Category: WIP

see larger versions on The Path gallery page and on flickr

We have released 4 new screenshots of The Path. The other screenshots on the site are quite old by now and the game has changed a lot in this year of production. Once we get to beta (we are very close!) there will be a deluge of images and video. For now, we just want to give you a peek at what we’ve been up to.
ahem, some quotes from a recent text we wrote about the aesthetics of the game…

“You control the avatar, but she also has a life of her own -directed by Drama Princess, a home-brew alternative AI system. The foliage on the trees turns out to be careful arrangements of gothic ornaments. What first seemed like sound effects, is in fact a continuously changing musical soundtrack -created by Jarboe. Random signs of decay on the screen become helpful hints for navigation. The entire forest feels natural but closer inspection reveals its artificiality. This is not the real world. You have entered a fabrication, a story, a memory, a dream.”
…
“Painting with the aesthetic palette of realtime 3D rather than using the medium for the simulation of reality, The Path could not have been made without contemporary technology. Yet it clearly sets itself apart from any other Next Gen game. The hand of the artist shows. Sometimes messy and strange, sometimes verging on the sublime. Harvey and Samyn are not in complete control. A large part of the attraction of game technology is its potential to surprise. Rather than locking down the look of each and every scene, The Path contains systems that alter the aesthetics of the game in ways that the creators may not have expected. To some extent, the players themselves can decide what things look like. Walking down the path, for instance, changes the time of day. Depending on where you enter the forest, you will be wandering through a bright and misty environment or a dark and spooky one.”

And if all that still sounds overly mysterious, hopefully we’ll be able to pull back the veil with some video… soon, soon, soon.

Today we are revealing the final girl in The Path. Scarlet joins her sisters Robin, Rose, Ginger, Ruby and Carmen as playable characters destined for the fate of Little Red Ridinghood.

Scarlet is the oldest of six. The firstborn. In a family with an invisible mother. Quite a responsibility. One that she faces with determination and a sense of duty and pride. She is 19 years of age. She should probably be enjoying what’s left of her youth. But with five younger sisters, one more unruly than the other, somebody needs to maintain order and stability.
Not that Scarlet doesn’t wish to share the burden. Or a moment of silence. A moment of quiet understanding with a soulmate. A moment of true togetherness. Her loneliness is a secret she will take to the grave. Sooner than she may expect.

We have just finalized this character and have added pretty pictures of her to the website of The Path. There’s new portraits of Scarlet in the gallery and a beautiful desktop wallpaper in the downloads section.

Between her studies and the household, Scarlet doesn’t have much time to write in her Livejournal. But feel free to peruse what’s there.

And once again, we are posting pictures of the creative process that preceeded Scarlet in her current form to The Path’s development journal.

That’s it. Six characters for you to play with.
There’s more characters in the game. But for those you’ll have to wait until the game comes out.

Click on the picture for a few screenshots.

These are screenshots of the first phase of the iterative design process we use for development. Basically what we did is create the environment in which most of the game will take place, a first version of the most essential characters, and the interaction systems we had designed beforehand and some that we came up with during development. As you may know from reading this blog or playing our games, we are not very interested in typical game-style interactivity. This is why we don’t simply execute and fine-tune an existing interaction design.

The demo we have now made is more a testbed for possibilities than a prototype for a game. It is used for figuring out which interactions work and which don’t. Which elements enhance the narrative and which don’t. Etcetera. As such it is a tool for internal use more than a public demo.

We have tried to achieve a certain level of polish that may be inappropriate for a pure prototype. We did this on the one hand because aesthetics are very important in the games that we make. But also because it helps us to critically evaluate our work before we move on. We’ve had bad experiences in the past with blocked-out worlds feeling really great and then being disappointed by the fleshed-out version. When the prototype is too symbolic and contains too much placeholder assets, our minds tend to make up too much for things that aren’t there.