1 | Quality of Life

1. Game-Breaking bugs take priority! As soon as we get a reproducible report of game-breaking bug, we'll immediately patch it and send out the fix. To keep the game current, we highly recommend using the itch.io app, as it automatically keeps all titles up to date, but we will always post announcements to let you know when things are being updated!
2. Smaller, miscellaneous bugs will be fixed as well, these are just as important, but are easy to compound into a single patch if we collect a few of them, and squash them all at once. Game-breaking bugs will be the spearhead that determines when and how frequent these patches come out, but always expect minor bugfixes to be included.
3. Performance fixes are something to expect as well. We've ensured the game runs as smooth as we can, but the Unity Engine is an ever-evolving, ever-improving engine, so occasional minor or even major performance increases are something to expect as well.

Phase 2 | Additional Content

We always try to squeeze in as much as we can, and in the usual spirit of our game dev debauchery, we will be adding some fun additional features into the game post release. We haven't settled on anything specific yet... But some ideas we're playing with are:

• A timed not-so-secret mode (like King's Comfort's 'Midnight Mode') to add an additional layer of challenge and fun to the game. These concepts are usually pretty off the wall, but allow us to have a little fun with the game.
• A 1:1 remake of the original 'Northbury Grove' in our updated engine we used for Walls Closing In. Imagine what we can do now?
• A Survival Sandbox Mode in which the player tries to survive as one of the other guests at Rock the Warehouse. How long can you outrun the slasher before you run out of supplies?
• Slasher Mode | Play the game from the perspective of the slasher, stop the events of Walls Closing In from ever happening! The Void is Calling... 

We may do one, some, all or none. Let us know what sounds most appealing to you!

Development Timeframe

We don't have specific dates for Patch 2, but Patch 1 is guaranteed. With all of that said, we're really looking forward to fleshing this game out as much as we can, and as always, watching your Lets Play's and Streams.

Love,
Scythe Dev Team