Underground Blossom – Devlog 3 – Q&A with Rusty Lake

Thanks again for taking the time to send us so many awesome questions. This time we decided to stick mostly to Underground Blossom related questions but worry not, we will host more general Q&As in the future.

First, a little introduction in case you are new to The Lake:

About Rusty Lake

Rusty Lake is an indie game studio based in Amsterdam, founded by Robin Ras & Maarten Looise. Since 2015, we have developed 16 surrealistic point-and-click adventure games in the Rusty Lake Universe. The story of all these games are intertwined and every instalment reveals more about the Rusty Lake mysteries.

We have released the following games on PC and mobile: Cube Escape Collection (bundle of our 9 Cube Escape episodes), Cube Escape: Paradox, Samsara Room and four premium games: Rusty Lake Hotel, Rusty Lake: Roots, Rusty Lake Paradise and The White Door. The Past Within, our first co-op experience, was released last year and tomorrow, on September 27th, we will release Underground Blossom.

A community interview:

@malthunos: How did you get the idea to develop Laura’s story in a subway? 🚇

When we brainstorm about new Rusty Lake games, we often start by thinking about interesting locations. A subway or metro station was in our heads for a long time. Eventually, we enjoyed the idea that a metro stop could symbolise a new chapter in someone’s life. Sharing more about Laura Vanderboom’s (secret) life turned out to be the perfect fit for this location for a game, we only had to wait for the right moment.

@onaiashraf: How long will the game be? 🕰️

Over the past 3 months, we held as many playtests as possible. Some sessions took over 3 hours, while others were much quicker and finished the game within 1.5 hours. Therefore we estimate a normal playthrough of Underground Blossom at 2 hours. But your journey doesn’t simply end after the final station…

Creen Greeper: How many stations will it be? 🚉

Underground Blossom will have seven standard stations.

@amiito23_’s: How important is music or the theme going to be to Underground Blossom…? 🌸

As we mentioned in our Devlog 2 last week, music and sound have been among the most important parts of this game. The piano and cello worked so well to enhance the (emotional) journey of Laura. We cannot thank all our musicians enough for their incredible work, Victor, Sebastiaan, Remco and, of course, our sound designers, Jorick and Giliam, did a tremendous job of getting the perfect metro atmosphere for the game. 

@r_no_registrada’s: Do I need the other games to discover the secrets of UB? 🦉

Most secrets in Underground Blossom can be found without prior knowledge of our other games. But we do recommend to have at least played the Cube Escape Collection (free on mobile). As always, all our games are connected in one way or another and Underground Blossom won’t be any different. So only our die-hard fans can collect the 34 achievements without hints/a walkthrough!

@nowhere: Will you keep the secret ARG level from UB Lite in the full version? It was so enlightening! 📼

Yes, you can still reach the Best Kept Memory station in the full game 🙂

@gracie._.smiles22: What was the hardest bug to fix? 🐛

Last night we fixed a bug that removed one item and duplicated the other in your inventory. While this rare bug was already mentioned in the Lite/Demo version, we never figured out how to fix it. Until last night. We somehow experienced the same bug again and Ruben, our main play tester and bug hero, gathered the right info to reproduce it. Because of the frame-by-frame movie clip he made, we were able to see exactly what happened and we fixed the code just in time!

Ps. We cannot guarantee the game is completely bug-free, so please let us know on Discord or support@rustylake.com if you experience anything while playing.

@mc_puddlls’s: How many voices will there be in the game? Will it have more than one voice actor? 🗣️

Unfortunately, our best and beloved voice actor Bob Rafferty won’t be the only one voicing the characters this time around (although he would have loved to). Just like in The White Door, Bob Rafferty, Iris Muller and Sara Hill are our main voice actors, but this time we got help from several different voice actors to bring the right quality to the game. But then again, there are more characters in-game, so you might know who helped us out here.

@PurpleMcgee: Will there ever be a reveal of why Rose left Laura? 🌹

Yes! But we cannot say too much about this yet.

@reyyanbetul_akgul’s: Which languages will be in the new game? 🌎

Our amazing group of translators together with our localization manager, Luuk, made Underground Blossom available in 21 languages! Please double-check your store (mobile or PC) to see if your language is available. We hope to add more languages in the future, but it costs a lot of time and hard work (from both sides) to implement a language correctly, hence why it will take us time to implement more languages.

@alr.saraa’s: Not about the development process but will you have a #laketober this year? 🎨

Yes! October would not exist without #Laketober. Our community managers Andreea, Damy and our mod team on Discord cannot wait to share the prompt list very soon! And yes it will be centred around Underground Blossom!

@niohsen.shanjamali’s: What happened to the mammoth game?

We cannot go back that far in time just yet. Now it’s time to Blossom 🎟️ 🚇 🌸

We hope we answered your burning questions about Underground Blossom and other Rusty Lake topics, we did our best to get to as many of them as possible! Thank you for all your great questions, but now we need to once again retreat and prepare the final tweaks on the upcoming Underground Blossom metro! See you on Release Station tomorrow, September 27th!