The Wrath of Whispers is a 1st person cooperative survival game set in a supernatural apocalypse. An ethereal fallout spreads, and spawns paranormal entities.
Survive the increasingly harsh seasons & fallout zones, live off the land & loot abandoned towns, make a home & become self-sufficient as the years become impossibly unforgiving. How long will you survive?
- This is the 4th Dev Diary for the project so I'd recommend checking out the site to catch up on all the info!
Well.. got a few topics to cover in this post of our supernatural survival game, starting with the name change, then I’ll go over some marketing and development stuff leading up to our first funding campaign and beyond. Also, Katie is back to work in health-care, working more hours than either of us have in a long time which means much more of my time will be dedicated to building this game with monthly videos and podcast episodes instead of DoorDashing!
The Game Title
The original name we came up with was Damsel; inspired by thoughts of being a damsel in distress if you’re separated from your friends, but recently we discovered another game already had the title and we somehow didn't notice till now. We spent awhile coming up with a list of dozens of alternate names with the help of the community and damn near every name we liked was taken already, so eventually we decided on The Wrath of Whispers. The name is a bit vague, fitting people's lack of understanding in regards to the apocalypse they're living through; a couple meanings behind it for a bit more context would be that everyone's enduring this wrath by supernatural beings and the fact that this apocalypse isn't playing out how any religion predicted, suggesting that if there was ever a deeper understanding of the paranormal, it was lost over thousands of years of rewritten texts.
Marketing & Development
I have to admit that I underestimated marketing. For a lot of the last month I’ve been focused on sharing info about our project on dozens of different sites and communities, and I still have a few profiles to update. I’ve wanted to make a variety of media content to share our progress and I'm almost at my personal milestone now that I’ve released some videos and a podcast which can be found on the Media page. Now for development I'm working on a lighthouse and dock location, along with a few more props over the next couple weeks; and finally getting into the habit of recording the work for videos along with building up some confidence to do an AMA livestream eventually. In the next week I should have the another DevCast out and I'm hoping in 2 weeks I'll have a quality YouTube video released to catch everyone up with the vision of our game as quick and thoroughly as possible.
By the time that video is ready I’ll have email drafts and a press release ready to send out about the IndieGoGo funding campaign; I imagine I’ll spend a good portion of that first week responding to people and sharing more information about the game. The second demo I’m hoping will be released before the end of the campaign but the scope has increased slightly since I want to include 4 character models for people to choose from for now, but there will eventually be many more presets and we’ll see how far we can take customization when we get there.
Our Funding Roadmap
I’ve been working on this supernatural survival concept in spare time since 2019 with a small break in 2020. We started talking about this project around 2016 and by 2019 most of the game was clear in our head. The Wrath of Whispers will be completed and additional content will be released even if we never receive funding; it might just take 10 years or so, but it’ll get there.
Now we’re hoping to gather enough interest so we can work full time until the base game is complete in maybe 2 or 3 years with plenty of early development demos to try.
This might go in several phases of funding. Right now we’re aiming for around $15,000 to work full time towards a more exciting proof of concept for everyone to try, which may get us greater funding opportunities so we can reach our main goal of working full time without compromises up to the launch of our game, then it can support us from there and we can give back to the community more.
There’s a couple things that could happen during this first campaign, either it goes wildly successful and we can leave the funding open and we don’t have to attempt another funding campaign and we may need to expand our stretch goals, or we’ll receive some funds that will help us towards that goal much faster but we’ll likely have to try another funding campaign once those funds are gone. No matter what though, we can’t wait to get each demo available to people however long it takes, and we’re looking forward to your feedback.
Check out our Pre-Launch page and Discord for access to upcoming pre-alpha builds of the game.
The Wrath of Whispers is a dream project for us that we want to support and build on for decades, even making additions in our old age. I've had this deep passionate goal since around 2008 to create separate post-apocalyptic, sci-fi and fantasy franchises to perfect throughout my life as single games, no sequels just expansions and ports to new platforms. Even better this is a supernatural post-apocalyptic game that looks endless to me. Can’t wait until most of what’s in my head right now might be out in the world in a couple decades or so.
