Remnant Records has now been out for more than a month, and what a ride it has been! We can never thank you enough for your engagement and support.
Still, this is only the beginning of this project. There is a lot more we want to show you, and you’ve already had a glimpse through the roadmap. Here’s a little reminder:
Do note this isn’t an exhaustive list. Expect surprises in the coming months!
One of those surprises is the very subject of this devlog.
RANDOMLY GENERATED MYSTERIES
If you’ve already played the game before, you know how a mission works: you enter a haunted place, look for clues to understand what happened to the people that used to live here, and use the information you’ve gathered to perform the exorcism.
Piecing together the story is the core gameplay of the investigation phase of a mission. For players to keep enjoying it, it needs to stay fresh, to surprise them occasionally, and to be believable.
The system works right now, but some aspects have left me unsatisfied. Here is what’s planned to make it more solid and engaging.
THE STORY OF A PERSON RATHER THAN A LIST OF EVENTS
With missions being procedurally generated, some will inevitably feel better than others. Our goal is to finetune the system to encourage coherent and natural storytelling. Right now, some missions can feel like fetch quests, with every text mentioning an item and being quite disconnected from each other. We want each mission to feel like a complete story that gets unraveled, with the protagonist being our ghost.
One of our solutions for this is the upcoming personality system. Each ghost will get multiple personality traits assigned to them, and the texts they leave behind will depend on those. This will help each ghost feel like a real person with their own personal story, their own way to express themselves, and their very own character.
In the future, these personality traits may even get reflected in the ghost’s behavior during the investigation and exorcism phase. Stay tuned!
NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM
As we all know, people who’ve had peaceful lives don’t become ghosts. However, that doesn’t mean that ghosts should have had only terrible or tragic moments in their lives. We want to put more emphasis on positive events that happened in the ghosts’ lives, and make them feel even more like real people, with qualities and flaws, good times and bad times.
To help with that, we also plan to put more focus on environmental clues. There are already quite a few in the game: all the information you’re looking for isn’t always in the texts. For example, try putting flowers on the exorcism table when you notice that the ghost’s room is full of plants!
MORE OF THE SAME
All those changes are very important, but we’re very aware of what the investigation phase needs the most: more content. All upcoming content updates will include dozens of new texts and new items, to help keep the experience fresh.
AND THE BEST PART: YOU CAN HELP
If, when playing the game, you sometimes feel you’ve been suddenly struck by inspiration… here’s a way for you to leave your mark in the game, and help create more content! We've setup a form in which you can submit texts to be used in the game. Do note: there is no guarantee the texts you send will be used, and they may be lightly or heavily edited.
Your texts don’t have to be perfect, or even complete. Don’t hesitate to even submit simply “ideas” for texts. We’re always grateful for your contribution and support!
Here’s the form: https://forms.gle/dG53ywzbwNqJYVeV8
Everything that’s been mentioned in this devlog is planned for the coming months. That doesn’t mean that’s it: the story system will keep improving over the entire duration of Early Access, and we want to do even more ambitious things with it, though I can’t go into details on this right now. Keep the suggestions flowing, we’re listening!
I hope you enjoyed reading this devlog. More will come, on a very irregular schedule. Don’t forget you can come and chat with us and the community on our Discord.
Yours truly,
EraKles