Mag-log in bilang miyembro
Nakipag-usap kami sa co-founder at CEO ng Wolf Haus Games upang malaman pa ang tungkol sa paparating na kakaibang open-world survival experience, na ilulunsad sa Marso 2027.
"Hello, everyone, and welcome back. We're, as you can probably actually tell by the lovely backdrop we've got going here, I'm currently here with Joe at the Join Us booth at Gamescom. And I've just had a chance to play a bunch of the game. It's very unusual, I suppose you could say. It's a fair word. Yeah. So tell us what was the idea?
Where did it come from? This started as a solo dev project for me in 2022, where it was just this thing. I had an idea for a cult game. The idea of a cult is so specific. It's this thing where it's not quite a family. It's not quite a religion. It's not quite an army. It's not quite a workplace. It's this thing and you break it apart into gameplay mechanics. Something really interesting comes out of that, I think. But it was something I was noodling with that I had very small ambitions for. And then it started building it out and showing it to people. And we built this great team around it. We're only 13 people now, but everyone kind of got to come onto the project and take ownership of it. And we wanted to make something that really Context, Context, Context, Context, We're our own publisher, and the game's been appropriately funded, so we really haven't had a lot of people to tell us no. So it's something where I think the game in a good way is built on feature creep, where we have ideas for things, and there's no red tape within our company, really. You know, it's really just we have an idea, we say, okay, cool, put it in the build. So I think we've been able to Contexts A bunch of guys got together who didn't really know anything about cults and didn't really do any research and tried to make a cult simulator and didn't do a very good job, but made whatever this game is, right? But I think the real one is if you watched Wild Wild Country of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon in the 1980s, there's this cult that had come into this small community in Oregon and moved in and there's this clash of visuals of this very Elaborate cult with the robes and the colors in this sort of small town somewhere, but we've always said that this is sort of like if the cult from Wild Wild Country showed up in the town from Roadhouse. Yeah, the town's going to fight back a little bit. Of course, the other thing as well is the humor. It seeps through. It seems that you're really pushing this game to be as... Do you know what it felt like when I was playing it? A little bit Destroy All Humans-y, in a way. Was that the idea? Yeah, Destroy All Humans is a great one. Saints Row is one that comes up a lot. We're always happy about... Definitely. It's a game where you're playing as... You're the bad guy, I guess, technically, in the... world of the game, you know, but it was, I think Destroy All Humans is a good one because something we talk a lot about with Join Us is we wanted to make a game where the player is the weirdest thing in the game. I think in a lot of games, like you're a marine or you're a soldier, you're, you know, but you're, you're kind of this normal character who is then fighting aliens and giant things. And you're sort of this, you're there to experience the weirdness on behalf of the player, kind of, or like to put it into context, right. And in Join Us, like, You're definitely the weirdest thing in the game until maybe some stuff that happens like in the third act, right? But we thought that was kind of a fun twist on that, right? Where you're the invasive species, you showed up in the tide pool that's kind of ruining everything. And this town would have been completely fine if you never showed up, right? Like, you're kind of the causal agent, right, as the player. And obviously the game has single player, but it also has that feature for multiplayer as well, right? So how does that work? How do you differentiate the two? Currently, it's either single player or one to four player co-op. Something we always focused on was that from a design perspective, the game had to be fun in single player and had to work in single player and multiplayer had to make it a better experience or a different experience, a bigger experience."
"For us, it's basically if you go into co-op mode, it's not like there's a host player and the other three friends joining our followers with limited, you know, they can shoot and hunt or something, but they can't build. Like everyone can issue teachings. Everyone can build. You're very much sharing the core gameplay features. So we're kind of trusting that four friends will play together who can agree on things or at least have fun disagreeing on things, you know? But I would say in our experience with it, The game is weird, and it gets weirder a lot faster when you're playing with friends. Especially one person punches someone in the street and the cops are showing up and so on. I unlocked the pig riding teaching now they're riding pigs around. The emergent chaos that's going to happen anyway in single player happens a lot faster. And the release is planned for March 2027, right? Yeah."
"Do you have any plans? What's the plan after that? You know, are you going to get the game out there and is that it or is that you intend to support it? What's the sort of idea? Take a nap sometime and that's going to be, everyone's scheduled for mid-March, late March. But, you know, no, I think that the plan after it is that we want to Continued support."
"And then there is, I think the community element that comes in then. It's sort of like, look, I started this as a solo dev and like, it was, that was my game then. Right.
Then these like 13 guys came together for making the game now. And like, it's all of our game. But then when you ship it out, it's everybody's game kind of like it belongs to the people playing it. People bought it. Everyone has ideas. Right. So it's like at that point there's a community. And I think I would like the life of the game to have input from the people who are playing it. We don't have a lot of red tape. We're pretty fast at making things. If someone wants something, we'll just do it. We have a Discord community now where people have asked for things in the game and we just put them in. People sent us pictures. They drew, hey, can that be a poster on a wall? Okay."
"You know, something we do in our Discord community is We have a server where everyone can leave their name if they want to be in the game. All the NPCs in the game are people who've left their names in our Discord, you know, so we're already trying to say like, trying to bring a community together, which is weird because it's a cult game, but we're not, we're not actually trying to make a cult, but like a little bit, kind of, you know. Kind of a meta joke in a way, I guess, is it? It's the problem with getting a game out there, getting the co-op and your marketing and it all kind of, kind of feels like a cult at some point. So it's like we're, the recruitment process. Well, there's a final question then for you, Joe. So March 2027 is the launch timeline we're looking at. When Join Us does eventually launch in full and the players can flock in and start their own calls, what's one thing you're really excited for them to experience?
I'm excited to see what people do with Jellybean in the tutorial. There's a, we'll say enough. People will know when they see it. There's a few moments in the game where we put kind of moral choices for the characters to kind of see what players will do. So I'm curious to really see, once we have metrics at volume, I'm curious to see like what percent of players did this. There's a few choices in the campaign that I think can tell you a lot about our player base. So I'm gonna, it'll be interesting to see what the math comes back like on that, I think. Well, stay tuned for it. Again, there'll be plenty more of Join Us as we get closer and closer to this launch window in, well, spring 2027. As always, you'll be able to find it all, well, you know exactly where to find it all, on your local network, so stay tuned and, yeah, we'll catch you on the next interview."
