What’s poppin, interns? It’s your corporate overlords from Aggro Crab Games, with our first ever devlog! 🥳
I’m Caelan, the writer & programming lead on Going Under, and for this first post, I’m going to talk to you about SETTING. Where does the game take place? Who lives there? Does JoblinEats deliver to your neighborhood? It’s time to answer these questions, and more.
Going Under is set in Neo Cascadia, a near-future dysutopia where friendly megacorporations make life a breeze and helpful delivery drones dominate the skyline. It’s a totally subtle satire of rapidly-growing west coast cities like Seattle, Vancouver, and San Francisco. The lore goes that after the Great Megaquake of 2022 which reduced the original Cascadia to rubble, a variety of opportunistic corporations swooped in to rebuild the city from the ground up.
“Cascadia” is a real movement, by the way, based on parts of Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and sometimes Idaho and northern California seceding from their respective countries and forming their own nation. This is the potential future that Going Under takes place in.
Of course, Aggro Crab is based in Seattle, where Nick (Art Director) and I were born and raised. Going Under is very much a game about how the city we grew up in has changed and continues to do so. During college, we were both surrounded by people trying to get into the hotshot startup game, or involved in the tech industry somehow. As soon as we started on the premise of the game, we both knew that we wanted to satirize that lifestyle—that whole way of thinking that drives people to try to make a billion dollars or take over the world with their one killer idea. Please buy our game, it’ll be painfully ironic if we go out of business.
The Neo-Cascadia Flag is the Cascadia flag but instead of a tree its a node tree ooh wow cyberpunk give us money~
Much of the Neo Cascadian city-state is owned by Cubicle, a massive company that dabbles in many industries but primarily runs an online store that ships products instantly to their customers via drone. They’re based off A██████, ████████████████████████.
More recently, Cubicle’s been dipping their toes in the AI market with their premiere Smart Assistant, Avie! She’s ready to help you manage your schedule, edit your resume, cook your meals, do your taxes, raise your kids, and practically live your whole life for you! And the best part is, she’ll never ever listen to your private conversations.
The game begins in the offices of Fizzle Beverages, a successful sparkling water / meal replacement startup that was recently bought by Cubicle. As our protagonist, Jackie Fiasco, performs her duties as Fizzle’s newest unpaid intern, she’ll discover more about the city, the company she works for, the company that owns that company, and the variety of cursed, derelict startups that lie beneath the Cubicle campus.
That’s all for this devlog! Tune in next time, where we’ll tell you something else idk
-Caelan