Tacoma is NOW AVAILABLE on PS4-- and Commentary Mode is live!

Guess what everyone…

TACOMA, THE NEXT GAME FROM THE CREATORS OF GONE HOME,  IS AVAILABLE ON PLAYSTATION 4 RIGHT NOW!!

And, along with it, we’ve added a new Developer Commentary Mode to the game-- and we’re updating Tacoma on PC and Xbox to include Commentary as well!

We’re really excited to bring Tacoma to PlayStation players, and to give you guys new insights into how the game was made. Commentary Mode includes over 2 hours of audio commentary from the designers, writers, artists, programmers and more who brought Tacoma to life. There’s details shared and secrets spilled about the game development process and our thinking on Tacoma’s characters and fictional world-- as well as some silly stuff like this:

And to celebrate this update and welcome people aboard who haven’t taken the leap yet, Tacoma is 20-25% off on Steam, Xbox and Playstation during PS4 launch week! Dive on in, tell a friend, and experience one of the year’s most gripping game narratives for yourself!

For those who haven’t taken the leap yet, we’ve prepared a bit of a primer: an introduction to the crew of Tacoma, in the words of the crewmembers themselves. These crewmember bios serve as a starting point to get new players acquainted with the folks who populate Tacoma Station-- or as a nice refresher for those of you coming back to the game from a little time away.

We hope you’ll grow to love the crew of Tacoma during your time on the station as much as we did while we were making the game :)

Also, ONLY for the rest of PS4 launch week, we have limited edition commemorative merch available on the Fullbright shop: a beautiful 3-piece enamel pin set featuring the AI of Tacoma, and a new printing of our limited edition launch tee shirt, in both men’s and women’s sizes, featuring a hand-pulled ODIN-blue-green gradient color scheme, and the awesome art of cyberpunk illustrator Josan Gonzalez.

Along with this, we’re retiring some of our old-guard items from the shop, and they’re all discounted to $5-- so get your Fullbright and Tacoma shirts/mugs/notebooks while they’re still around!

Thanks you again to our fans for grabbing the game on PC, Xbox and Playstation, and for digging in to our new Commentary Mode. We can’t tell you how much it means to us that you spend time with these people and places we create. All the best, and see you in Orbit!

Tacoma is in the EXPLORER’S BUNDLE on Steam!

Welcome, Explorers! We're proud to announce that this week on Steam, Tacoma is part of the EXPLORER'S BUNDLE, 6 modern adventure games all discounted as a special deal, the rest of this week!

The games in the bundle are TACOMA, The Witness, Firewatch, Obduction (from the creators of Myst), Quern, and Samorost 3-- and they’re all discounted individually, or at a special bundle price! All fantastic, beautiful, thoughtful games (if we do say so ourselves), and we couldn't be more honored to be included alongside them.

Tacoma is 30% off for the first time EVER to the general Steam audience-- so if you or a friend have been waiting to pick it up, now's the perfect time. And even better is that as part of a Steam bundle, if you already own some of the other games in the group, completing the bundle by buying the rest of the titles in it gives you an ADDITIONAL 20% off your purchase price-- and also puts a bunch of awesome, innovative games about story and exploration into your Steam library.

Thank you everyone who's played Tacoma so far-- and to everyone who picks it up as part of the Steam Explorer's Bundle! Can't wait to hear what you think-- and we appreciate you helping get the word out about this rad deal! See you in orbit...

-steve

Here it is, the final installment of @koalaparties’s Tacoma mini-comics, created as a companion piece to the game (which you can find out more about at https://ta.co.ma!) Mini-comic #5 closes the loop with the moments leading up to the scene players experience in the Administration wing in the game. We hope you’ve enjoyed these peeks into life on Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma! See you aboard...

A quiet little scene between Sareh and ODIN for Tacoma Minicomic #4 by @koalaparties. Thank you for spending time with our crew on Tacoma station, and in these moments that Kate’s been creating. One more episode to complete our five-part comic series-- stayed tuned! https://ta.co.ma

This week’s comic is about a bit of a zero-G rivalry on the station :) This is minicomic 3 of 5 by our ever-talented environment artist @koalaparties about daily life aboard Tacoma Station. Get up close and personal with the crew on Windows, Mac, Linux and Xbox One by visiting https://ta.co.ma to find out more :) Look for the rest of the minicomic series in the coming weeks!

New, limited-edition launch gear on our shop!

It’s been a few weeks since launch-- and we’re celebrating with some limited-edition items in our web shop!

First off, we collaborated with amazing cyberpunk illustrator Josan Gonzalez to create an original t-shirt design featuring Amy and ODIN floating free in zero gravity!

Preorders for the shirt are open til Sept. 12, and are available in both men’s and women’s sizes. We’re so excited about how Josan’s art has captured the spirit of Tacoma and can’t wait to see this out in the wild! We’ll be producing shirts based on how many are ordered, and they should start shipping out first thing in October.

We also produced some custom items for our launch party, and we’re making them available to fans while we still have some on hand!

The Party Pack is a limited-edition 6x9″ print of Rebecca Mock’s fantastic Tacoma title art, plus a custom Scout Books notebook made specially for our launch. You can find out more about the notebook from Scout Books here! And we only have a small number left, but we’re throwing in a set of crew icon coasters as well to lucky customers who order in time.

While we’re at it, we’ve discounted our classic Fullbright and Tacoma hoodies, shirts, and mugs by 25%-50% in case there’s anything else you’d had your eye on...! https://shop.fullbrig.ht

Thank you for showing your support for what we do! Be sure to jump on those limited items while they last-- and we’d love to see how they look once they make their way to you! Feel free to tweet us at twitter.com/tacomagame once your order arrives! Hope these items find you well :)

It’s time for part 2 of Life on Tacoma, our mini-comics story series! You can find Part 1 here. We’re so happy to know that people are fascinated by what life is like on Tacoma Station, and our amazing environment artist, Kate Craig, is making a short series of mini-comics all about the moments in the crew’s lives before disaster struck. We hope you enjoy this little story, and will look forward to the rest of the series in the coming week! If you haven’t played Tacoma yet, head over to https://ta.co.ma and check it out on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Xbox One.

Life on Tacoma: A Mini-Comics Series!

Among all the player reactions we’ve gotten to Tacoma, by far the most common is that people fall in love with the crew of the station, and wish they could know more about their lives in Orbit. Luckily, our intrepid and incredibly talented environment artist, Kate Craig, is also a fantastic comics artist-- and she’s working on a series of short side stories about moments in everyday life for the Tacoma crew when everything ISN’T going wrong. Today, we share the first of these little moments with you!

We hope you’ll enjoy these illustrated peeks into the lives of the characters you got to know in the game. Here’s part 1: “Down Time”! More to follow in the coming weeks...!

The Translational Magic of AR

Hi folks! Been a while since we posted here! First off, if you’re looking for a wind-up of our time at E3, try giving our most recent email newsletter archive entry a look! Since we’ve posted last, we’ve shared our launch trailer, announced our launch date (August 2!), and gone up for preorder on PC and Xbox One! The game will be available in just about a week... can’t wait for you to play it! But, that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. We’re here to talk about language translation in augmented reality!

Tacoma station is driven by augmented reality-- digital information overlaid on the environment directly in the user’s vision, giving the inhabitants of this futuristic facility more information about their world.

The cool thing about so much of the information in the world being digital is that when you switch between one of our supported languages in your options settings, you see Tacoma as if you’d set Amy’s AR software to auto-translate everything she encounters, seamlessly. The station’s zero-G Hub goes from existing in English...

...to Russian...

...or Japanese!

It’s really cool for the fictional technology of the game to translate so directly into something that’s usually only part of the options menu-- the change of language really inhabits the gameworld. Digital information about everything from signage leading you around the station, to AR pop-ups in Amy’s vision, to yes, how to use sinks and toilets, all transforms when you switch languages:

And as far as interpreting physical writing and objects go, we posit the Augmented Reality would detect written text and overlay it dynamically on the world-- so that’s how the fictional tech in Tacoma works too:

Whatever language you play Tacoma in, we hope you’ll enjoy it when it’s released on August 2... and that you’ll take a minute to swap your options and see what the station looks like through different languages of the world. See you on Tacoma Station soon!

Tacoma spring news; two big upcoming events in Portland!

Hey all!

As spring rolls around, we wanted to make a post here to update you with what’s been going on lately, and what’s coming up soon!

First off, if you haven’t already, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at ta.co.ma-- we just sent one out a week or two ago, which included a roundup of recent hands-on impressions and new gameplay video from our time at GDC. If you’ve missed the newsletters and want to catch up on past entries, take a look at our new Newsletter Archive! Each one includes recent updates about the game, as well as one WEIRD SPACE FACT for your perusal and enjoyment. Never miss our latest info, straight to your inbox.

But, there’s more cool news coming up this April, and since we just sent out a newsletter and didn’t want to follow it up too soon, we’re posting an update here! Are you in or around the Portland area? Want to go hands-on with Tacoma? We have two awesome events coming up that will let you do just that! We’re partnering with the Portland Indie Game Squad to present Tacoma at BETACON, hands-on for all attendees!

PIGSquad has curated a full playable showcase of games made here in Portland, and Tacoma will be there! All day Saturday April 15-Sunday April 16 we’ll be part of the event, hosting the demo and chatting with fans. Hope to see you there, and thanks to both BetaCon and PIGSquad for having us!

And if you can’t make it out to BetaCon, we suggest you drop by the PIGSquad Drink & Draw event on April 28 in central Portland! PIGSquad’s Drink & Draws are awesome events where you can play tons of local indie games, chat with devs & other fans, and maybe win some prizes in their drawing contests throughout the night! We’ll have Tacoma playable there as well-- register now to RSVP for this free event.

In the coming weeks we’ll have more to announce-- but in the meantime we’re working away on the game, entering the final months of development before Tacoma is finally released to the world. Hope you’ll get a chance to try out the game here in Portland if you’re an area local-- keep an eye here (and sign up for our newsletter) for more updates! Cheers!

-steve

An interactive view into Tacoma’s multipath narrative

Hey all! IGN has put up something really cool: using their multi-stream video technology, they’ve allowed you to explore one of Tacoma’s early scenes from multiple angles simultaneously! Click through to check it out-- then head back here for some insight into the process.

One of the toughest things about talking about Tacoma is getting across what’s so unique about our core mechanic. We all know the feeling we’re going for, and it can be described, but it really comes across most strongly when you can be in it. As Marty Sliva puts it in his writeup for this feature, “It’s almost like being able to control the flow of a play that’s being performed right in front of your eyes.” You can see how that ability to rewind, fast forward, move through the scene and connect disparate moments comes together in the 15-minute gameplay video we released, but the other side of it-- getting to fully examine each of these multipath scenes from every angle-- is harder to encapsulate.

Which is where IGN’s very cool multi-stream video technology comes in. With this new feature, we were able to capture three separate player paths through the same scene-- all starting from the same place then immediately diverging-- to get a fuller feel for how all these parallel threads add up to a complete view of what a scene like this means in total. It also emphasizes how quickly the player experience can add up in layers... and this doesn’t even include the story thread where the player follows E.V. into her office, or other parts of this wing that go unexplored here.

In any case, thanks again to IGN for making such a unique view into what Tacoma is and how it works possible! Click on through and explore the Admin wing of Tacoma from multiple angles... and look forward to doing much more of this yourself when you get to play Tacoma in Spring 2017 :)

The First 15 Minutes of Tacoma!

Greetings! It’s an exciting day of us today, as the fine folks at IGN have chosen Tacoma to be their IGN First feature for the month! And to kick it all off, we’ve got a fresh 15 minutes of never-before-seen gameplay from the beginning of the game. Follow Amy as she boards the station and begins her exploration of what led to its crew being evacuated, and what really brought her here in the first place. Thanks for checking this out-- and keep an eye on IGN for tons more features on Tacoma all through the month of September!

Press Roundup!

Hi all! We sent out our newsletter (you can sign up at tacoma.game) and have posted some on our Twitter and Facebook pages, but we haven’t gathered all the exciting press coverage we’ve posted from E3 2016 in one single, all-encompassing place yet! And so: welcome to this blog post.

First off, if you haven’t seen it yet, we kicked off E3 by debuting our moody new trailer for Tacoma:

We showed it as part of the YouTube Gaming Live show with Geoff Keighley: Karla and Steve went onstage to show some more footage and chat a little about some of the big changes since we showed the game last. You can check out that segment here! 

Following the debut of the new trailer, we spent the rest of the conference showing a live gameplay demo to press folks from tons of outlets from all over the world. Thanks again to our compatriots at Microsoft for making us part of their behind-closed-doors press schedule in the Xbox One booth!

One result of all this demoing was that we were lucky enough to end up being included in a number of sites’ “BEST OF E3″ lists! Thank you to Game Informer, The Verge, Nerdist, the AV Club and more for including us! 

But of course the most exciting stuff to come out of the E3 press coverage was in-depth peeks into just what our new and improved vision of Tacoma entails. A good place to start? Polygon’s video comparison between what we showed a year ago, and where the game’s at now.Polygon also did a full writeup of the press demo, including their impressions of how it plays and where it’s headed.

The Associated Press wrote up a number of their “trends of E3,” which included Tacoma’s Amy Ferrier as one of the show’s “diverse heroes.”

What else, what else?

Along with naming Tacoma the Best Adventure Game of E3, Game Informer also wrote up their full impressions of the driven demo.

The Guardian’s Keith Stuart also gave the demo a look and shared his thoughts.

As a game that’s going to launch on PC and Xbox One, the Xbox Wire came by and shared their impressions.

For our Japanese-speaking fans, Famitsu came by and gave our demo a look! They also took a nice photo of Steve & Karla in front of our big logo wall in the press room:

Finally, perhaps you are an interview liker? We’ve got you covered.

Wired wrote up their time with the game, and asked Steve and Karla more about the creative process, and life in 2088. And took some very dramatic photos.

The Daily Dot shares an extensive interview, with tons of new insight.

And, finally, Kill Screen came by the Fullbright office and interviewed Nina and Karla about their work in games!

Phew! Think that does it for now! Keep an eye out later this summer for more new info about the game. Thanks for hanging with us... can’t wait to show you more!

Tacoma is Coming, Spring 2017

Hey all-- we just sent out a newsletter (which you can sign up for at tacoma-game.com) which included the announcement that Tacoma’s schedule has been extended to Spring 2017. We’ve made some decisions about where the game was at and how much time and attention we believe it deserves, and have decided to give it the extra time it needs. As you can tell from this decision being made a full year before we plan to launch, this isn’t a last minute “we just need a little more time!” thing, but more of a “we need to be responsible about giving the game more space to live up to its potential” kind of thing. Please see the text from the newsletter below-- and look forward to new info on (and gameplay from!) Tacoma in the coming months!

As you may have noticed, we haven't released a lot of new info about the game in the last few months-- and that's because, after we did our big unveiling last summer we sent out a playtest build to a bunch of fellow developers we trust, took a long hard look at their feedback and our own feelings on where we were at, and decided to reexamine and rework a number of the core assumptions we'd held about the game. How would gravity really work on a deep-space facility like Tacoma? What are we trying to say about the function and implications of Augmented Reality-- and how does the player interact meaningfully with the story content in the game, in a fundamentally different way than anything we've worked on before?

We dove in and took this job seriously, redefining a number of elements that really needed it. It's been an important process (and we've recently sent out another playtest, the response to which has made our months of deep-structure soul-searching feel very worth it) but it's also taken time... time that would've otherwise been devoted to getting the game further on toward being finished and shipped.

So, long story short, we've had to push out our original schedule. We'd originally planned mid-to-late 2016, so we're giving ourselves an additional 6+ months, to land in Spring 2017. We're currently polishing up a sample of our newly-minted alterations to the core game into something showable that we'll be showing the world this coming summer.

Thank you again for all your support & commitment to what we do... we can't wait to show you more of the new face of Tacoma. We've got some very exciting stuff in store...

Happy Holidays, all!!

This year we put together a Fullbright holiday card, illustrated by our fantastically talented animator Noël, themed for the game we have in development, Tacoma! We signed & sent this out to friends of the studio and a few lucky fans-- but we thought you might want to print some out at home as well! So here you go: a high-resolution version of the image, suitable for printing, sending, framing, whatever your holiday-cheer-loving heart desires. From the crew of Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma, and all of us here at Fullbright-- Happy Holidays!