It was always a hope to add animated cutscenes into the game. At one point I (developer Dave) had taken inspiration from Super Meat Boy and tried my hand at animating a scene using Synfig (an opensource Flash-like tool). That didn't work out well enough to go forward.
Karly MacDonald was asked to try her hand at a cutscene. She successfully created a test scene and I successfully integrated it into the engine, displaying it before Level 5 (factory boss fight). This scene never shipped with the Early Alpha tho, because I didn't want players to expect more of them until I knew for sure we could commit to them. While Karly did her job, the remaining scenes were canceled due to the looming unaffordable expense. You can see a video of it here:
https://youtu.be/D5AEZtKtJTQ
The cutscene worked, but the effort involved in just this little scene would have to be multiplied many times over to get a real story going.
COMIC BOOK
So... no cutscenes possible, but did we give up? No! Another approach was conjured up! What if we told the story in another fashion, instead of animated, we could have a series of pages and panels?
Ihor and I sat down over a series of meetings and discussed the feasibility of this plan. We decided we could do 10 pages over a course of two months, and thus we started on it. Ihor created an interested test page set to the pace of his own music:
Then Dave started storyboarding, which was far more difficult and agonizing than anticipated. It took a month of on/off sketching to get a semi-acceptable storyboard. Even then, we changed and tweaked the storyboard as we went and decided to add more pages to flesh out the story a bit more. Finally we ended up with a 15 page comic book that we have finished this week!
[img=http://i.imgur.com/PbRECxr.png]
COLLECTING THE PAGES
As you move Patchman about the game world, you have the opportunity to find each page of the comic book, collect them, and complete the entire set.
PLOT TWISTS AND SHOCKERS
You may be thinking: "But don't I already know the whole story of Patchman? Didn't you write it out?" Yes, you know the gist of it, but not the details, and what's more important, you don't know the source of the whole plan behind the Drones and control of the Sheeple, the origin of Patchman, and more epic plot twists that we won't even hint at here.
As you collect the final pages, the story will tie together, bits and pieces of the game you may have thought were trivial take on relevance, and the full meaning behind the title of the game will make sense.
Furthermore, the comic is only what happened BEFORE the game takes place. So there are more surprises in store as you continue on through the game, including the ending(s).
[img=http://i.imgur.com/ZFHxu3P.png]
NO WORDS CAN SAY
And yet through all this there are no words in the game beyond the title screen and some explanatory menu labels. These are all available for translation to Unicode languages. We did experiment with adding captions to the comics, and we'll leave those as an Easter egg that you can enable by entering a secret code. These can also be translated to other languages.
It has been extremely challenging to craft a game and story without using any words or sentences! We even worry if this will impact the game negatively, but it's one of the early artistic choices we made, and think it leaves room for contemplation and interpretation of the events. Also, after testing and receiving feedback for the comic, a fair share of people complained about the poorly written dialog, and a high majority agreed that the words weren't necessary as the pictures were enough to get the plot points across.
WHAT REMAINS
We still have a lot of work left to complete levels, bosses, integrate more art, endings, special effects, and sound. But we are getting so close to the end and release! "When exactly" is hard to predict as our lead/sole programmer Dave has limited time to work on this (not by choice). There are countless new features just waited to be shipped and played with...
