The Tomorrow Children: Alpha Videos, Infographic (Happy Holidays!)

Hello aspiring projection clones! I’m John Davis, a community manager here at Q-Games. As you might know, we recently finished the closed alpha test for our upcoming PS4 exclusive, The Tomorrow Children. The alpha was amazing and gave players a great sneak peek at what we we’re working on, plus it was a chance to get lots of data on exactly what players will be doing in the Void once The Tomorrow Children arrives on PS4 next year. We had a great time playing with everyone and it was incredibly informative on top of that. The best of both worlds!

For the vast majority of people who didn’t get into the alpha, there’s been a lot of questions about exactly what The Tomorrow Children is, and we can understand that. If you’ve been keeping up with our posts here on PlayStation.Blog, you know that The Tomorrow Children takes place in a dystopian future where a Cold War experiment to meld the minds of all of humanity resulted in the near extinction of the human race.

What was left was a planet-wide Void, where the remnants of human thought manifest themselves strange islands and creatures. As a projected clone created from a sliver of human DNA, you are tasked with venturing out into that Void and reclaiming the souls of humanity that are now trapped in hidden matryoshka dolls. You’ll explore the Void, find the lost humans, collect resources to expand and upgrade your town, and defend it from the walking nightmares called Izverg.

Are you still with me? Keep up! This is just the tip of the genre mash-up that is The Tomorrow Children! We know lots of folks, myself included, would probably be able to wrap their heads around it a little better if there was a handy video. Well you’re in luck because we just so happen to have one! We’ve put together a primer for you with commentary by Q-Games head honcho and veteran game programmer and director Dylan Cuthbert for the TLDR folks. For those of you who want a deeper look, I’ll explain some of the pillars of the game in detail below.

A Clone’s Closet

When heading out into the Void, players can choose to outfit their characters in different uniforms that cater to whichever role they want to fill. There are five uniforms in The Tomorrow Children: Citizen, Engineer Commander, Miner, Radio Officer, and Combatant.

While every citizen can perform the same actions, each uniform has different merits and demerits. For example, just for the alpha test, the Miner starts with a Pick Axe, while the Combatant gets a shotgun. There are many other abilities such as increasing your bag’s capacity or the player’s running speed.

The final game will give players even more freedom to shape themselves into the productive members of society they long to be!

Defending Your Town!

As I mentioned before, collecting humanity’s lost souls is your main mission in The Tomorrow Children. Each matryoshka doll you find in the Void can be brought to town and then resurrected to increase your town population. Your new citizens are fragile and disoriented, so you have to defend them from the dangers of the Void, the Izverg.

You have lots of different ways to defend your town in The Tomorrow Children. Basic defenses include shotguns and rocket launchers that you can purchase. As your town becomes more populous and upgrades up, you’ll open new avenues to defend it, like manned artillery turrets and mobile hover tanks. These are just a few of the options we’ve shown in the alpha and there are more planned for launch.

Unite for Glory!

To survive in the harsh Void, you’ll have to work with your fellow citizens! The Tomorrow Children uses a unique asynchronous multiplayer system in which players exist in the town, but only appear in your world when they’ve interacted with something in theirs. As projected clones, you only appear to all when you’ve physically changed the world. This creates a unique “connected but disconnected” feeling that makes The Tomorrow Children feel even more otherworldly. It also makes working together more challenging, as you’ll have to pay attention to the needs of the town to understand what your role should be at any given moment.

Alpha Test Imagineering!

Making each town “Your Town” is one of the most exciting things about The Tomorrow Children. We were excited to see everything that the players created in the alpha with only the small sample of the tools that were available for the test. I think the video speaks volumes about the crazy stuff people created, so give it a look!

Daily Void News

As I said before, we got mountains of data from the alpha test. We’ve taken a pickaxe and shovel to it and mined some of the most interesting facts for a handy infographic, seen at the top of this post! There are a few things that stand out:

• The most popular class was the Engineer Commander, followed closely by the Miner and Citizen. Surprisingly, the Combatant was the least favorite of our fellow comrades. Pickaxes over Shotguns, I guess!
• There were over 396,000 resources collected over the two weeks! Dems a lot of apples!
• The battle between the Izverg and Projected Clones was heated! Over 36,000 Izverg were toppled, but the Clones suffered equally with around 28,000 deaths. Luckily, fellow Citizens were there to pick us up with 12,000 resurrections!
• Players were all about the speed, as the mayoral candidate who promised faster vehicles was elected 1049 times during the test!

Whew! I’m sure that was a lot to take in, but we’ve just scratched the surface of The Tomorrow Children. We’ll be back with more blogs as we get closer to launch. We’ll leave you with a little holiday cheer from everyone here at Q-Games!