Hello everyone!
Today we want to talk to you about the story of Idlewild and its main character!
As usual in game development, the story changed a lot over the past months. What started as one person’s vague idea, now gained its own momentum, reflecting everyone who touched it in some way. It is becoming something truly special.
We believe that in order to create a story that resonates with the players emotionally, you must look into your own soul. Find the things that make you laugh and cry, things that you want to share and generously fill your story with those feelings. It can be hard as the most touching and emotional things are hard to bring up to the surface. Another difficult thing is deciding how intricate you want to make it. You can get easily overwhelmed by the desire to make your story beautiful yet too complicated, losing your vision and straying away from the original idea in the process.
We have decided to go for the story that is relatively simple, a casual daily life, without turning it into a heavy drama or tragedy. Nonetheless we wanted it to be simple but sincere, a story that the players can recognize, understand and relate to.
But simple doesn’t have to mean shallow. The hardships and struggles of ordinary life have meaning and depth, and so do our dreams, hopes, desires and little moments of joy. Most of us don’t live in blockbuster movies or magical fantasy legends, but life still can be an adventure if you let it. This is why it feels important to us to tell a simple tale about the journey of life and the search for connection.
The main character of our story is a girl on the edge of adulthood, no longer a child, but still inexperienced with life and human connection. Through unfortunate yet common circumstances, she has become sheltered and withdrawn.
It doesn't take much for a child. Bullying at school. Lack of family support. Misplaced trust or bad choices. Sometimes just one thing is enough, but when they pile up, it becomes hard to find a reason to ever leave your shelter and reach out. Your own mind becomes a trap, narrowing your vision until you feel stranded on a deserted island, undeserving of being heard or understood, blind to others struggling within arm's reach.
But we are stronger than we think. Kinder and more generous than we allow ourselves to be. It takes courage to take that first step, to open up and extend your hand to someone else. Yet it is in your power to change everything. It is hard, but possible.
Our heroine is about to discover this herself – with your help. We hope to create an engaging, responsive story with varied dialogue choices and reactions, making her journey relatable for every player.
We want the player to be able to name the main character when starting a new game, to better connect to her on a personal level. Internally during development, we gave her name Iris. We still haven’t decided everything about her background and it is, along with a plot, still a matter of passionate debates amongst the writer's team. But we intend to keep you posted on its development, let us know what you want us to talk about in more detail!
Talking about visuals, her core design is a compilation of our own features and traits, and just like the story, it changed quite a bit in the process. While we kept most of the initial outfit design ideas, we decided to go with less line art and more painting style with a soft color palette. It is incredible to watch our amazing artists work and see how our ideas shape up and become reality with each brush stroke.
We’d happily make Iris more customizable, add hairstyles and let the players choose hair and eye color. It’s on the roadmap, but how much of it we will actually be able to make into the game depends on how much support we can gather and thus on how much work our artists can put into the project. We have a lot of amazing ideas for the visuals, including customization, but the game will be very “art heavy” as is, so we don’t want to promise you anything we cannot deliver.
As a little bonus from our artists, this is our game mascot. Meet Jaba, the catfrog! He was born on a whim, but we grew to love him and decided to make him a part of Idlewild.
Gameplaywise, we want it to be more than a visual novel. In order to not mislead people, we would like to mention again that there will be gameplay. Character progression, relationship system, unlockable progress, hangouts and activities, and also some simplified RPG elements. We want to make a game that you can play, not just a novel to read. We will also make a post explaining the gameplay down the line, so expect news soon!
Thank you for reading this post! We hope to see you back here for the next one. Next time we will introduce you to some technical features of the development process and show bits of UI. We’ll also talk more about the plot in upcoming posts, without going into too much detail to avoid spoiling the player experience.
Please consider supporting us on Patreon if you want to see this game go all the way to release! You can find us by the name Team Bunny Basket.
Thank you and see you soon!
