10 years ago today, Estranged: Act I was released. Since then, there have been well over a million unique players, with nearly 7k reviews and the title sits with a Steam rating of 93%.

"Natural Reserve" by Er0de from the Act I Steam Community

Thank you to everyone that supported the project by translating, submitting feedback, and of course playing the game. The biggest reward for a game developer is seeing people have fun with something you’ve built.

Humble Beginnings

For those that may not know the background, Estranged started as a map for Half-Life: 2 known as Splooshe (available on the Act I workshop), inspired by some of the early Half-Life: 2 screenshots[combineoverwiki.net]. From there, the map and concept continued to evolve into a mod, and then into a standalone game (and got a better name!).

Untitled screenshot by siplaki from the Act I Steam Community

The Departure

After the release of Act I, Act II was born as a background project. It entered Steam Early Access in 2017 and released in 2020 as Estranged: The Departure.

"Красивое место 🧡" (en: Beautiful place) by Extragamer from the The Departure Steam Community

A year later The Departure released on Nintendo Switch (US[www.nintendo.com], Europe[www.nintendo.co.uk]) which introduced brand new audiences to the series. The title will celebrate its own 5-year anniversary later this year!

Next Instalment

The next instalment to follow will be Estranged: Arctic Cold, which has been in development in the background since 2020. This is a direct continuation of where The Departure ended, with enough context to also be played standalone.

Previously unseen development screenshots from Estranged: Arctic Cold

A personal note: I’m at the stage now where I’d really like to get people playing Arctic Cold to shape the future of the game. It’s nice to develop in a vacuum without the pressure of expectations, however it’s not rewarding; no-one is playing what you’re putting together. The plan is to follow with an Early Access release of Arctic Cold later this year, and continue to develop it "in the open" as with The Departure.

If you'd like to stay in touch, there is a Discord server at https://discord.gg/estranged

Thank you for playing and following the Estranged series!
Alan

Cross posted on the Estranged: The Departure Steam Community

An update is now live for Estranged: Act I on Windows, containing the following changes:

• Updated workshop tooling to .NET 8 and a newer version of the Steam SDK
  
• Updated the Source SDK bootstrapping tool to .NET 8

See the Official Workshop Guide for more information.

I'm sorry to announce that because of changes Apple are making in macOS Catalina (due to be released later this year), Estranged: Act I will no longer be able to run on macOS.

• In the next few weeks, the Act I store page will no longer list Mac as a supported platform
  
• Players that downloaded Act I previously will still be able to access the Mac version of Act I, but after upgrading to macOS Catalina the game will no longer run

There is no impact for players on Windows and Linux.

The specific changes that Apple will make is the removal of support for 32bit applications. I have followed up with Valve[github.com] around adding 64bit support to the Source SDK 2013, but have not heard anything back.

My hope is that since this also impacts Valve's older first party titles, they will fix this in the 2009 engine branch and upstream the changes into the 2013 SDK.

Apple are also actively deprecating the OpenGL graphics API in favour of Apple's Metal API - something Source SDK 2013 won't support without a lot of engineering work on Valve's side.

To bring Estranged and other Source SDK 2013 games back to Mac for any meaningful length of time, both Metal and 64bit would need to be supported.

If you'd like to discuss this, drop a comment below or join the Estranged community at https://discord.gg/estranged

Thanks,
Alan

I'm excited to annouce that Estranged: Act I now supports Steam Workshop!

Click the image to jump over to the Estranged: Act I Steam Workshop!

There are a few items in the workshop already contributed by the Estranged Discord community. I also added my map that started Estranged, from August 2011:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1698691129
There is a full guide documenting how to download items from the workshop as a player, and how to upload your own maps, sounds, models and materials as a developer:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1700006102

The workshop tooling is currently compatible with 64-bit Windows, with Mac and Linux versions on the way soon. If you'd like to speed up this effort and offer to test, please join the Estranged Discord server and ping me directly (@AlanEdwardes) - https://discord.gg/estranged

As part of this update, the Hammer launcher has been fixed, and now appears as an option when launching the game.

Thank you for playing Estranged, and I can't wait to see what items you develop for Act I!

Alan

An update is now live for Mac, Linux and Windows with the following changes:

• Statistics collection is now disabled autoexec.cfg - previously it was opt-in, the difference is now the game no longer asks at first boot if it can collect statistics, and runs with them disabled unless explicitly enabled
  
• Replaces all URLs to point to iamestranged.com - previously some URLs pointed to alanedwardes.com/estranged which was the temporary landing page since I wasn't sure whether I would be able to keep iamestranged.com (!)
  
• Custom content support - The "custom" folder is now enabled in gameinfo.txt for custom content out of the box

If there are any other changes you'd like to see in future updates, let me know in the comments, or via Discord: https://discord.gg/estranged

Thanks for playing Estranged!

This was cross-posted from the Act II news hub

As 2017 draws to a close, I thought I'd round up some of the things that happened over the past year, and look ahead to what 2018 will bring.

Here are some interesting statistics from the past year:

• Over 19,000 downloads on Steam
  
• 262 Steam reviews (74% positive)
  
• Over 30 content updates (many more undocumented)
  
• Over 300 builds (some are duds and don't go live)
  
• 2,829 commits in source control
  
• Over 40 GB of content (raw levels, code, textures, models, sounds)
  
• 18 development blog videos on YouTube

Concept level from photograph of sewer - view tweet


I am going to be posting more smaller morsels of news and screenshots on Twitter, so if you'd like to get smaller development updates follow me @AlanEdwardes and @EstrangedGame.

These will propagate into the update news posts on Steam, but if you want to get more detail from behind the scenes and development updates as they happen then Twitter is the place.


The next year is going to be a big year for Estranged: Act II, with the first content update of 2018 arriving very soon. There will be more action, story and awesome environments to experience in the next few months – the fisherman's voyage is not yet complete!

Upcoming changes to forest level


I touch on it every news post, but I want to thank every person reading this for being involved in the project – whether you're waiting for the series to be complete, or you're playing the content updates as they are released – thank you all.

Here's to 2018!

Alan

We are excited to announce that Estranged: Act II is now available to download on Steam Early Access!

http://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/582890
During the Early Access period we'll be using the Act II forums to talk to the community about the direction of the game, features you'd like to see and any bug reports: http://steamproxy.com/app/582890/discussions/

Please let us know what you think! We'll be continuing development of Estranged: Act II during the Early Access period with regular updates adding more content, and improving existing content.

Thank you for being part of the development so far, and we hope you'll continue to work with us to make the finished version a fun, immersive experience.

The Estranged Team

We are excited to announce that Estranged: Act II will be on Steam! We will be releasing Estranged: Act II into Early Access - for free!

http://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/582890
Estranged: Act I was released in incremental “alphas” while it was being developed. This allowed us to regularly provide players with new content, and for players to continuously give feedback on the development process.

Early Access vastly simplifies the incremental update process, as it is a lot easier for us to release often. We no longer need to prepare and advertise large releases ahead of time, the process of pushing a new build to Steam takes a matter of minutes.

Once Early Access has finished, we plan to charge a nominal amount for the game – but this will be when we are satisfied it is complete. Estranged is (and has always been) a spare time project for everyone involved, alongside full-time work and education. We would love to get paid for what we do, but only if we make a fun game.

Anyone that downloads the game during the free Early Access period will keep the game in their library when it releases fully, paid-for or otherwise. If you are a part of the development process, you deserve to keep the game forever.

We will be using the Act II Steam forums as our primary means of communication, with transparent release notes and a public bug tracker to streamline the development process.

We will be putting the Early Access build live over the next few weeks. Thank you for being part of the Estranged project, we hope you’ll continue this journey with us!

- The Estranged Team

Today marks the 3 year anniversary of the Estranged: Act I Steam release! I recorded a developer commentary to mark the occasion, available to watch on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqV-9bdXEkY&list=PLFxFKQapTGSGf53ujxMwuY-UqFWKaLZZ9
We'd like to thank everyone that played Estranged: Act I, it has been amazing to see so many people experience something that we built!

Development on Act II is in full swing, and if you haven't already, you can download the first alpha from the official website: https://iamestranged.com/download/act2/

Thank you for your continued support!

Alan + The Estranged Team