The Ramlord Reborn
Hey everyone. Sorry it’s been so long since I reached out to the community last. I don’t have new media to share or a trailer to reveal, but I still come with good news!
The last few months saw a fast paced, energetic development cycle hit a ceiling. Designs ran off without the story, and many team members came and went. This broke down consistency of development and ultimately, resounded in a failure. We paused development and felt the despair that many teams do when reality catches up to planning faults. I took this time to hone in the story and script, design documentation and focus strategy. Spelos took the time to improve upon our framework of his excellent programming standard and implementation, and we finally transferred our development pipeline directly to github, whereas before we used three pipelines – drive, trello, and dropbox.
This paragraph contains some cult gibberish!
As the story cultivated within this mod is the centerpiece, I thought I’d share some of my reflections writing the narrative. Taking place in a dark and dreary period, I’ve taken to studying some of the more prevalent cults and thematic consistencies there. With a grain of salt from grimoire and allegory, I centered in on the theme of Lucfuge and what allegiance to him meant to the church, at the time. Pairing this with the narrative was interesting, as it allowed me to open up some different ways of approaching the lore in Ramlord. For the astute out there who follow my stories, this means you have an actual historical demon to read about – and it’ll give you insight into the Ramlord in the story.
The narrative that takes place now will center in on the interactions between three characters; Anton, Albert, and Emilia. Much of the world building exposition is carried through a unique flashback system we have, as well as sparse journal entries or even dialog between characters. Our player perspective, as a Witchfinder, is to abhor all of this. We view it with hatred, and it is our job to banish it. However, flipping that perspective in a unique middle series of levels – playing as Emilia – is a planned way to show both sides to the horrors beneath Caecea.
It is uniquely difficult to engage the player in a story if they don’t want to be, so we’ve taken this extended period of time to challenge the previous level designs and pacing, and replaced them with a much shorter but more vertical plan. A few puzzles and unique scares pepper the levels, as to compliment the story or environment taking place around you. In all, about seven levels clocking in around forty minutes to beat is our goal. Very much a playable flash fiction, rather than a full walking simulator.
Conclusion
Our timeline has well enough survived the restructuring of our development process and streamline of approach. We’re targeting an end of year release, with hopefully much more frequent media updates from the team as well as a trailer by end of summer. Thank you for the patience in sticking around with us, hopefully we will all be rewarded for it.
~Glenn, Dark Craft Studios
