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Attending Gamescom is certainly an undertaking and during the week we are there our progress will definitely slow down - but the hardest part about our preparations is making a demo version of our game. We talked about some of our processes before, the ideas, design, concept art, prototyping, creation of 3d assets, and making animatics. But there is more - like programming, testing, and polishing. These are all phases that our game has to go through to be in a playable state. To make a demo we need to choose a part of the game and prioritize it going through all the phases, which requires great effort from all of our departments and can be quite complex logistically.
On the other hand, it allows us to try all the ideas we had on a practical level and make adjustments based on feedback from real players, so it definitely has its bright side. In the last few months, we had to shift our focus from the big picture (making designs for all the chapters and slowly building up our progress game-wide) to fully polishing the first, tutorial chapter. Designers needed to shift their focus from brainstorming to testing and polishing, 3d artists from making prototypes to finishing assets and making textures, and concept artists from making concepts to creating various documents and paintings that you’ll be able to see in-game.
Of course, some parts of the demo are not the same as you’ll be able to experience in the final game. Visual effects for one are only an approximation of our final vision and will require a lot more work before the final release. 
I look forward to seeing you at Gamescom and/or later in the comment section and collecting all your feedback and notes!
What is an animatic? In general, animatic is a series of images or short videos that are made to convey planned features, or a feeling a piece of audiovisual art should portray. In our case, it is a bit more specific. Our animatics use prototypes of 3d assets and animations of any active objects and aim to show the full workings of any one puzzle and scene.
Finished animatics help designers to finally see what their ideas look like after all the iterations and changes, tweak the workings and mechanisms of the puzzles (this of course requires cooperation with the 3d artist who made the prototypes in the first place), and convey their ideas about interactions and causalities in the game world to the coders who then use the animatic as a baseline of how should things behave.
You can picture our animatic as a playthrough video made before the game is finished. It focuses on all things the player can interact with and follows his every step through the chapter, every stage, every zoom, every puzzle as well as any extra interactions that are not necessary for the completion of the game.
Making animatics often requires cooperation across all of our departments and helps us iron out a lot of potential issues. To show you a small glimpse of what our animatics look like (and maybe to get a chuckle out of you), Lucka, one of our designers and the specialist on animatics for The House of Tesla created this gif for you.
And that's my cue until next month when we will talk about Gamescom, our preparations for an event like this, and what goes into making a playable demo.
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