Estranged: Act I News

A minor patch update is now available for Estranged: Act I on Windows. Changes in this build:

• Tweaks to the Extras menu to link to the Official Estranged Wiki
• Removes the anonymous statistics functionality from the game code, and checkbox from the Estranged Options
  
• Adjusts Visual C++ redistributable version to 2013
  

Happy 2025, and thank you for playing Estranged!

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. 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, Europe) 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 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 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://steamcommunity.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://steamcommunity.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