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[Batowski]

Cool, I'm so referencing this for a later look again.
Is Ink for Unity only? We use our own engine in Monogame...

[Ludipe]

Cool, I'm so referencing this for a later look again.
Is Ink for Unity only? We use our own engine in Monogame...

I'm not an expert so I'll just quote the official documentation :-P

Note that although these instructions are written with Unity in mind, it's possible (and straightforward) to run your ink in a non-Unity C# environment

Hope that helps! By the way, they guys at Inkle are super nice and you can usually reach out for them on the online chat.

[Ludipe]

We got interviewed by the guys at TechRaptor, here's the article!

They reached out for us, told us that they wanted to feature some indie games that wouldn't be at E3 :-)

New update is coming out on Friday, stay tuned!

[Ludipe]

Update #17 : The many voices of the city

Crafting the narrative of an open world is not an easy task, specially for a small indie team in which only two people work on the writing. On our latest update we explained how we are using Ink to help us manage all those dialogues, we would now like to unveil a small surprise in which we have been working on for a few months now ... ... (drum roll) ... ... a group of fifteen veteran writers are going to participate on the development of "A Place for the Unwilling"! They have worked on anthologies, published novels, translated books, wrote scripts for TV shows and even been nominated for a Goya. They're all Spanish, fantasy-lovers and familiar with Lovecraft.

After 6 months of planning we were able to set up a meeting with most of them in Madrid. We went out, had a nice dinner together, answered every question and then assigned each of them a random character. Before getting into details of how this collaboration is going to work, here's a short video featuring clips from their interviews.

The beginning of this crazy experiment

Around Christmas we were still debating a lot of new ideas for "A Place for the Unwilling". It was Ángel who talked about selecting a team of veteran writers who would help with the lore and the character design. They needed to be experienced, had worked as part of a team in the past, be suitable for the setting and up for such a task. It's easy to see that just putting the whole team together took us several months.

We wouldn't dare to do anything like this in another project, but "A Place for the Unwilling" is an open world game in which two people are trying to speak for a whole city, in this particular case a choir of voices makes a lot of sense, so we went ahead and decided to give it a try.

They won't be writing dialogues or directly altering the plot, but working on the background of each character in the cast. They'll also write articles and books that players will be able to find and read in the game, these will complete the lore in many ways and talk about more mundane things. Every writer will get a small intro for their characters that should serve as a starting point, besides a more in-depth explanation of the lore.

(both writers and developers having dinner together)

Explaining the work process

Most of the writers have a lot of experience working together on anthologies and collaborative projects and, writing for "A Place for the Unwilling" is not very different from that. They have deadlines and write raw text, since they're not doing any dialogues it's not necessary for them to learn how ink, or the rest of the engine, works.

We try to set everything up but, at the same time, give them enough freedom to come up with unique ideas. We want players to be able to find personal letters from other citizens, technical books or even tales for kids. Everything in this project focuses on creating a living space in which to get immersed, and we feel these details will add a lot of value to the mix.

On a previous update we explained the difficulties of creating a whole set of characters while trying to give a different personality to each of them. With the help of these writers we'll make sure every character in the game feels even deeper and more interesting. Once again, we set some restrictions to make sure the style is as similar as possible and the core development team is still in charge of every piece of dialogue in the game.

Final thoughts

We are really excited about this collaboration, not many indie teams are lucky enough to have such an amazing team of talented writers to work with, and who knows? We might not work on another project as suitable for this initiative as "A Place for the Unwilling". We're sure their work will be top-notch and they can't wait to get out of their comfort zone and experience the adventure of working on a game for the very first time.

Planning everything for months, without being able to share it was pretty hard for us, but today we finally got to officially announce it. We just hope you find this news as exciting as we do. We'll keep publishing new updates every two weeks, like we've doing for a long time now, and we'll certainly give you more details about how is it to work with a team of writers, but feel free to leave a comment or send us an email. We are also always around twitter!

We decided to upload an uncut version of the interviews to Youtube for those of you who want to know more. Stay tuned for future updates!

[Ludipe]

Update #18 : State of the game

Hey everyone!

We thought that, every once in a while, updates could be used to talk about what we have been doing for the last months and our plans for the future, instead of focusing on a specific part of development.

It's July already. Last week we were at Gamelab (Barcelona), showing the first playable version of "A Place for the Unwilling" in public. We changed our development engine not too long ago, so everything was pretty basic, players were able to move around the rich quarter and get to know some of its inhabitants.

We thought it was a good idea to show what we had, even if it's still on an early stage, just to point out some bugs, find things that might be confusing for players and test a few ideas. It was a show for professionals who work at the videogame industry, so they get that something is still a draft, not a polished product. We don't want to show "A Place for the Unwilling" in a regular festival until all the mechanics are implemented and players can experience the core of the project.

Our plans for July are to take what we had at Gamelab, polish it, work on AI behavior and add interior maps. We also noticed streets were quite empty, so now there's crates, ladders and carts all around. Right now Rubén is drawing rats and birds, because who doesn't like to pet vermins.

Trading isn't functional yet, that'll probably take 2-3 months as there are higher priority tasks in our to-do list, but we're going to start adding some of the smaller interactions pretty soon. Let's just use an example to illustrate what we mean:

There are many beautiful buildings in the game, but not all of them can be appreciated while playing because of the camera, we want to create spots like the ones in "Brothers: A tale of two sons" where players can choose to look around and change the in-game camera to feature some nice views. This is the kind of things we mean when we speak of those "minor interactions", actions which won't change the plot or affect your relationship with the other characters, but will allow a deeper immersion.

Brothers: A tale of two sons

We have some more of those planned for the future, like being able to knock on doors or write down notes on a diary, being a small indie studio means we have limited resources, but we're trying to have as many interactions as possible.

On the next update will explain how the rich quarter has evolved since we first featured it, when the kickstarter campaign was still active. Let us know what you think about these updates, we are always trying to feature what's more interesting for the community :-)

Cheers! 

[Ludipe]

Update #19 : How things are slowly shaping up

Hey everybody!

On the latest update we discussed our immediate plans for the development of "A Place for the Unwilling", now that the basics are already working on Unity (moving around and talking to people) we're are going trough a list of smaller improvements, this time we have some gifs (cause everybody loves gifs) to show you how things are evolving over the last two weeks.

Shadows are being kind of tricky. The draft version of them really needed an upgrade in terms of dialogue and movement. We're now aiming for a more organic behavior, instead of fixed paths they now wander around nodes. Each time one of them enters the scene we select a set of dialogue lines and then combine them to create their dialogue tree. Since they are passive, right now they won't speak to you unless you start the conversation, they will only answer your questions (about the city, recent events or general topics) or avoid you if they feel you're being annoying.

Our first idea was to come up with several dialogue branches and assign one of them to each shadow, but repetition would be easy to spot, it makes more sense to break those dialogue branches into smaller pieces and use them to create lots of combinations, after all, they're strangers walking the streets, there's not really much to ask them besides the time, directions or some general information.

And yes, if you ask too many questions they'll probably run out of patience and leave, because that is what would happen if you were to stop somebody on the street and start asking about a bunch of things, from time to time you might meet somebody who would kindly answer everything, but chances are they won't stay too long.

Moving on! We're adding "looking spots", places where the player may press a button to focus on a view or specific building (which are manually placed by us). As explained on previous updates, we are using these to feature things you might miss or trying to create contemplative moments in which to relax and just stop for a couple of minutes. 

We're also including documents you can pick up and read (like we did on the spin-off). These are useful when we want to display a lot of text that wouldn't fit the dialogue interface while adding another layer of narrative, using images, fonts or layouts to tell you more things about the world. A note from somebody in the poor quarter might be dirty and folded, while one from an educated gentleman would feature a clean handwriting and perhaps even a family crest.

Our goal is for the game to feature dozens of letters, notes, newspapers, books and other things you can pick up, look at and read.

We will implement a text overlay that you can activate just by pressing a button, to make reading these documents easier, though the original image should be readable as well.

---

These are some of the things we have added to the game in the last two weeks. Gamedev always feels slow, most times it's easy to feel as if you weren't making any progress, so it feels good to take a look back and see these small improvements.

We're still aiming for a more polished build of the project before focusing 100% on creating more content. On the next weeks we want to start introducing time in the game, events you will miss if you're not there at the right time (plus simple character routines). Interiors should also be working before the next update, with a smooth transition from the building to the street.

Once that's ready and polished it'll be time to start adding the inventory system and the trading mechanic, which will keep us busy for a few months. After all those small pieces are done we will start focusing on content.

And that's all for now! There will be another update in two weeks, as we always say, feel free to leave us a comment asking whatever you want about the project, we'll do our best to answer! :-D

[Ludipe]

Update #20 : The origins of the City

Before delving into the update itself, we need to make a quick announcement. We usually publish updates here, which is our main devlog, and also on our Kickstarter page. There are a few things we need to sort out and, in the meantime, we, AlPixel Games, do not have access to the Kickstarter account and can't publish updates there. It may take a few weeks, so we are getting in touch with all the backers and telling them the updates will be available here for now.

Now that's said, we can get back to the cool stuff! It's time to grab a cup of tea and lean back, we're gonna talk about the story of our city

The City, with a capital "C", a place so unique it doesn't even need a name to be distinguished from the rest of cities because, why would you talk about any other?

As impressive as it is, 20 years ago soil and farms plagued what now is the centre of the trading world. One can only wonder how it managed to stay like that for so many years, but money attracts money, and when the first businessmen arrived, the rest followed. After a few years, the landscape had radically changed, and there was no going back.

Buildings raised, ships started docking and the fog began to thicken. People had to change in order to fit in, and it wasn't easy. The smallest of the apartments was already too expensive for them, and everything seemed to go up but salaries. Sickness, poverty and crimes became just another part of everyday life. As the city kept growing the factories appeared, roaring day and night while making the fog even thicker.

As years passed more and more ships made of this place a mandatory stop in their routes. Big deals where closed and anybody, who was truly somebody, traveled to the City every once in a while. A mayor was elected and policemen were hired to make sure law was followed. An university was built and even a theatre, business weren't the only thing on the rise, but so was culture.

This is not a fairy tale, both evil and righteous people are hard to find and most of the souls in this city wear a grey mask.

The pieces are always moving and stability is just an illusion. Over the last weeks crimes have increased, and the city's most influencial families seem to have been chosen as targets. If you were to ask on one certain quarter you would be told it was those anarchists from the working class, while in a different part of the city the story would be quite different. But most people do not care about the other side of the story, or the "others"; perhaps this time the story doesn't have just one or two sides, perhaps it's not that simple anymore, and while most people focus on the battle, fumes keep coming out of everywhere, blending with the fog and making it thicker.

While all this happens the theatre wears a new dress, covered by posters, announcing the king's arrival, for a new play is soon to debut in the City and everybody is talking about it, "The king in yellow" is coming to town.

[Ludipe]

Update #21 : Expanding the city

Hey everybody! Hope you're having a great summer! It's time for a new update, number 21 already!

August is always a bit tough, Madrid is too warm, even if you have such a luxurious device as an air conditioner, but we're doing our best to survive the heat. We had to crunch for a couple of weeks, which means we worked overtime and on weekends to get to our goals in time; it's not nice and every developer will say it's something that should be avoided, but sometimes unexpected things happen and you just have to deal with that. But hey! We were able to do everything we had planned and we took a couple of days off, once it was over, to chill and recover.

The good thing is that we're back to our regular schedule and things are going great. We have a quite small playable build with the whole rich quarter, time, NPCs with simple routines and some narrative events, getting to this point has been super exciting for the whole team, as it's the first time ever we can let other people truly playtest the basics.

We have already started working on sketches and drafts for the rest of the city, always trying to have lots of different environments while still showing it's all part of the same city. The center of the city features more crowded streets than the ones on the other side of the bridge, while being the host of all the public buildings, like the city council, the police station, the university or the hospital. But not all the streets in this area have the same looks, their style changes as players get closer to the other quarters.

We're not focusing on the poor neighbourhood just yet, but we have made some very rough sketches of it, a twisted chaotic maze in which to get lost. We'll probably go a bit wild with the architecture here, but this part of the city is still a draft.

As we progress we'll be able to have people test the other maps and see what needs to be changed, what doesn't make sense(or is confusing) and needs to be iterated.

We also have about 4.000 words-long extended backgrounds for each of the characters in the game, kudos to the fantastic team of writers for that, they're amazing, we just can't post them because there are huge spoilers in there, but we really enjoyed going through all the text.

We're super happy about having reached a new milestone and excited about expanding what we already have. Hope you are enjoying the tiny bits of information that we keep releasing every two weeks!

And that's all for now! But you can leave a comment here, say hi on twitter or just write us an email to [email protected], we always do our best to answer as soon as possible.

And stay tuned for the next update! It's going to be about something we've hinted, but never really explained, on previous updates ;-)

Cheers!

[Bertram Fiddle]

Cor! Those streets look lovely!
I can't wait to wander around and explore them...

They really look lived in! I love it!

[Ludipe]

Cor! Those streets look lovely!
I can't wait to wander around and explore them...

They really look lived in! I love it!

Thanks! We're now working out the details and slowly crafting the actual maps!

[Ludipe]

Update #22 : The sweet "King in Yellow"

Hey everybody! This new update is very special for two reasons. First of all, you'll soon discover it's a very personal story, second, because this one was written by Ángel Luis Sucasas, the writer working in 'A Place for the Unwilling'.

The whole team is always doing a constant research for 'A Place for the Unwilling', while doing this, something happened to Ángel over the last month and he wanted to tell you the whole story.

(If you don't know what the 'King in Yellow' is better click here before reading the update)

---

I don’t think that anyone who’d read 'The King in Yellow' would think that sweet is a word that describes the master work of R.W. Chambers. Dreadful, maybe. Terrifying, for sure. Morbid is probably my favorite. But sweet… Come on! Cosmic horror isn't something you'd want to cuddle with.

And yet, life always catches you off guard. After my experiences researching every attempt of recreating the theatrical play of the Ancient God in tattered yellow robes, I can say that sweet is also a suitable word for 'The King in Yellow'.

It all began with madness. I told the rest of the team how cool would it be to have an actual representation of 'The King in Yellow' in 'A Place For the Unwilling'. Two full acts of the play that, if one should believe Chambers, could make you go mad by the second act. Because AlPixel team is that cool, instead of sending me right to the nearest asylum everyone was on board with making a premiere of 'The King in Yellow', one of our biggest narrative set pieces.

I had a hunch that I wasn’t the first writer in attempting to cast the spell of Ythill, Lake Hali, Hastur, the Hyades, the black stars and Carcosa. I went straight to Wikpedia and suddenly I had a label, 'Reconstructing the Play', that speaks of many versions that tried to recreate the play.
 
There were two in a Chaosium Book called The Hastur Cycle, one by James Blish, another by Lin Carter. I got it on Amazon. There was another one by Thom Ryng, with a beautiful Yellow sign in the cover, published by Armitage House. Also ordered that one in Amazon. There was even the supposed French version, Le roi en jaune, in Lulu. Another fish to my net.
 
The last one mentioned was from an American playwriter and actor, Thomas Tafero. The guy even made a Kickstarter and actually premiered the thing in New York. Yep, it's on Youtube. I discovered the thing, loved it, and knew that I needed the manuscript, that I must have this play to read it countless times.
 
I searched for the Facebook profile of the author. Apparently, it was still active. I was really excited, I really didn’t dig in his Facebook page, getting straight to contacting him. I sent him a private message, telling who I was and why I needed the manuscript.

The very same day, I got this response:

Since then, Cailin and I had become acquaintances. I’ve read Thomas version hungrily two times in a row. It was brilliant. Easily the best of the pack, although I still love Blish and Ryng more classical versions of the play. Thomas did something amazing. He was capable of creating two plays in one. The first is the 'The King in Yellow'; Camilla, Cassilda, written in verse, baroque dialogues, etc. The other one was a brilliant meta turn of screw.
 
Among the troupe of actors playing 'The King in Yellow' in New York there’s an agent of FBI, David Stern, that’s trying to hunt the director of the play, a sort of modern Orson Welles called Michael Tazzerati. So this guy, Tazzerati, proposes the agent the following: he will confess his supposed crimes, a terrible premiere in Venice that ended with the whole audience dead in a fire, but he must let him finish this premiere of 'The Yellow King'.
 
The way Tafero writes this crazy thing is masterful because audience and characters blends in the same horrific fascination of what’s real and what is a scam. Tazzerati seems to be a farceur (clown), an egomaniac artist pretending to have pacts with the devil, or something worst.  We, as audience, identify with FBI agents, and experience the same dream like incredulity he has. Is this guy for real? Are people really disappearing in the theatre? What the fuck is happening?
 
The ending is so frightening I couldn’t close my eyes. It was like 3.00 am. Dark hours. I started the whole thing again, obsessed. Next day I wrote to Cailin and I told her how sincerely overwhelmed I was by his husband version. In return, she asked me to send my message to Thomas' mother and sister. She also told me that I must keep her informed of any advances on both our version and the game.
 
Now you know how it's possible to say that 'The King in Yellow' is, or can be, also sweet.
 
But beware. The one you would found in the game it would be not. Cause Hyades are glittering high in the sky, the yellow sign has been found, and the city behind the moon is on sight again. Think very well if you want to stay for a second act. Madness is a one-way ticket.

---

If you're anything like us you're probably still trying to take in all this. It was surprising and shocking. The whole team thanks Cailin her collaboration and how open she was about helping us, it was truly meaningful.

We're going to say goodbye so you can start reading the story all over again, see all of you in two weeks for the next update! :-)

[Uprising Studios]

Hey guys, not seeing you since gamelab. Glad to see the game shaping up! Eager to see the king in yellow inside the game

[Ludipe]

Hey guys, not seeing you since gamelab. Glad to see the game shaping up! Eager to see the king in yellow inside the game

Hey guys! Yeah, looks like everybody is waiting for "the king in yellow", but we still have quite a lot of work ahead :-P
I'm sure we'll meet soon in another event :-D

Update #23 : Technical mumbo jumbo

Hey everybody!

It's time for a new update and no, it's not Friday yet, from now on we'll release updates on Wednesdays instead of Fridays. They'll still come out every two weeks, so the only thing changing is the day of the week.

This time we're going to talk about some of the technical aspects of the game, we won't be getting too specific but hopefully this update will give you some perspective about what's like working on "A Place for the Unwilling". We'll be focusing on NPC behavior and interaction, but if you think this kind of text appeals to you we'll do more in the future explaining other parts of the game.

Though the prototype was built in a different engine, we have been using Unity for about 5-6 months now. As of today, this is how we see the game when we start the engine.

The yellow lines right next to the fog wall are the edges of the map, once the player collides with one of them the next map gets loaded. Maybe you already noticed that most times we post a map of the city it's over a grid. That's because we broke the city in many smaller areas. Take the rich quarter for example, which isn't big at all, that zone is formed by 12 of these small areas.

Why do this instead of having the whole map loaded all the time?

1) We use assets with a really high definition and we want people to be able to play "A Place for the Unwilling" on modest computers without having to lose its image quality.

2) NPCs would be way harder to implement in a larger space. If a character needs to go from point A to point B we need to find a path avoiding obstacles, as well as refreshing it so they don't bump into another character. Doing this for all the NPCs in the city all the time would take more processing resources and it's more likely to produce bugs or unexpected situations.

With the map divided into smaller areas we can have NPCs wandering around and, as soon as they cross the fog, they'll be wherever we need them to.

Once you start a conversation with one of the NPCs they will stop moving until it's over. As we explained on an earlier  update, we use a narrative engine called INK. So basically what's happening here is that Unity requests content to INK, which pulls it out from our dialogue files, and then hands it over to Unity. Once we receive some input from the player we decide which piece of content we want to load and send a new request to INK.

This image show just a few lines from one of our dialogue files, which can get pretty lengthy, we already have some of them with over 500 lines. We'll probably go over this in a future update, but let's do a super quick explanation of how the syntaxis works.

Every dialogue is divided in "knots", marked by the blue "===". Think of them as chapters. We can easily target them whenever we want. Each line starts with "NAME:", which makes it look like the script of a theater play and tells the engine who is speaking (so it can highly their portrait).

The second line(the green one) doesn't start with "NAME:", that's because it's not something supposed to be displayed, it's just indicating a new value for a given variable. In this case we're setting "sombra_AUGUST" to false, triggering a small cinematic in which the shadow will go away and we'll see the character who was under it.

There's also a grey line. The engine will skip these as they're just comments left by the writers, either to remind themselves why they wrote something or to tag something that couldn't be completed at the time for some reason.

Finally, lines starting with "+" or "*" are player choices. When the engine reaches one of these it'll display all of them and, once the player chooses, it will carry out whatever actions we have added to the right (from displaying a new line to changing a value, targeting a new know or ending the dialogue).

INK is very powerful and allows us to create functions and complex behaviors, these were just the most basic tools we use while creating dialogues in "A Place for the Unwilling".


And that's it for today! Once again, do tell us if you found it interesting or what kind of content you'd like to see featured on future updates. We'll be back in two weeks, in the meantime, you'll always be able to find us on twitter or reach us through [email protected]

[Ludipe]

Update #24 : What happened to the writers?

Hey everybody!

Three months ago we published a devlog update called "The many voices of the city". Those who missed it can read it here.

In that update we announced that we would work with a team of 15 writers. Back then we had only a small profile of the characters who appear on "A Place for the Unwilling", about 300 words for each of them, in which we described personality, short background and the details we felt were most important.

Some of you have asked us what happened to all that and how it's influencing the game, well, here we are today to explain it!

We sent them a document with many questions to answer about the character they had been assigned, but some of them decided to prepare a short tale instead or just a monologue. After a few months all the writers had their texts ready. Each of them had written a super-detailed background for each of the characters (about 5.000 words long). We now have plenty of small anecdotes, stories and behavior details that will improve dialogues a lot, making interacting with these characters way more interesting.

We put everything together and turns out that, in this stage of development, we have over 80.000 words of lore for the world of "A Place for the Unwilling", a bit more than "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone".

As this content kept growing it became rather daunting(and hard to manage!). Imagine having to go through all those documents every time you need to double check a fact before writing a dialogue or creating a new asset, "What kind of clothes does Doris wear? Huh, I think there was also some info about here on Thomas' file". It was confusing and took too much time, so we finally decided to create a private wiki! Setting up everything wasn't easy, but searching info about a certain topic, location or person is easier now.

We don't want to unveil too much about the background of our cast... but let's go ahead and share one of the tiny anecdotes the writers sent us (one that we like a lot!)

You already know good old Lucas, one of the first characters we ever showed. He's kinda crazy and owns a library in the rich quarter. He is highly introverted and tends to stutter, usually choosing only short sentences. But turns out there's a solution for his speaking issues, he doesn't stutter while singing. He's an opera expert and, whenever he wants to explain something, he simply plays music and sings along. So if a client walks into his shop he might play a piece from Wagner while talking to them.

You won't get to really know a character the moment you meet them, that'll take many in-game days, but you'll slowly discover who they are. The more they trust you the more things they'll tell you.

The writers didn't only work on the backgrounds, they also provided us with more ideas for quests as well as specifying how a certain character might react to a certain player action or decision. Their next task will be to come up with the books that players will be able to find and read while exploring the city (these will cover lots of topics).

Since the writers don't directly work on the dialogues they can work at their own pace, without needing to be coordinated with the rest of the team.

(here's the video we published a few months ago featuring the writers)

And that's all for now! There's a small surprise we'll announce soon, stay tuned and say hi on twitter or through email ([email protected]) if you feel like it!

See you in two weeks :-D

[Ludipe]

We just announced a new teaser, enjoy! (and share it on twitter :-P)

[Grogshot]

Cool teaser, mate!

Can't wait for more!!

[gabrielcarioca]

WOW, I discovered today about this game, so amazing. The game looks beautiful, I love narrative games and you have a lot of potential to create an unique work. Really expecting to see it in the future.

The bad point is that it's only 30% done

Good luck finishing it, I'm expecting it to become a great game I would like to play!

[Ludipe]

Cool teaser, mate!

Can't wait for more!!

Thanks guys! :-D

WOW, I discovered today about this game, so amazing. The game looks beautiful, I love narrative games and you have a lot of potential to create an unique work. Really expecting to see it in the future.

The bad point is that it's only 30% done Sad

Good luck finishing it, I'm expecting it to become a great game I would like to play!

Glad to see you liked our project! It's always hard to say how much work is left, we could even be over 30%, but there's still a long road ahead before the game gets released :-P

Update #25 : 3D Wire, Game Connection and more

Hey everybody!

Today is a bank holiday in Spain and here we are, trying to rest but also doing some work. We are going over the last details of our trip to Paris, yup! we'll be there in about two weeks.

We love attending events, it's a good way to gather feedback and meet devs. We usually go to national events, which are way cheaper for us, but sometimes we're lucky enough as to visit other countries. From now on, we'll try to announce every event we'll visit, in case any of you is around and want to come and say hi. We always take a laptop with us and we'll gladly share with you some exclusive stuff that we still can't show in here.

Last weekend we were in Segovia(Spain) attending 3D Wire (sorry we forgot to announce it on our devlog), an event focused on animation and games. We were there to participate on a round table about indie games along some awesome people. Also got plenty of free time to go around chat with devs and press and enjoy the local food.

Paris is our next stop, we're travelling there for Game Connection, but we might also visit Paris Games Week, that depends on how much free time we have. We'll get there by October 25th and stay for 4 days.

Over late November you'll be able to find us in Gijón(Spain), at the international film festival, where we'll participate in a round table and also give a talk about indie games, our past projects and "A Place for the Unwilling".

After that we might visit Bilbao(Spain), also on November, but we haven't confirmed that one yet.

So yeah, plenty of places to visit over the next weeks. Will you be around any of those events? Do let us know! In the meantime, you can reach us here or on twitter.

We'll be back in two weeks with a new update, next one will be about the art style of the new maps we're currently working on, stay tuned!

[Ludipe]

Update #26 : The foundations

Hey everyone! Since we're flying to Paris today (to attend Game Connection) we're releasing this update (which was writen by Ruben, the game's artist) on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, enjoy! :-)

The city in “A Place for the Unwilling” is, without a doubt, the most complex and multifaceted element of our adventure, home to the rest of the fragments: commerce, relationships, gossips and the unknown. Therefore, the city must feel alive, organic, shifting and a reflection of the microcosms that lives within its limits.

The story of our metropolis is tied to the ones of the seven great families that once ruled the city, in a tense but sustainable balance, and how the vanishing of five of them left the spectrum broken. Two of these families, the Yellows and the Reds, still play their part, sharing the power and being the key pieces in the big game.

Their great tales, their treacherous parties, their complex and thorough methods to keep spreading their influence (and their tragic defeats and collapses as well); all that lives in the streets and the city's history, its architecture and its constructions. Each quarter is impregnated with the heraldic color of one great family, and not just in a figurative meaning. Each of the three quarters has built its foundations upon the history of one of the great surviving families; its architecture and color palette stands for those ancient rulers. To the eyes of the player, these three quarters can be easily differentiated with a quick glance but, despite this, they still keep their coherence and remain as part of a bigger whole.

Let's quickly analyze these three quarters to understand their vital importance in this matter:

The rich part, separated from the rest by a long and guarded bridge, is a quiet oasis in this crowded city. Urbanistically planned as a residencial area, its streets are wide, with little activity and enclosed by two-story buildings. Homes for single families in its majority, their facades speak of a calm and quiet lyfestyle, free of frights, that only a few ones can afford. The upper class will try to avoid blending with citizens from other quarters, that's the reason why small shops and stores can also be found in here; mostly dedicated to first quality goods and luxury items, gentlemen clubs and tiny establishments where the friendly face of the owner is a quality guarantee.

The poor quarter lays on the oppostive part of the city, the slums, where a richman's shoes would never dare to enter, not even on their carefree flânerie. There are no regulations in here, this part of  the city is reigned by chaos and necessity. Its eclectic architecture, along the cheap waste materials like wood and plate, provide shelter to a great rural multitude that moved to the city after its sudden industrial burst; giving birth to a breathing creature, of muddy shades and incoherently beautiful shapes.

New constructions are born from one day to another between the pointed arches, plate walls or six-story huts with a Renaissance tower on the top. The power of the Yellows and their ancient domain is clearly reflected in this quarter that, as if it were an exposition of macabre curiosities, collects pieces of every past domains only to throw them back to the world among rats and steaming sewers.

Between these two, in no man's land (but still triumphantly dominating)sits the central quarter. Big administrative and residencial buildings stand in the way of the sky. The main and most important buildings are located here, rising in the city's main street and welcoming those who arrive to this place. The Red's influence is easy to see in this area, as much in its color palette as in the burocratic and disciplined nature of its buildings. The city hall, the hospital or the church are three examples of the power gathered around these busy streets. Everyone must traverse them at some point, either due to some procedure at the city hall or to end their miserable lives at one of the hospital's seedy beds. This coming and going of people is the true secret of the central quarter and its unifying nature. The color palettes of the other quarters invide the central streets, like feet being dragged, coating with their essence the streets that connect the center of the city with its bordering quarters.

The architect has left his blueprints perfectly clear and we, at AlPixel Games, will keep placing brick upon brick to accomplish his design and prepare for you the city of “A Place for the Unwilling” just like he conceived it.

[jordanchin]

Wow, these inked in environments are just beautiful. Following this one for sure.