Dear weary traveler, in case you were stuck in the Near Shallows for the last few months, CoT2 had been in development for the last few months!

Art

The artstyle will be a Retro-inspired side-scrolling pixel RPG look. That's a real mouthful, take a look at the screenshot:
We've developed and tested some art styles and code for the exploration mode of the game, including: -an environment design -sprites for characters with animation -rendering and lighting systems One thing I always found wanting in a retro pixel game is the lack of detail on the portraits, which is why we're going with highly detailed portraits during dialogue, like this:

Characters

There will be 6 main characters in total, and potentially more minor characters to come later. While the player will take control of Lura, every characters will be a Dyed magus who plays an indispensable role in the story. There are no pure comic-relief and side-kicks, no jar-jar binks here, even if some magi could act like clowns from time to time. After all, they are made out of meat.

Gameplay

So far we have started prototyping the following: -player movement -dialogue system based on ink, which is used in many massively branching narrative games.

Story

The game will still be all about stories that will try to devour your heart, but make you whole again, and to do that we need characters who live and breath and exude humanity, so we began to write back-stories for each of the characters. Lura, who is a sort of magus detective specializing in magick anomalies, will be traveling to a Temple of the Deep where the Order conducts advanced research into magick. An accident had occurred there and one of the magus had disappeared without a trace. Lura will be tasked with solving this mystery while trying to come to terms with the whispers and shadows that had haunted Their own heart since They were separated from Their parents as a child. It doesn't help that in the depth of the Seas, the whispers worsened, threatening to push Lura over the edge of sanity. We planned to write a short[i/] story for every character up to when They arrived at the temple, but the writing took on a life of its own. For example, Evin who will be the healer has Their story already boasting 100 pages or 40k words. That's almost 1/3 of The Remainder!

What we will do next:

We're falling in love with our characters as their stories come to life. We also showed the stories to a few devout fans and they reported enjoying reading them very much. So our current plan is to first fully develop all the characters and find out just what sort of mysterious events and circumstances happening all over Tal'Dun had brought them all to this temple. Evin the healer seems to want a story of no less than 100k words to Themself. Near the shaper has Their budding story at 14k, and it just got started. We would not be surprised if by the end of this process we have a novel on our hands. A novel for the back story of a game, can you imagine? Writing is the soul of a narrative game, so we believe it will be worth it to make writing our primary focus. We will be releasing 1 chapter of backstory that's brought to a decently polished stage to Ko-Fi and Patreon backers every 2 weeks for now, so they can get a taste of Tal'Dun while they wait. If we do our jobs right, then the stories of our other magi should be no less compelling than the story of Vyn and Ilar. Having done this, the dialogue and scenes for the actual game will be much easier to do since now the characters will be alive in our heads and will let us know what they would say or do in each situation. We will also continue to develop art and designs as the writing happens, since ideas will continuously appear from the writing process. But for now art will be secondary to writing. When the stories are ready, we may compile and edit them together into an actual novel to be given to backers or sold in our store, but that is not set in stone for now. We have our plans, but the Seas flows how it wills, doesn't it? The overall timeline for CoT2's development is 2.5-3 years. We will bring an update at least once a month. I hope to see you among our backers, or in our discord or social channels. Take care! -Ze

[ 2022-10-19 12:01:22 CET ] [ Original post ]