In the many versions of Little Red Ridinghood that inspired The Path we chose to ignore the ones where there is a Hunter, Woodsman or some such guy who comes and saves Red from the wolf. Instead we chose to make the Woodsman one of the wolves. The Path of Carmen is one of the more hotly argued chapters in our game because it seems to be the most obvious. Obviously we are evil people for depicting a situation where a girl meets a strange man in the woods… a man with an axe. A man who is more interested in obsessively chopping trees than he is in her. And what does she do, she drinks his beer and steals his hat sits by his fire like she owns the place.
The Woodsman is quiet and wants to be left alone in the forest to do what he does best, chop obsessively at trees that never fall. The Girl in White sometimes stops by to make sure he’s okay. Maybe they live in the forest as a family in seclusion?
I just think of him as being square as the cube he was extruded from. He’s not very tall, not really very assertive, And Carmen is waay too much for him to deal with that day.
first, a little music.
[audio:werewolf.mp3]
he’s a bit of a comical fellow. we wanted him and Robin to meet. Robin is the most traditional looking of all our Red Ridinghoods so she meets the most traditional looking “wolf.”
I actually had no problem at all coming up with a concept drawing for him. I sort of knew from the very beginning what I wanted him to be like. big, cuddly, goofy. But damn, those claws.
He sort of passively wanders around. Robin is more agressive than he is. As Robin sneaks up on him forgetting that though he may be “cuddly” he has thoughts and feelings and may not like having a girl ride him like an animal. He is only part animal, only at the full moon, the other part is human, afterall.
click to see it larger
Above, an in process render, the humble beginning of his model and one awesome rendering glitch 😉
These are what we call “reference sheets” and they were what I used to keep on track for the various environments and the effects the wolf has if he encounters the girl and “gets to Grandmother’s House first.” You can click to see a larger version.
The cemetary was one of the very first environments we made. It was featured in the demo we showed at the Independent Games Festival in 2008. We’d had a whole bunch of gravestones and grave monuments, including the angel statue, made by Dragonfly very early on (before we decided not to outsource modeling anymore.) But in the end it turned out we didn’t need them all. Many of these were thus reused in our other game, The Graveyard. We ended up reusing some of the graves I’d made for The Endless Forest too in The Path. Forests and cemeteries, we do that a lot. hmm.
In a few days. I’ll make a larger post about Grandmother’s House… It’s hard to explain a lot about what the Wolf effects on the house “mean” In a way because I don’t want to put too many concerete ideas about it out there. For another because sometimes scratches on a door are just scratches on a door. He digs holes in the ground. He rips apart the bed where Grandmother sleeps. A wolf will be a wolf will be a wolf.
footage from the very very first working prototype of game structure. re-using the girl in white model from 8. shows the way we work. we like to build the game as soon as possible to get a feel for things and then the real design work can begin.
muuuuuch later on. this was a prototype we built to examine character interaction. you can still see the first control interface in this one where characters are directed via buttons on screen. this also contains the experiment we did with a dance game. (i’m still sad we didn’t work that in to the final game somehow.)
there you have it. two ugly game prototypes. it’s all part of the process.
Well, really its just a set we’re uploading on Flickr. It contains treasured bits and pieces from our computers from the development of the game. Sketches, screenshots, little movies, whatever.
Part 2 of our ongoing postmortem is about the design of the game and some of the process we went through to get to what The Path became. The archive is the same story in images.
this has nothing to do with our game.
But Momus posted this song today on youtube.
and i like it.
and it’s called “My Rose”
and its seems very surreal and sad
and we have a character in The Path named Rose (that i think about whenever i hear the name Rose.)
and I listened to his music a lot when I was working on The Path
and…
The merchandising for The Path has been a really home-made affair, despite the fact that we get our stuff professionally printed. We still load up the data on the USB drive ourselves, I pack up each poster and try to give everything a personal touch. We actually don’t make much money from selling these USBs and posters and cards but I am very happy that people who like having a physical product can have one to remember our game by.
The choice to make USB sticks rather than CD’s was a simple one. We wanted fans to have something they could keep using long after they’ve stopped playing. I imagine that you could copy all the data then put whatever you want on the drive for many years to come. I have hundreds of old CD’s sitting in boxes in the attic… we didn’t want The Path to be one of those things. And so far we’ve done 3 editions of the Ruby one, 2 of Rose and this will be the one and only time we’ll print Robin, to keep her edition special.
For The Path’s 1 year anniversary, we are selling the silver USB featuring a sweet little print of Robin that contains the PC & Mac version of the game plus your choice of poster. The Rose (Mac only USB) is marked down until March 28. There are lots of other things on sale too.
(By the way, the things I’m going to post here won’t always be duplicates of the main ToT blog,I’m just making sure everyone gets a chance to get something while the sale is going on. Things will be getting much more tangential tomorrow.)
Hello Path blog. It has been awhile. Well, if you are following along here, over the next 10 days you are in for a treat! And I hope more people will gather ’round.
If you enjoyed The Path or were curious about The Path you may find some interesting insights. We will be sharing with you: never before released materials for your visual pleasure, a post-mortem “making of” feature where we give details on how the game was made. Interviews we’ve done with people who inspired some of our design work on the game. And an important announcement! or two! oh and whatever else comes up… who knows! Anyway, have a seat, follow along on twitter, our facebook page or this blog’s rss feed for updates.
In preparation of our anniversary celebrations next week (on 18 March, The Path will be one year old), we’ve fixed some minor bugs in the language patch. You can download the new version 1.1b2 here. It contains the same languages as the previous version:
Danish translation by Tobias Kosmos and Nicklas Beck Jørgensen
This journal chronicles the making of The Path, a single player horror game developed by Tale of Tales, the game was released in March 2009 and can be downloaded via this website! Contributors to this journal are the game’s main creators Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn.
We hope you will enjoy our candid revelations about the work process. But we do want to warn you that if you truly want to experience The Path fresh, you might want to avoid reading these pages. We cannot garantee spoiler-free content!
