Hey everyone,

As we announced last week, we are keen to share some more behind the scenes information about the development of our future episodes and we were very happy to receive your warm words of support and encouragement in response to that news. The team is right now working very hard on developing the second episode of Life is Strange. We were really excited to see Episode 1 finally released a few weeks ago, and it can’t be said enough how reading the many positive comments is an awesome motivation boost that helps us continue our efforts on Episode 2.

So what’s been going on recently behind the scenes? We’re pleased to say that development is going really well! Just two weeks ago we organized some Episode 2 playtests on a pre-Alpha* build of the game, using one of our external playtest partners who specialize in recruiting gamers for these specific tests. Even with such an early and incomplete build, which is missing many assets** and still obviously suffers from numerous bugs that need squishing, such playtests are incredibly valuable and help us immeasurably. We also have our own team members attend the sessions in person so that they can observe player reactions and feedback. These playtests will help us understand where in the episode players had difficulties, what they didn’t understand, what they enjoyed and or did not, and many other useful things that we can then fix! We are always very grateful for all the testers’ feedback and their enthusiasm is a great morale boost for us!

Our team is able to sit in an observation room and watch each playtester’s gamestream. This allows us to see where players are struggling and what their reactions are.



In addition to these external playtests, this past Tuesday was for us “Episode 2 day” at DONTNOD. This is a special day that we organize for each episode, where all team members take a break from their usual tasks in order to play through the full episode and provide their feedback. This is an incredibly important step as we want to make sure that the whole team has an opportunity to play the episode in full and express their positive and negative feedback before we enter the next stage of an episode’s production.

Some of the team making their way through the episode!

Looking ahead, we will in the coming weeks be running another voice over (VO) recording session for Episode 2, but we will talk more about that and how voice-overs are integrated into the game in our next update.

We look forward to sharing more with you then and we hope you have a great weekend!

The Life is Strange team

*Alpha builds are usually some of the earliest fully playable builds of a game, though they are missing a lot of pieces of the game and are very unstable.

**Assets in this case is a synonym for components like textures, models, props, audio and more.