We’ll pick our favorites on January 2nd and get in touch with you via DM. First place will have their pick of the three, second will have their pick of the remaining two and third place will get whichever print is left.
And when we say “in the wild” that can be whatever that means to you! You don’t need to climb a mountain or take a trip to Wyoming to make something special. Just head outside and see what speaks to you.
SAN FRANCISCO–LOS ANGELES–LONDON–SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN ENGLAND—The twelve of us at Campo Santo have agreed to join Valve, where we will maintain our jobs as video game developers and continue production on our current project, In the Valley of Gods.
If you’re the type of person who gives two flips about this news, we can elaborate a little bit on this big decision. First, we really like making video games. Furthermore, and perhaps more accurately, we really like making and producing entertainment. From the day-to-day production of our last game, Firewatch, to the way we run the company, make merchandise, meet players at expos and shows, send out a quarterly literary journal, throw open-to-the-public game demos in the middle of an artificial forest—all of it is geared towards surprising, delighting, and entertaining the customers who have shared in our success.
In Valve we found a group of folks who, to their core, feel the same way about the work that they do (this, you may be surprised to learn, doesn’t happen every day). In us, they found a group with unique experience and valuable, diverse perspectives. It quickly became an obvious match.
Second, while visiting IGN’s headquarters in early 2015 to talk about Firewatch, we came across an undelivered 2011 Game of the Year Award for Portal 2. It happened to be engraved on an unopened bottle of champagne. Never ones to pass up free alcohol, we stole it and drank it to celebrate the launch of Firewatch a year later. So in some sense, this is a return home for us. Well, for that bottle of champagne.
Third, and last, we had a series of long conversations with the people at Valve and everyone shared the satisfaction we take in working with people whose talents dwarf our own to make things we never thought possible. Both sides spoke about our values and how, when you get right down to it, we, as human beings, are hard-limited by the time we have left when it comes to making the things we care about and believe in. They asked us if we’d all be interested in coming up to Bellevue and doing that there and we said yes.
Yes, we’re still making In the Valley of Gods (as a Valve game!); yes, we’ll still support Firewatch; and yes, we’ll still produce The Quarterly Review and our regular blog content. Thanks so much for your interest in our games and we’ll see you in Washington. Cheers.
When will it be out? All we can say is “soon!” Reengineering the sprawling meadows and towering trees of Firewatch’s wilderness to play perfectly on new hardware is no small engineering task. We’ve been hard at work stripping much of Firewatch’s tech down to the studs and rebuilding it to render the world more quickly, to stream and load faster, and to generally be more responsive. Nearly everyone in the Campo Santo office has a Nintendo Switch (and the rest want one). We know what a good Switch game feels like, and want to make sure Firewatch feels like one too.
Plus, we’re hoping to throw in a couple surprises just for the Switch release.
For more information about Firewatch’s release on Nintendo Switch, keep an eye on this blog and on the Firewatch Switch website (sign up there to receive release date information and other Firewatch news by email)!
And for our other players, take note: The optimizations we’re doing to Firewatch aren’t just for Switch. They’re for Firewatch’s future as well. For the many people out there who haven’t played Firewatch yet, as well as the millions of existing fans who may go back and revisit the game some day, we want the experience to be as good as it can be. We expect to bring the low-level optimizations and tech clean-up we’re doing for the Switch to all platforms eventually. That means if things go to plan, we’ll see performance improvements on PlayStation 4 (and 4 Pro), Xbox One (and One X), Mac and PC.
We’re lucky to be able to keep investing in and supporting a single player game that came out over two years ago, and we’re more proud of Firewatch than most things we’ve made in life. We want it to be found and enjoyed by as many people as possible. Thanks to you—and everyone, past, present, and future—who has played Firewatch for making that possible!
I first considered a Chinese localized name for Firewatch when I gave a talk at GDC China 2015, and they had translated the session title as <看火人> (word for word, this is “Watch Fire Man”). I grew up in Hong Kong reading Chinese, and I thought the localized name was well chosen—because while it mostly suggests “fire lookout” (which doesn’t specifically imply “firefighting”), it also allows a more ominous interpretation of “person watching the fire burn.”
This was long before we had ever decided Firewatch would have a simplified Chinese localization, but the name stuck with me.
Jump to 2017. When we began working with Tencent on a localized Chinese voiceover, it was natural for us to suggest <看火人> as the official localized title. We began to play around with the idea of having a properly thought-out Chinese logo to go with the localized title.
Chinese typography presents fascinating and challenging problems; here’s a great article about the breadth and complexity of the art form. Luckily, we are only attempting to create 3 relatively simple glyphs, all three of which are the same in both simplified and traditional Chinese, so we decided to try to do it ourselves rather than outsourcing it.
For reference, Jake, Claire, and I picked out three existing Chinese fonts that we thought were closest to the feel of Verlag, our English font. Claire, who doesn’t read Chinese, made a pretty great first attempt, seen in the lower right above. I’ve never had to think about Chinese characters as a design, but as someone who can read the language, I knew it didn’t “feel” very finished.
It was fun and educational for me, as someone with elementary Chinese penmanship, to sit down and try to analyze and articulate why some of the glyphs looked like “a kid wrote it.” It was also a fun exercise for me to give Claire, our art director, some direction notes for a change!
Further revisions include:
making the middle “Fire” character symmetrical
making sure all three glyphs take up about equal amount of space
The characters look great now! Then the attention went to how to resolve some of the harsh points in the graphic, in terms of just the visual design:
adjusting the gutter width so they are not identical (yellow)
making the cut in the shield shape more pleasing (red)
deciding whether the “Watch” glyph should have “feet” flourishes (green)
By the end of the third day, we’d settled on a design we’re very proud of. Here is Claire’s fantastic final vector version of the logo. We hope you like how it looks on a shirt as much as we do!
A few months ago, we got a piece of mail from Ryan (Ryan withheld his last name, even on the return address of the envelope). Ryan had played Firewatch and, quite generously, turned around and bought the Crime by the Numbers Notebooks available at store.camposanto.com. As a side note, there are many finely made pieces of merchandise on our online store, all fairly priced and ready to ship worldwide. The notebooks, which you can find scattered around the world of Firewatch, are reproduced down to their inside covers to be exact replicas of the type of pulp paperbacks you’d find in a supermarket and then carry with you out to the woods. On the inside back cover is a fake order form for other novels from their fictional publisher, and, much to our delight, Ryan Real-Last-Name-Withheld, was the first Campo customer to take the bait.
Yes! A compliment and an excuse to spend days on a one-off, never-to-be-reproduced piece of merchandise for a fan. Our favorite type of mail. Plus, if you’re Jake, you now have a reason to head to Craigslist and buy an expensive large-format photo printer at a deep discount. Should we be working on our second game? Absolutely. Could we spend a few dozen hours of time on fulfilling Ryan’s order instead? You betcha.
Let’s see, Ryan Real-Last-Name-Withheld, would like one copy of Mo Marlowe’s Love at First Site and included $4.50 to exactly cover the costs plus shipping and handling. A few hours of illustration by Claire Hummel, a few more hours of design by Jake Rodkin and a little elbow grease in the form of creative writing by me, Sean Vanaman, and voilà, one copy of Love at First Site, ready for our friend Ryan.
A couple things to note: the “order form” itself (again, not a real order form, a prop, in a book that is itself a prop in a video game) is expired. Secondly, Conrad Hummel, the fictional (ie: not real) publisher of the prop book that is itself a prop in a video game, has included a letter to let Ryan Real-Last-Name-Withheld that not only is this the last copy of Love at First Site but, it’s the last book in the entire warehouse. In other words, we’re never going to make one of these again for literally anyone. Unless you’re Stanley Tucci, we would definitely do it for him.
We never head from Ryan Real-Last-Name-Witheld (oh God, I hope he got it) and he never posted this anywhere on the internet so we thought it was time to share it with you. We hope you enjoy the fact that we made it as much as we enjoyed the actual making of it.
Firewatch is now updated and enhanced to support the PlayStation 4 Pro.
If you’re one of the first to pick up a new PlayStation 4 Pro this week, be happy to know that Firewatch has been updated to support the new console!
With a lot of talk about what a “4K console” offers and what “PS4 Pro Enhanced” means, we thought we’d quickly break down the update for you.
Standard PS4 Customers: no change
PS4 Pro Customers with a 1080p Display: enhanced detail distance, smoother loads, and much higher quality shadows
PS Pro Customers with a 4K Display: the world is now rendered at WQHD (2560x1440p) and the UI renders at 4KUHD (3840x2160) and you will have enhanced level of detail of a standard PS4
Furthermore, this update features the roll-out of Free Roam Modedetailedhere! This is a free update for all customers, PS4 Standard and Pro alike.
If you’ve got a Vive or Oculus Rift you might be familiar with Destinations, a great app that lets you visit all manner of real and imagined places. Today we’re releasing Henry’s lookout tower and you can walk around and poke your nose all over it in VR.
To get Firewatch stuff into Destinations we had to rebuild the scene in Source (Valve’s engine) and I think you’ll agree that Jane did a masterful job.
It’s really stunning to be in Henry’s personal space. In fact, while messing around in it the other day, I picked up and then dropped the twenty-sided-die in his desk drawer and it rolled underneath his chair. Then, because I was using the Vive, I had to get down on the actual floor and reach under there to get it. It was an interaction I could never have in non-VR and was pretty thrilling despite this Destination being a simple static scene.
I’d like to talk a little bit more about that, what it means for a Firewatch movie, and why we’d do something like that, in general!
Almost a year ago we got an email from Akshay Mehta. He claimed that he worked for Good Universe, a company in LA run by two men, Joe Drake and Nathan Kahane, and that they had made successful movies. (Most recently, the horrifying Don’t Breathe, but Joe had run Lionsgate for years and brought you a few little movies based on The Hunger Games). His claims were validated by Google in addition to the fact that he repeatedly said “I’m legit, bubby!” like a real Hollywood deal-maker. (Akshay didn’t actually say this but I could tell he wanted to.)
Around this time, it was right after E3, we were getting a few emails about the future film rights to Firewatch and we kept putting them off. It felt silly to pursue a film deal for a game that wasn’t even out yet and probably could be a stinker. Nevertheless, I got to know Akshay and months later, about four days before Firewatch came out, I was in LA and stopped by to show them the game.
Joe, Akshay and the rest of Good Universe work on Wilshire Blvd., about a block from an office where I used to make copies for a pair of producers in college, about fifty steps from Rodeo Dr. and a strong 7-iron from the agency WME. If you’ve ever watched an episode of Entourage,you have seen this stretch of street many times.
Sitting in Joe’s office, I started talking a little bit about what we wanted for Campo Santo as a company and quickly began to hate the sound of my own voice and transitioned into showing them the game. It was maybe 5pm so I figured I had 45 minutes before folks wanted to head home but we spent the next couple of hours combing over the prologue, Day 1 and Day 2 of Firewatch. It wasn’t the first time we’d talked to folks about the story or the game but it was the first time I’d played with anyone and had such a strong emotional reaction.
They understood what type of story we were trying to tell and were curious about the tools we employ to tell it. I’d never experienced anyone in that business have the sort of process curiosity they showed along with an easy-going demeanor that didn’t try to big-time the one guy in their office with an indie-game running on a giant laptop.
Conversations moved from Firewatch to the abstract ways Campo Santo and Good Universe could work together going forward. And in the end, we decided that, while developing a Firewatchmovie is exciting, and we are definitely in the early days of doing that, in Good Universe we had another company that shared our values and we could call upon with weird and exciting ideas (and that they could do the same). It’s not dissimilar to the wonderful partner we found in Panic Inc. when we set off on this scheme at the very beginning.
It felt ridiculous to notpursue a partnership with these folks. It’s rare that you find people who don’t just share your creative values but your business ones as well. Solid relationships are the only way anything in any creative business gets made.
So, when will Firewatch be in theaters? Who will play Henry’s hands? Who will do the voice of Turt? For those of you who understand what film development means you a) know I couldn’t say if I knew and b) know that getting a movie made is a tireless process that mixes luck, timing and sheer will together to create success. What I can tell you is this isn’t a situation where we sold someone the rights and they’re off to do whatever they want with with it – anything you see out of us will be the product of a partnership, brought to you by tireless people like Akshay and countless contributions by everyone here at Campo along the way.
Until next time. We’ve got convertibles to purchase and sunglasses to don. We’re in the pictures, bubby.
Because game launches and updates across major platforms are never as perfect as one would like, here is all you need to know!
I live in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia or Argentina! The game is out on Xbox One at Midnight PST on September 21st! (12am PST and 3am EST on September 21st in the US) Get it now!
I live in Europe, Australia, New Zealand! Some ratings issues delayed our Xbox One launch here but we’re aiming to have the game in your hands on September 30th in Europe and the week after in Australia & New Zealand.
I already have the game on PS4/Steam/GOG and want that sweet Firewatch Audio Tour!There will be rolling updates throughout the day on September 21st after 9am PST in the US. PS4 users should have it as of 9am.
I heard something about a Free-Roam mode? Yes, Xbox customers will be getting a free-roam mode on September 21st and we will be rolling it out to other platforms in the coming weeks.
For those who were there, thanks so much for stopping by the booth and saying hi. For those who weren’t there, you were missed but this update is for you.
We’re really excited to finally be on the bone and introduce a whole new slew of future Firewatch fans to the game.
We unveiled the Firewatch Audio Tour for all platforms!
The Firewatch Audio Tour is one part devlog mixed with one part scavenger hunt all presented like a museum tour within the world of Firewatch. We’ll talk way more about it (seriously, try to shut us up)in the next two weeks. But everyone will have it on September 21st or very very shortly thereafter (PS4, Steam, GOG, everyone!).
We had a sensational photo-booth!
Thanks to Panic Inc. and Happymatic, fans could get their picture taken with Forrest Byrnes or even the dev-team if they so desired. Also, Cabel from Panic went as far as to have a bunch of prop walkie-talkies made, surprising the team with them the night before.
We partnered with Syber and CyberpowerPC for in-booth sick rigs!
Fans got the chance to play Firewatch on one of Syber’s Steam machinesorCyberpower’s towers. They’re great machines (Cyberpower assembled our dev machines) and they were a great partner at show. Thanks CyberpowerPC and Syber Gaming!
And here is some coverage of all the new Firewatch news!
Firewatch is coming to Xbox One on September 21st!
You’ve been inquiring and those inquiries were not falling on deaf ears. We’re thrilled to finally be sharing Firewatch with our friends in the Xbox community.
Along with the main game, we’re also shipping the Firewatch Audio Tour (a free update for all customers!) which we’ll talk a little bit more about tomorrow. The short version: one part scavenger hunt, one part museum tour, one part game dev workshop, mixed with a dash of inside Campo Santo goofs. We think you will like it very much.
Furthermore, we’re going to be rolling out a free-roam mode to all customers, beginning with Xbox One (again, you asked!). In free roam, you’ll be able to live in the Shoshone with a full day/night cycle and explore with a few hidden secrets.
Thanks to everyone who’s made Firewatch such a success and we’re stoked to grow the Campo Santo family! We’ll see you on September 21st!
PAX West is this week and we’re excited to say we’re going to be there, with a full booth, new merchandise, an Official Fotodome Photo Booth and some never-before-seen Firewatch things to show.
Also, we’re partnering with our friends at Syber for our in-booth gaming PCs so you’ll be able to experience Firewatch on only the sickest of rigs. Thanks Syber!
Cabel asked me if I had any Forrest Byrnes art lying around he could use for the Forrest 64 soundtrack art, and I said “yeah sure I do but WHAT IF INSTEAD-” and tried to channel my inner Yoichi Kotabe
anyway if you own Firewatch on Switch please enjoy this extremely dumb and good easter egg
