Rivals is a unique twist on the investigation puzzle genre, a cleverly executed evolution of the type set out by Obra Dinn and Her Story. It's the kind of game you'll want to pull out a pen & paper to scrawl your mad thoughts on the page, and that's why I love it!
Owl Skip has constructed a detailed tapestry of fictional history tied together with beautifully recorded custom soundtrack, character biographies and audio logs which you use to untangle the storied account of these interwoven bands.
Like curating your own iTunes library, or digging through wikipedia to piece together the lineage of your favourite band, Rivals effortlessly delivers on the premise of sorting bands and albums into a timeline but peppers it with so much extra juicy detail you'll become lost in its own constructed world.
The game has a good handle on its difficulty curve, with the first chapter being completable with all information available to you, and subsequent chapters expanding the scope to internet sleuthing and riffling through your notepad of hastily scrawled notes desperately trying to make sense of it all.
By the end of the game you will feel like a super-fan at a pub quiz with an intimate knowledge of the subject matter, able to answer any question thrown at you.
Tying into their previous game, Family, Owl Skip clearly has an excellent handle on this burgeoning genre of detective simulation and I'm very interested to see where they take it next!
I tried to make one of those before Ring of Fire and it was such a big job that I quickly gave up due to the complexities of building a convincing forest. I used Quixels megascans to populate the scene on my ArtStation but nowadays I'd grab a couple pre-existing forest packs from the unity asset store to get started, and cultivate your own rendering style, then teach yourself to make your own foliage to build hero-pieces.
If this is your first game I would recommend starting on small indoor spaces like we have here in Ring of Fire, you can grab a bunch of free assets online and combine them relatively quickly or buy an existing scene.
The reason you probably haven't gotten around to it is the idea is too big, pick something smaller first that you don't care deeply about, and make that as a way to learn your tools.
We use Unity as our rendering engine, you can combine it with any number of plugins such as adventure game toolkit + fungus, ink or yarn as your narrative engine. It's not important what 3d package you use but I would recommend Blender 2.8. I use Photoshop for textures, concepts, and store art, but there are free alternatives like Krita.
I'd love to know how you get on, feel free to post about it in our community discord, happy to give you feedback and support!
Hey, thanks for playing! The game forces camera changes for specific narrative moments, so if you never pressed anything you'd get a very loose version of our intended story.
It's certainly an option to consider for the future, but its current implementation (while kinda basic) is true to what we wanted to make. Would love to make a game with directing more of a focus in the future.
