Hello, fellow Survivors.
Last week, we talked about our original intentions for the monsters at the core of our game, and how the concept of "Plague-ridden Corpses" came about from a narrative and art perspective.
However, as you'll see in the current Early Access version, the narrative and art concepts for these Infested have once again undergone major changes, and today we're going to show you how and why.
Third Setting: The Journey of a Knight who Vowed to Reclaim a “Holy Relic”
I mentioned earlier that we wanted to give the characters a sense of purpose, and that this led us to the idea of a pilgrim's journey to the Holy Land.
The idea of traveling to a specific location in an apocalyptic situation is a trope that's been borrowed heavily from zombie media, most notably Death Road to Canada, and we thought that if we could create a sort of "Medieval Road Movie" type of setting, we could create a pretty unique narrative experience.
After making the initial stages of that version, we also worked on a rough trailer to show at exhibitions and such. At that time, the title of our game was "Before the Dawn".
However, as we started to flesh it out, we started to get feedback that the experience was a little more bland than we hoped.
We had a long discussion about why it wasn't feeling as emotionally engaging as we initially thought and came to the conclusion that unlike real-time survival games, the stage-based, turn-based tactical genre expects more meaningful objectives to be presented "on every stage".
Whereas in survival games, where things keep changing over time even if you remain still, the environment itself keeps you on your toes without the need for a strong “scripted” crisis.
In turn-based tactics, where you experience each stage in isolation, the experience becomes more repetitive when you feel like, “The enemies change over the course of three stages, but all I'm doing is the same thing: gathering supplies and staying alive.”
To create a little more intrigue in the characters' journey, we came up with the idea of giving them an intermediate goal to collect something a little more “special” along the way to the final ending.
In keeping with the “Medieval” and “Holy Land” themes, we decided to create a “Holy Relic” that would be the only thing in the game with “Supernatural” powers.
At this point, we were implementing the Choice system for expressing humanity that we shared in the previous archive, so we needed a “Protagonist character" who would be the "Agent of Choice".
So naturally, the whole narrative went from being a “road movie of ordinary medieval people” to a “journey of a knight sworn to recover a holy relic.” We wanted to tell the story of a knight in an apocalyptic situation who has to retrieve a holy relic, meeting various companions and facing various dilemmas along the way.
The knight would later become the inspiration for the main character "Willam" in the Early Access version.
Fourth Setting: Remore Struggles Against a “Medieval Unknown Species”
We've talked about this in past Archive posts, as we realized that the cost of implementing an options system was much higher than expected and decided to focus on tactics.
This decision naturally had a huge impact on the narrative foundation. Because whereas in previous versions, "Combat" was a sort of narrative "Means of Survival" and secondary to the overall gameplay experience, in this fourth version it is now the core of the game.
Previously, only the "Protagonist" had a "Combat-specific" class called "Knight" to serve the narrative goal of the vow and to give them more differentiated combat abilities, while other characters were “Generic Medievalists" such as "Monk/Nun," but in the new direction, each class needed to have unique combat abilities...
This led to a design concept for the starting classes that would give the traditional Knight a One-handed weapon specialization with a Shield, the Outsider a powerful damage dealer with a Two-handed weapon, and the Militia a support attack role who used a Spear or Bow.
There was also a need to make the end goal of the game more “Active.” This was because the previous version was a kind of "Storytelling Survival Game" that used turn-based tactics, but the new direction was focused on "Combat" and "Killing Enemies.”
In fact, it wasn't as easy as we thought it would be to come up with a "clean, satisfying ending that the player can choose," while still maintaining the feel of a "Zombie Movie", because we felt that in a world where most people have already been turned into zombies, it doesn't feel natural to have the world go back to normal because you did something, unless there's some sort of convincing setup.
So, it seems that in a lot of zombie-centric narratives, the "Main Antagonists" of the story turn out to be the humans themselves. Whether it's a leader of a group of survivors who takes advantage of an apocalyptic situation to oppress people, or a villain who unleashes his inner psycho he's been hiding when times were good, it's often a "specific group of humans" that drives the story.
The Cultist group we revealed in Early Access was designed to be just that: a group that was "discriminated against by the people of Remore and now taking advantage of the situation for a chance at revenge," with evidence of their brutal "Rituals" to create a sense of crisis and pose a threat to the player base...
However, setting the Cultists as the "Arch-enemy" of the entire game felt out of place - they were good enough as "Supporting Villains" to add variety to the overall experience, but if they were going to be the end goal of the game, they needed to have some sort of appeal or intensity to them.
We believe that creating compelling villains is just as difficult as creating compelling protagonists, if not more so, and we were concerned the cost of narrative expression needed to achieve what we had in mind would be too much, given our "Tactics-focused" direction.
The idea was, "Since this is a game where the creatures are the primary enemies, why not create a new creature setting that doesn't necessarily have to be tied to the zombie sensibility, but could be big enough to be the final boss?"
It doesn't make sense for monsters to have their own intelligence or goals when they're still "Zombies," so a story that says, "You defeated the final boss zombie, and the world went back to normal" feels awkward and forced.
But if there is a separate species of monsters that are not “Zombies” but somethings capable of a kind of “Volition,” and they are “Turning” the humans of Remore into monsters, then it seemed that it would naturally lead to the conclusion that by killing them, we could at least prevent the apocalypse from getting any worse.
However, we felt that it would be good to have an entity that was “Different from Humans” and felt threatening, that couldn't communicate directly with humans, but could still have its own “Rules of Engagement,” so we came up with the idea of an “Insect” concept, an unknown species, focusing on the swarming behavior of ants/bees/etc. We jokingly and half-seriously said, "This is going to be like medieval XCOM...".
If you've been paying close attention to the dialog following Alldris' rescue in the monastery, you'll recall that he mentions something called "Land Eaters" after fleeing the capital city of Broken Rock. These are the ones that must be "Finally Defeated," an insect-like unknown species.
This unknown species emerged through a "Tear" in the sky - the one that "suddenly opened up one day," as the intro suggests - to make the land of Remore habitable for themselves, and they would capture the Remore people and turn them into "Cocoons”. The idea was that these cocoons would hatch and become "Infested" - insect-human fusions like the Knawer, Blister and Skulker.
To express this “Insect-human Fusion” concept, a sort of upper-layer skin texture was adopted, and a design adopted that would maintain the overall human “Body Shape” but express insect features, mainly in the jaw area.
This is how the narrative and art of the "Infested" you see in the Early Access version came to be.
However, as it turned out, this direction would have its own problems! So, along with the current big gameplay changes the narrative concept itself is undergoing its own transformation!
We’ll explain the next step of the concept change in a future post but next week, we’d like to give a little insight into our narrative representation of the Middle Ages, since we have yet to set the stage for our current keywords "Medieval" and "Monsters".
Thank you for sticking with us, and a special big thank you to those of you who commented on our last post for being so supportive!
We feel it is imperative to share our progress and intention in this way as we're about to make some big changes after a long period of no live updates since releasing the game in Early Access, but seeing the players' reactions is very motivating (Because we feel ultimately that these changes are for the benefit of the player!) :)
We'll be posting tirelessly until we can implement and showcase this new direction!
As always, thank you so much!
REMORE