“The staff will be reluctant to let me go again, but I’m not an easy man to confine.”
I have been listening to lots of Irving Berlin to get me in the melancholy mood for post-war Travelling At Night. (I’m a big fan of all this kind of stuff. Did you know Nina’s dress is inspired by one worn by Ginger Rogers in Carefree?) We should get some news about potential music for Travelling this week, which may be extremely exciting. We will reveal those particular details as and when they exist.
For now, I wanted to share our updated character creation screen for the game. It tells you a lot about a lot. Here’s where we are right now:
Click for a larger version.
You choose your Career, then Passion, then put points into selected Skills (based on your Career). This generates a character portrait of Spencer, a little backstory, your ‘Sign’, and builds your starting Aspect Pool.
The trickiest part was fitting so much information on a page. I’m sure many of you reading this – like me! – know the RPG fan’s joy of being presented with a character creation screen and being allowed to choose your attributes and personality and all those tasty things. We can’t offer full visual character customisation: Travelling is being drawn in 2D, so we’d have to facilitate every possible alteration to the base character in all hand-drawn art, animations and UI portraits, as well as somehow making it work with the Outfit mechanic. But we can offer a lot of Aspects / Skills / Passions customisation, which will pretty meatily affect your roleplaying and probable choices in-game. Forgive me if I’m doing Art Maths, but I think that works out at about 108 different potential starting Spencers, which seems quite enough to be getting on with!
Your Sign is allocated right at the end of the whole event, once you’ve chosen your Passion and allocated all points to your Skills. The art for this is not final, and your Sign is probably the most mysterious thing about your whole character. I’ll let AK explain it in a later blog post, but for now it has something to do with your origin story, commedia dell’arte and a key Rosa Mundi activity which will recur at significant moments throughout the game.
You’ll notice that your choice of career affects which starter Passions you’re offered, and that out of the three that appear, you only get to pick one to start with. You can have up to three Passions as you progress through the game, which become available based on dialogue choices and play style. But here’s the full suite of them, in case you want to aim for one Passion in particular! AK is definitely a Melancholy/Whimsy build; I’m probably an Ambition/Compassion. What about you?
Click for a larger version.
Lots more coming soon, but we will take a smol break from Travelling to launch the French and Spanish beta for Cultist Simulator tomorrow, along with an early Japanese beta for BOOK OF HOURS. It sounds very odd coming out of my mouth in particular, but I am particularly excited to be able to share the world map…