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[Zizka]

Awesome unique art style reminiscent of Braid a bit. The idea is great too, an open world adventure. You're really standing out from the crowd. Will be keeping my eyes on this one. Really, the art is just too much! 

[Ludipe]

Awesome unique art style reminiscent of Braid a bit. The idea is great too, an open world adventure. You're really standing out from the crowd. Will be keeping my eyes on this one. Really, the art is just too much!

Thanks! We'll let the artist know about your feedback ;-P

Update #12 : EGX, goals, plans, updates and more

Hey guys! 

It's been a while since the last update, lots of things we need to tell you about!

EGX Rezzed

Last week we visited London to showcase "A Place for the Unwilling" at EGX in the GamesBoosters booth.

It was great, lots of people came by and enjoyed the small spin-off we told you about on the last update. Backers will receive a new update later today with a link to download that quick project based on the world of "A Place for the Unwilling" that we made for the EGX visitors.

We even had the chance to speak with some people from Inkle, creators of Sunless Sea, who have recently released their scripting language as open source, it's an amazing tool that's going to help us a lot on "A Place for the Unwilling".

Attending events always takes time and it's usually exhausting, but it's also a cool experience that we enjoy quite a lot. Getting to festivals out of Spain can be hard, but we'll do our best to visit those once we have a more advanced version of the game.

The team is growing!

A programmer will be joining the team really soon. We're switching to a another game engine that you might have heard of, Unity, lots of indie devs use it. 

This will allow a better implementation of the dialogue scripting and it will make ports to XBOX1 and PS4 easier if, once the game is out, we have the opportunity to work on them.

It will remove some load from other members of the studio, allowing us to work even harder on other tasks.

Goals

The reason why we decided to take a few days after EGX before releasing a new update is that we had a long team meeting yesterday. Mostly to discuss plans, milestones and goals. 

One of those "big" goals is to have a demo/beta ready in October. A demo is usually something really small which contains a few minutes of gameplay; in the case of "A Place for the Unwilling" a demo means you should be able to move around a huge part of the city, talk to all the characters and discover all the mechanics. Art might not be final but it'll be there and it'll be playable. So our "demo" won't be small at all.

Thomas Graham - Alone in London

Inclusive characters

We had another important issue to discuss at the meeting, something that we were kind of avoiding for some time now. We once announced there would be only one playable character, a young male trader who just arrived to the city. 

We thought having a female character would take a lot of time, in the victorian age she wouldn't be treated as the male character, so we would need to write two versions of each dialogue and a few things might not make much sense even after all that extra work.

After thinking about it and getting feedback from players at EGX we have decided that what we were doing needed to be fixed. "A Place for the Unwilling" won't be an historical-accurate game, we have cartoonish character which try to resemble those from "Over the Garden Wall" or "Discworld". There's plenty of games out there which take their references super serious and feature societies exactly as they were, we want to do something different, "A Place for the Unwilling" will still be inspired by the real victorian age, but our imaginary society will be different from the historical one in terms of gender equality, with the purpose of featuring a way more inclusive set of characters.

This decision will affect most of the characters in the game and we'll also include a female playable character that players will be able to choose.

Updates

We also talked about establishing an updates calendar, to keep in touch with the community and let you know about the development of the project.

We're going to start releasing two updates each month, like we did before Kickstarter. One around the first days of the month and another one in the middle of it. If those updates take too much time away from development or doesn't feature enough interesting content for you we'll look into changing the system.

There's also the exclusive devlog for those backers who pledged over a certain amount of money. We are going to do that once every month, and it's going to be a videolog. The first one will probably come out in May.
People who supported us through Paypal will have to wait just a bit more since the process isn't automatic and we're still getting all the data.

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And that's all for now! As said before, backers will get an extra update today with links to download the spin off made for EGX visitors. Stay tuned and remember that you can always ask anything you want on twitter, Facebook or just leave a reply here. Let us know what you think! :-)

[Greipur]

We thought having a female character would take a lot of time, in the victorian age she wouldn't be treated as the male character, so we would need to write two versions of each dialogue and a few things might not make much sense even after all that extra work.

After thinking about it and getting feedback from players at EGX we have decided that what we were doing needed to be fixed. "A Place for the Unwilling" won't be an historical-accurate game, we have cartoonish character which try to resemble those from "Over the Garden Wall" or "Discworld". There's plenty of games out there which take their references super serious and feature societies exactly as they were, we want to do something different, "A Place for the Unwilling" will still be inspired by the real victorian age, but our imaginary society will be different from the historical one in terms of gender equality, with the purpose of featuring a way more inclusive set of characters.

This decision will affect most of the characters in the game and we'll also include a female playable character that players will be able to choose.

A great move! There has always existed people who have been able to transcend the norm, though sadly most of the time that is taken by force or by heritage and privilege. So I wouldn't find it the least surprising if there were powerful people that weren't men during the Victorian era that had agency.

In my mind it's still possible to create a historically accurate game that lets the player examine disempowerment and empowerment. Take the recent film Suffragette for example that examined the early feminist movement.





If the film would've been egalitarian from the start the basic premise of the film would've been moot (that women are supressed and need the same basic rights), and it would no longer be a way to discuss our history. But at the same time the perspective is clearly put on the disempowered women, which in itself can be empowering to see how they fight against the system.

What I'm getting at is not that you should change anything, I'm just questioning the rhetoric that a game is either fantasy or strictly historical. None of us were there so history is always a reconstruction with pieces garbled, misunderstood or left out. And empowerment and disempowerment is a little more complex, so I would suggest to rephrase that in the future. To me it's just a point of view, a historical work can be sexist and oblivious, but so can a fantasy work. They don't become disempowering or sexist just because people are oppressed in the world, I would argue what matters is if the work sympathises with its victims or not.

Are you making a power fantasy (the player should always feel empowered) or a critique/simulation of our past? Either is fine, and whatever I say it's your choice. But there's several ways to make the player feel empowered and disempowered.

To be more constructive both your characters could be aristocrats for example, where the women could've had more leeway. You could still have some poor women having a miserable time, but not disempower the player themselves. But that's where the cookie crumbles, is it about discussing historical disempowerement and empowerement or more a vehicle for the player to feel awesome? Either is justified and perfectly fine imo.


---


But yeah, treating them the same is a cost effective route that still makes it accessible to a wider audience. I remember the GDC talk about Dishonored's art style. The art director was asked why they chose to give the women pants just like the men, and the simple answer was that it was too much of a hassle to animate dresses procedurally. Yet none seemed to care, and wearing pants was still a thing during the 19th century, but still a bold move. So it's more of an exaggeration than a lie. And maybe that's where I'd place your game as well, it's not strictly historical, but it's not a lie either.


(Sorry for the many edits, haha.)

[Ludipe]

We thought having a female character would take a lot of time, in the victorian age she wouldn't be treated as the male character, so we would need to write two versions of each dialogue and a few things might not make much sense even after all that extra work.

After thinking about it and getting feedback from players at EGX we have decided that what we were doing needed to be fixed. "A Place for the Unwilling" won't be an historical-accurate game, we have cartoonish character which try to resemble those from "Over the Garden Wall" or "Discworld". There's plenty of games out there which take their references super serious and feature societies exactly as they were, we want to do something different, "A Place for the Unwilling" will still be inspired by the real victorian age, but our imaginary society will be different from the historical one in terms of gender equality, with the purpose of featuring a way more inclusive set of characters.

This decision will affect most of the characters in the game and we'll also include a female playable character that players will be able to choose.

A great move! There has always existed people who have been able to transcend the norm, though sadly most of the time that is taken by force or by heritage and privilege. So I wouldn't find it the least surprising if there were powerful people that weren't men during the Victorian era that had agency.

In my mind it's still possible to create a historically accurate game that lets the player examine disempowerment and empowerment. Take the recent film Suffragette for example that examined the early feminist movement.





If the film would've been egalitarian from the start the basic premise of the film would've been moot (that women are supressed and need the same basic rights), and it would no longer be a way to discuss our history. But at the same time the perspective is clearly put on the disempowered women, which in itself can be empowering to see how they fight against the system.

What I'm getting at is not that you should change anything, I'm just questioning the rhetoric that a game is either fantasy or strictly historical. None of us were there so history is always a reconstruction with pieces garbled, misunderstood or left out. And empowerment and disempowerment is a little more complex, so I would suggest to rephrase that in the future. To me it's just a point of view, a historical work can be sexist and oblivious, but so can a fantasy work. They don't become disempowering or sexist just because people are oppressed in the world, I would argue what matters is if the work sympathises with its victims or not.

Are you making a power fantasy (the player should always feel empowered) or a critique/simulation of our past? Either is fine, and whatever I say it's your choice. But there's several ways to make the player feel empowered and disempowered.

To be more constructive both your characters could be aristocrats for example, where the women could've had more leeway. You could still have some poor women having a miserable time, but not disempower the player themselves. But that's where the cookie crumbles, is it about discussing historical disempowerement and empowerement or more a vehicle for the player to feel awesome? Either is justified and perfectly fine imo.


---


But yeah, treating them the same is a cost effective route that still makes it accessible to a wider audience. I remember the GDC talk about Dishonored's art style. The art director was asked why they chose to give the women pants just like the men, and the simple answer was that it was too much of a hassle to animate dresses procedurally. Yet none seemed to care, and wearing pants was still a thing during the 19th century, but still a bold move. So it's more of an exaggeration than a lie. And maybe that's where I'd place your game as well, it's not strictly historical, but it's not a lie either.


(Sorry for the many edits, haha.)

There's quite an interesting debate in here! I agree with you, you can do an historical-accurate game which isn't sexist but, as you already said, when talking about open world adventures it can cost a lot in terms of production.

Games doesn't have to have historical or fantasy but, for some reason, we were always checking facts and trying to stick to historical documentation, until we relaized we didn't have to. One of those cases in which the solution is pretty simple but you're so close to everything that you can't see it.

[Greipur]

Yeah, it's always hard to know when to emulate and when to do your own thing imo, I've faced the same problem with Crest since I'm a huge history buff. Looking forward to see how this element of the game develops. 

[matheavyk]

I think it is good to have a proper historical furniture for example. But, on the other hand, there is nothing wrong in including a time machine hidden somewhere in tesla-like laboratory .

I must say that the game looks brilliant! I especially like shadow people idea. It describes a world around us really well.

[Ludipe]

I think it is good to have a proper historical furniture for example. But, on the other hand, there is nothing wrong in including a time machine hidden somewhere in tesla-like laboratory .

I must say that the game looks brilliant! I especially like shadow people idea. It describes a world around us really well.

Thanks! We're trying to incorporate the "shadow concept" when trying to explain people what "A Place for the Unwilling" is about, it usually grabs their attention :-)

[Ludipe]

Update #13 : Creating the characters

Hey guys!

How is it going?

These last two weeks we have been focusing a lot on the characters, trying to make non-definitive versions of them as fast as possible so we can use that to build all the lore and the story of the game. It’s one of the goals we want to reach for our June milestone.

All the basic info from the characters is compiled into a single spreadsheet, this gives us a general vision of the game and helps us balance ages, genders, social classes and narrative archetypes. Making each character unique and interesting gets harder with such a big cast, so it’s important to always keep track of them as a whole. 

Each of the characters gets a separate document in which we try to define their background, personality, feelings and motivations. We try to keep these short, usually around 300 words, so every member of the team can learn all about them with a quick glance.

Once a character has a minimum lore, Rubén starts looking for references and draws some sketches on his notebook. After choosing a style he then comes up with several variations of it, switching hairstyles, expressions, clothes and colors. 

He also faces the challenge of trying to make each of them look different, one of the tricks he has used is picking a shape from a set of random doodles and then using that shape to form a silhouette that will define the design of the character.

That’s all for now! next update will be in two weeks, we're still working on the private devlog. Send us an email or a tweet if you feel like! :-D

[Bricabrac]

Following! Can't believe I missed the kickstarter, this game looks like Pathologic + Majora's Mask and those are two of my favourites game ever.
I'll throw some money at you as soon as I have my wage ;_;

[Ludipe]

Following! Can't believe I missed the kickstarter, this game looks like Pathologic + Majora's Mask and those are two of my favourites game ever.
I'll throw some money at you as soon as I have my wage ;_;

Thanks for the support, we're glad you like "A Place for the Unwilling" :-D

[Ludipe]

Update #14 : Meet the cast!

Hey guys!

Time for a new update. Last time we talked about the process of creating each of the characters in "A Place for the Unwilling" and, today, we're happy to announce that they are already defined.

Every character has a background, a emotional profile and a defined look. Their portraits aren't fully polished yet, as most of the time was spent designing them and choosing clothes and colors for each of them.

As the game keeps growing and there's more information about the world and the characters we keep creating more internal documents so anybody on the team can learn about anything with a quick glance.

Each character sheet contains some details about the emotions and personality, age, social class and a bigger text block with a detailed background (we decided no to include that specific information on the update to avoid spoilers)

A city needs its inhabitants, that's why we chose to focus on them, they're the tools we'll use to build the whole plot. Now that they're ready (or drafted at least) we're gonna focus on producing the graphical assets for the streets, as they are necessary to test many design decisions, such as: "How long should a day last?", "Should we make maps bigger?", "Will map-transitions feel slow?", "Does this city layout work?".

Next step (design-wise) is to build a cronogram, which is a visual representation of everything that will happen to everyone as days progress. We would like "A Place for the Unwilling" to feature a few in-game weeks and, since we have a large cast, it's important to know what's happening each day, otherwise we'll get lost in all those events. It's also a great way to get a bigger perspective of the player actions and make sure it's structured.

Some small announcements

We'll publish the first entry of the private devlog next week. We're still not sure about what's the best way to send that content to backers who pledged over the required amount, but we might need to email them directly.

Next regular update will take place in two weeks, we might cover the technical side of development. If there's anything you'd like to know about let us know and we'll try to incorporate those in future updates.

GamesBoosters informed us that we'll have a booth at Gamelab (end of June), a national festival, mostly for people who work at the games industry. We plan to have a playable build ready for visitors to test. It still won't feature the whole city, so it's not a demo (which is scheduled for September) but it'll be playable and it will help us detect any possible issues.

And that's all for now! Remember that you can leave a comment to let us know what you think (or find us on twitter)

Cheers!

[Ludipe]

Update #15 : Learning along the way

Hey everyone!

We love working on a game like "A Place for the Unwilling" for several reasons, one of those is that it keeps pushing us to do research and learn. Over the last few months we have enjoyed as we discovered (or sometimes re-discovered) artists, books and games to incorporate them to our references.

So we thought it could be cool to do a quick recap about some of the influences that we found while working on the game.

Ángel (writing)

Dickens meets Lovecraft. Charlie should love Howie. But in fact, C.D. hates H.P. And it's mutual.

Marrying these two writers, which is crucial for our narrative, is a hard pill to swallow. Charles, a full character-driven storyteller. Howie, a prose poet of the weird.

Curiously, the answer to this dilemma is not in the stories of either authors, but in History. Henry Mayhew, wonderful Victorian journalist, saved my ass.

His works, "London Labour" and "London Poor" made me understand that victorian poor people were an incredible complex network of multiple jobs in the three grand tasks of economy: buying, selling and distributing.

The counterpart to this eerie vision would be Judith Flanders (consultant historian of "Assassin’s Creed Syndicate"). Flanders is in romance with the age, but her portrait is equally full of detail both in "Inside the Victorian Home" and "The Victorian City".

Reading this "heads and tails" portrait of London, I began to understand the way to make Dickens and Lovecraft fit. The key are the lives that inhabit that age. And the tricks of the time, past, present of future, that distort what really was, and turns it into what we think it was. It's not important for "A place for the Unwilling" to be both loyal to Dickens and Lovecraft. What matters is knowing our citizens and watching what happens when cosmic powers collide with them.

Uhm... I think I'm hearing Charlie whispering Howie to the ear. It sounds naughty.

Rubén (art and animation)

In addition to my initial references, which influenced the visual design of the characters in "A Place for the Unwilling" ("Over the Garden Wall" and the works of Charles Addams), I'd like to point out a few more artists that I've come to look at when working on the game(my "reference" folder kept growing even after the Kickstarter campaign was over).

I already told you about Alfred Kubin, and his grotesque representations of monsters and demons from other realities, as seen on his book "Die Andere Seite", in which the main character is invited to enter the dream world. Marcian Bialas, a contemporary print artist, creates tense bodies, distorted anonymous presences and imposible oniric structures(similar to those described by Borges in some of his short tales).

Books such as "London: A Pilgrimage", in which master artist Gustave Doré captures his vision of victorian London in full-page drawings, are one of my most common visual references for the creation of clothing and stage details.

On this text I focused mainly on my print references but, as we always say, we draw inspiration from several sources to create "A Place for the Unwilling". In future updates and social media we'll start sharing some of those works that accompany us on this journey.

Celer (sound and music)

The game is always evolving, and audio is no different. I can make an example out of UI sounds. At first I was planning on creating something influenced by "The Banner Saga".

As we are going to have lots of text, I thought that avoiding UI sounds was the best choice. Now that the project isn't on such an early stage, we realized that it might be a good idea to try out adding some UI sounds while talking to NPCs. We are still running some tests, not entirely sure if it'll work, but we are going for something close to what "Pyre" does(the new Supergiant’s game).

Music is also evolving along the rest of the game. When we started out back in September, music loops seemed like a good choice, but we realized loops don't work that well in an open environment where the player is free to wander around.

At the moment, I am working in a music system that reacts to player input, their discoveries and the plot itself, quite different from having a fixed music ambient.

As for me (Luis), I've been re-discovering Terry Pratchett's works (and its brilliant character design), learning a lot about virtual and real economies and studying how player express themselves through dialog on "Kentucky Route Zero".

And that's all for now, we'll be at Gamelab (Barcelona) by the end of June, showcasing "A Place for the Unwilling". We're also working on a small surprise that it's kind of a secret right now, but we'll be able to tell you all about it after a couple of updates :-)

[TonyManfredonia]

A+ for putting interactive music to use! Definitely creates a more living world and gameplay style.

I look forward to seeing (and hearing) it in action!

[Ludipe]

A+ for putting interactive music to use! Definitely creates a more living world and gameplay style.

I look forward to seeing (and hearing) it in action!

Thanks!

We'll probably have a audio-focused update later on :-)

[Ludipe]

We don't usually post too much stuff in between updates, but here's a gif that we shared yesterday on twitter showing the animation process.

1.Final stage, with chalk-coal lines.
2.Colour with volume
3.Flat colour
4.Line with inbetweens
5.Line, only keyframes

[Batowski]

We don't usually post too much stuff in between updates, but here's a gif that we shared yesterday on twitter showing the animation process.

That is just beautiful! I would love to see a live or step-by-step video of the shading/colouring process of this. Will you stream at any time? Or plan to release a video on your process?

[Ludipe]

We don't usually post too much stuff in between updates, but here's a gif that we shared yesterday on twitter showing the animation process.

That is just beautiful! I would love to see a live or step-by-step video of the shading/colouring process of this. Will you stream at any time? Or plan to release a video on your process?

We've discussed this a few times and we definitely want to do it. Right now we're a bit busy, we release updates every two weeks and we have a montly private videolog for some backers. Right now we're also working on a public video-update to announce something pretty cool hahaha. So yeah, we'll do it, but after a bit more of time.

So, new update is coming out on Friday and we printed the character sheet, we're going to use those for something really cool over the weekend; we can't talk too much about it right now but it's going to be recorded and released on the following update ;-)

[and]

Glad to see things are coming along and I love seeing the art process!

The influences update is really cool too

[Batowski]

We've discussed this a few times and we definitely want to do it. Right now we're a bit busy, we release updates every two weeks and we have a montly private videolog for some backers. Right now we're also working on a public video-update to announce something pretty cool hahaha. So yeah, we'll do it, but after a bit more of time.

So, new update is coming out on Friday and we printed the character sheet, we're going to use those for something really cool over the weekend; we can't talk too much about it right now but it's going to be recorded and released on the following update ;-)

STOP TEASING!!! :D

[Ludipe]

Glad to see things are coming along and I love seeing the art process!

The influences update is really cool too

We'll keep showing the art process in future updates :-)

STOP TEASING!!! :D

NEVER! ;-P

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Today's update is directly taken from an article we published yesterday on "Made with Unity" about using Ink and Unity to make a narrative game. Next update(in two weeks, as usual) will be a cool video ;-D

Hope you like it!

Update #16 : Ink, narrative and teasers

We are huge fans of the works of Inkle, which recently released an open-source tool for those of us making narrative games.

Quick Note! If you're working on a narrative game you really need to play "80 days" (IGF winner and BAFTA nominated) and "Sorcery!", both amazing games.

This is a small explanation of how we're dealing with dialogues in our game, why we decided to use Ink (the free tool made by Inkle) and how it's been so far. Hope it proves useful to you.

Why use Ink?

Right after our Kickstarter campaign ended we were supposed to attend EGX Rezzed in London. The game was still in a very early stage, so we decided to make a small spin-off, a short interactive fiction game, made in one week, and display it at the booth GamesBoosters, our publisher, had rented. While we were developing this prototype the programmer made a dialogue engine using xml files, but syntaxis wasn't simple enough, writers would spend more time fixing bugs or checking commas than crafting the narrative. We still went on with this, since it was a one-week development that we had to finish.

As days passed everybody would suggest necessary improvements for the dialogue system. We realized that, in a narrative game, we would need more tools than we anticipated. You need to be able to tag which answers can be picked multiple times and which ones are a one-time-thing; then you notice how easier life would be if you could access a single part of the text (not the whole line) for a certain situation or how cool would it be if the dialogue were to choose a random string from a set of them when desired.

You can probably imagine how this went, we remade the whole thing almost everyday, since the new features weren't compatible with the logic of the old ones. We were going to lose a lot of development time if this continued. We then found out about Ink, the scripting system Inkle had developed, which was now available for everyone, easy to integrate in Unity and, what's best, not only was it powerful but it was also designed for writers.

Turns out we even got to meet Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey, co-founders of Inkle Studios, at EGX Rezzed. They tried out our spin-off project and asked about the scripting system. We told them right away that it was one made by us, but that we had heard of Ink before coming to the event and that we would get started with it as soon as we got back to Spain.

Unity, Ink and us

Back at home it took us just two days to get Ink working in our project, it's quite easy thanks to all the help and documentation provided by Inkle. Using Ink can look challenging at first, specially for some writers, takes some time to read everything carefully, practice and learn to use its tools. There's lots of things that you can do with Ink and seeing all those features can be overwhelming at first.

So everything was fully working on Unity, but we still had to solve a few more issues.

Picture from Ink's demo project

Ink is mostly used for games that resemble a more "book-ish" narrative and "A Place for the Unwilling" focuses on direct dialogues. We needed to add tags to the script system to identify the speaker (so Unity can display their portrait), we also wanted to get each line of the text on its own (instead of the whole paragraph) and, finally, we wanted to be able to trigger sounds right from the ink file.

It didn't take long to have everything ready. I'll also add that the staff at Inkle has been really helpful with every issue we run into. Maybe you're not doing exactly interactive fiction, but perhaps spending a few days tweaking Ink to your needs would save you a lot of time in the future.

This is an example text we used while learning how to use Ink; two friends are talking about a sports match, if the  player has seen the match he will add some information that would stay hidden otherwise. It almost looks as the script from a theater play. While in game, the "NAME:" doesn't appear on screen, it's just a tag for the engine to highlight the active character.

You can use an editor such as "Sublime Text" to recognise Ink's syntaxis.

What's coming

We're attending another festival in a couple of weeks, it'll be the first time we'll show the actual project (and not the spin-off) and we're using that as a milestone so writers can get more practice with Ink. Getting used to something new always takes a bit of work, but it's already paying off. If you think you're working on a project in which Ink might fit then, for all sakes, give it a try (again, really easy to add it to your Unity project). You can always go back to the old ways and use excel, but this feels way more organic and natural.

Check Github for more resources, there's even an online tool to write and play ink files directly from your browser, and the staff at Inkle has already teased us with a future Ink IDE that we can't wait to have.

We will probably write a new update about working with Ink after a few months, once we're more experienced :-)

-> Home of Ink <-

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And that's all for now, we're always around to talk but next update will come out in two weeks :-)

Cheers!