Hello.

A little preamble that's completely unrelated to the game in the title of this post, but Trail of the Wretched just got released on Steam. Download it if you want. Leave a glowing review if you'd like. Alternatively you could leave a negative review, but only on the condition that it is funny. 

Okay, now to discuss the game I'm actually working on.

Narrative Changes

From today onward I'm keeping the narrative stuff close to my chest. One, because I'm pretty terrible at describing my own writing, and two, because I'm of the opinion that the story I'm writing isn't half bad, so I don't want to reveal all the details before it's even finished. Anyway, I'll give you a taste of one the earlier conversations in the game, since it's not exactly crucial to the overarching narrative. You're literally just standing there thinking about ants.

Art

I made a church. A good ol' rural baptist church. I've finally managed to figure out a proper pipeline for modelling and texturing buildings, so this didn't take long to build. That's also good news for the rest of the game, since I can construct the other parts of the town way more efficiently. Unrelated, ProBuilder makes me want to put my head in an oven.

This is the second time I've thrown a church into a game I've made, and it won't be the last. It wasn't my intention while making it, but the church does remind me quite a bit of the first season of True Detective. No idea why. All I know for sure is that spooky religious places are my shit.

This is also where the town's tornado bunker lives.

And this is what that bunker looks like on the inside. I don't know why, but the idea of being trapped in a claustrophobic room with a cardboard cutout of Jesus is quite funny to me. You'll be spending a lot of time here, and I think because of that I'll need to put a lot of effort into making it interesting to look at. It's also missing all the characters you'll meet there, but that comes later. 

I'm dedicating the coming week to polishing the game and filling in all the holes. I want to get it to a state where someone could play the small portion I've made without me looking over their shoulder telling them what to do. Once I've hit that goal, I'll spend some time getting people to play through it. It's more than likely I've made some terrible design decisions, so I need someone to point those out to me before I go ahead developing the rest of the game.

That's all for today. Tune in next week to find out what happens to Cardboard Cutout Jesus.