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Getting into the third year of development after little new gameplay during the last, I'm now focussing on just that. It's a wordy update so maybe boring, but it's nice for me to have it in the devlog!
Story timeSo I've been writing. A bunch. Want a draft of the whole story you play through as you travel back in time before I put anything more into the game. Going well, and I've received some fantastic feedback and criticism that has helped a lot <3
However I won't talk about the past timeline today!
A big change has been decided upon:
They surviveIt was getting too grim, so the narrative now has a brighter outlook to it.
No longer will you meet ghosts and help them find peace, but you'll find survivors and get their testimonies as you help them to safety and solve a mystery.You'll still walk through memories as a representation of the information you get from people, photographing details as a way to interact rather than picking dialogue options. The gameplay stays more or less the same as before but the narrative around it is different.I've figured out a gameplay loop taking advantage of this rewrite, and I'm excited to share it with you!ShipwreckedThe intro cutscene will still start as before with the visual from the lighthouse of the dam in the distance breaking and the water gushing out. Most townsfolk are gathered on the square for a ceremony that you'll see once you traverse their recollections.
Oversized lighthouse in front of the undersized old town greybox, but roughly showing the framing.They find shelter from the water under the harbour wall and are unharmed by the flood, but a noxious haze fills the air and they're forced to flee onto a large ship docked there and end up running aground on an offshore island, unable to go back to look for others who didn't make it out.
A quick 3D representation of the steam ship and the hollows in the wall used for shelter.Business as usualThe player character reaches town, having not noticed the ship in the thick haze and the whining wind as they set off in their much smaller boat to help, wearing that old gas mask to be safe in the foul air.
This is where the game starts and the player gains control.You still meet the same character who had spent the evening feeding birds by the fountain, only they're in the harbour now, having failed to get on the ship in the midst of all the chaos.
My old doodle of this character.This person is in a bad way, but wants to tell you what happened after you get them to snap out of their dizziness with a photo of the birds still alive in the distance, and so you unlock your first memories/retelling of the evening just like before.
Basically, this is the tutorial.Not aloneAfter that another character wearing a gas mask shows up. It's someone I can best describe as a "coordinator" of the town, overseeing the ongoings and dealing with issues, who has stayed behind to help out as well. You get their account of events too (more memories to traverse).
They help you clear rubble off the road to the town square so you can look for more people, and then borrow your little boat to ferry the other character off to safety on the island with the others. The boat is too small to carry more than one driver and one passenger.
Doodle from today of my general idea of the coordinator (bottom) and their grown-up child (top), having in common ocean hair with waves since I want the people to have the same slightly whimsy designs as the town itself!The game loopAnd this is essentially going to be the main gist of the game! You find more disoriented and incapacitated people around town in the haze and you figure out the right thing to jolt them back to consciousness in order to hear their stories while you wait for the coordinator character to return with your boat to ferry them to safety, one by one. The game mechanics of it is that they simply don't get back with the boat until you've gotten memories from a character, and then that character gets to leave town. Rinse and repeat.
So from a gameplay perspective the present timeline is basically like a "hub world" while the past timeline provides the main gameplay (almost like "entering levels" but seamlessly) where as before you listen in on conversations and photograph things of interest as a way to inquire further about them, connect people and events to each other and so on. You can then use these details from the past timeline to approach people in the present timeline.
This way you unlock more of the past version of the town while simultaneously getting access to more of the present version so that you can help more people and, of course, figure out what happened in the first place.
What's that in the air? Why did the dam break? Sometimes seeing something in one timeline can be helpful for the other one as well.
I'm thinking that once you reach the square you can find several people and choose freely in which direction to explore further, and it only opens up more, with variations on the game loop to change things up.
You will no longer be able to affect what happens in the past, but the accounts of events provided by townsfolk don't all match up and you don't always get the truth or the whole story from some of them, and so the story changes as you gather more information.In other newsI doodled a small boat! And then another one. It's a canal boat that follows a rail like a tram. There'll be a couple around town, for purposes of the narrative and the progression. I did the one on the left first before realising they should be able to go in both directions. Maybe the player character's boat will be a smaller version of the first one?
I'll keep writing away on the story for the past timeline and then we'll see how much of it I decide share here and how much will remain a secret until you play the game.
