Hey all, Fiffle here!
Long time, no see! Development has been slow the past few months as Rye and I had things in real life that required our time, but things are picking back up! This article will cover what’s happened since our last article, and what is planned for the future.
To start things off, we hit a few milestones between October (when our previous article was published) and December (when development slowed down.) This includes:
- The release of our demo - on Halloween, we released a demo here on ModDB for people to play, including chambers 00 through 06. We’ve gotten some good feedback that we used to improve the game, and we even received a shoutout from the Snowdrop Escape team!
- Ambition’s Steam page went public - in our last article we mentioned that Ambition was accepted on Steam. Well, although quite some time ago, we made the store page public so that everyone can wishlist it! You can find it here.
- Some new people joined our team - welcome Contaminated Sound, Lorna, and Caldon B. to the team! Contaminated Sound will be working on the game soundtrack, while Lorna and Caldon will be taking the roles of the scientist and ALiCo, respectively.
We still have a spot open, though! We’re currently looking for an artist to do some graphic design and texture work for in-game assets. Same as before, this position is not paid.
If you're interested, email ryeplease.az@gmail.com or fifflesniffle@gmail.com.
A lot of Rye's and my time has been taken up by school related stuff such as studying or extracurriculars, as well as being at school itself, and outside of breaks we struggle to get a whole lot done. Without any work to assign to the rest of the dev team, they’ve gotten an extra long break. Rye is still occupied with school and graduating, time has opened back up for me. This leads into events from March to now, and our plans for the future.
Project lead changes - I am now the main lead of Ambition! Rye will still be working closely with the team and I on the mod, but I will be directing the mod creatively as we near completion. Speaking of completion…
Let’s talk about the future release schedule for Ambition and what’s changed since our August and October articles. In our October article we pushed the release back and changed the schedule mentioned in August to better fit releasing on Steam and hence, grow the scope a bit. Now that we’ve whittled away at those additions more, here’s a rough roadmap of what to expect and when to expect it:
Late Q2 ‘24 - updated Portal: Ambition DEMO release on Steam
H2 ‘24 - Portal: Ambition Main Campaign release on Steam
Q4 ‘24/Q1 ‘25 - Portal: Ambition XTRA PLAY via update on Steam
XTRA PLAY, as we’ll be calling it from now on, is planned to include:
- ~ 20 bonus maps, containing cut chambers, cut story maps, and some chambers meant to be bonus maps all along!
- Portal: Hope, the predecessor that led up to Ambition, will have its campaign included along with the other bonus maps, making the total amount of bonus maps almost 30!
- Updates to campaign adding new areas to explore, and some side missions as well!
All the dates are subject to change of course, but things likely won’t be pushed back any further.
From now on, the project will be developed more ‘as we go,’ whittling away at it with no specific date until we KNOW it’s ready for release. As such, this may be the last article for a while until we have some stuff to talk about. Hopefully Ambition will be worth the wait!
Now, to the juicy stuff. Here’s what’s going on in regards to development!
First off, assets. Last year, Allison Ghost / Valla-Chan and a few others released work on a canceled project called Every Last Crumb, which aimed to replace many of Portal’s models and textures with nicer updated ones, as well as modifying the levels. The levels aren’t of much use to us, but the assets are.
We’ve decided to include ELC’s asset replacements in Ambition, which will raise the quality of the game’s visuals. We’ve also gotten permission to modify the assets (with credit to Allison of course!) to include some of our own modifications to the models to fit Ambition’s needs a little better. Things like fizzler skins, pipe skins, and more.
Here’s some shots showing off what they look like:
Portal: Every Last Crumb assets by Allison Ghost (Valla-Chan)
Modifications such as the gray pipe skin in image 5 and the disabled fizzler in image 6 were made by us.
Second, we have a new logo! You’ll see more of it as we go through and change more of the branding to match it.
Feel free to include it in anything that covers the mod, think of these images as a sort of press kit.
Included is a version for white backgrounds and a version for black backgrounds, as well as the game icon.
Third, map detailing! Here’s some screenshots of our current maps:
And a little bonus:
Thank you to the amazing mappers that make this mod possible!
Finally, some OST:
Stoicism made by Fiffle__Sniffle with assistance from Contaminated Sound
Libertinism made by Contaminated Sound
We also need playtesters! As we get closer to finishing the mod (for real this time) we need to do more testing on a variety of different players and ranges of hardware! If you’d like to help us make Ambition better, please consider applying. We’ll start going through and accepting applicants soon, you’ll definitely hear from us if you’re let on.
You will need to actively test the game when asked to, though. Remember that playtesting doesn’t mean getting early access to the game, it's still unfinished. If you're interested, you can apply here!
That’s all for now, folks! Hopefully this giant update can make up for our 5 month silence. Thanks for hanging in there, you won't have to wait too much longer!
Follow our Twitter account: @portalambition
And join our Discord server for more frequent updates!
Things are looking more ambitious now...