Intro to By-place development
Hello world!
This story began in 2020, when I first watched True Detective and The Truth About the Harry Quebbert Affair, and conceived the idea of making a game with similar motifs, but in the setting of the Russian wilderness. For maximum immersion in the theme already in 2021 I went to Vorkuta, and then to Kirov, Nizhny Tagil, and single-industry towns in the Chelyabinsk region.
Having gathered inspiration and references, it was time to start thinking about gameplay and prototyping.
Ludum was a great opportunity. We were able to get a team of 2nd year college students where I work and immerse ourselves in the project for the entire 3 days. Anna Russ helped us with the script and the storyline, and Vasily Kashnikov helped us with the soundtrack, many thanks to them.
We took mechanics similar to Disco Ellisium: walking, dialogue, collecting clues, and matching them. The hardest part was putting all the ideas into a short story and making all the systems work together.
One of the main challenges the programmers had was to put together a dialog system where one piece of information would give clues to unlock another in dialogues with other characters. After all, as long as our character doesn't know about an event, we have no logical explanation as to why he can ask about it. The branch of connections and dialogues looked like the picture below:
It wasn't that hard with the location - just take an ordinary courtyard of a Russian provincial and transfer recognizable objects from photos to it by texture drawing and photogrammetry, arrange the characters and... understand that the players still don't understand how to play it :)
But we liked the result, in just a couple of days we got the atmosphere we wanted. From the sketch it turned into a blocking at first, and then into a full-fledged location with all the sets.
In the end it was a great experience to work on an idea and get a working result in such a short time. Huge kudos to the team for their involvement and dedication. Now we are in for a big journey to the full-fledged game - we will have to reassemble the gameplay, prototype a lot and think about how to convey the idea and the essence of the game. So that despite the familiar to every resident of the former Soviet Union aesthetics the very idea of the game would resonate with each person, wherever he is. Wish us luck.