Hello everyone and welcome to the return of our dev diary! Yes, I am aware we're a day late, but life always more hectic than you think after returning from vacation^^ Needless to say, I haven't had much time to work on Adesaw or NEON DARK, but I wanted to share some from the writing side of game dev instead of the game mechanics side. So, after the jump, let's look into NEON DARK's opening monologue! Opening Monologue
NEON DARK will act as a middle point between Horror at Adesaw: Prologue's literary focus and it's more game-intensive sequel, Initiation. NEON DARK will have gameplay elements such as investigating crime scenes throughout Neo-Edo, traveling the city's hole-in-the-wall dive bars for information, and surfing the web to track digital trails of your marks, all of which will depend on your investigative abilities. However, the story will unfold through heavy sections of text, with dialogue interspersed. This game will be somewhere between a visual novel and text-based rpg, but I'm still working out the exact systems. Mostly, I have been working on the story. I've been reading sci-fi books, watching sci-fi movies, and devouring any article or news story faintly involved with such futuristic concepts as AI, machine learning, cryogenics, and the privatization of space. This is informing a lot of the substance of NEON DARK, and the goal of this story is to immerse the player in a world without relying on an intensive graphics engine but rather the written word. With that said, I'm very happy to share an extracted portion of the opening monologue in NEON DARK! A few disclaimers: 1. This is a rough draft and likely to be tweaked 2. This may or may not make it into the final cut of the game 3. The main character's name has been obscured. Please enjoy! "...Soft sheets of rain fall across the crowded alleyway jutting from the main roadway behind. A shamble of shacks and storefront pile on top of each other, each garishly decorated with pulsating holo-signs pushing their wares. To the immediate left is an electric blue fish alternatingly falling into and jumping out of a steamy soy broth. Across the street on the right is a small pig flashing hot pink, the sign below beckoning nameless customers inside for steaming pork dumpling. The street is loud and bustling, and the crammed bar seating is shabbily protected by large sheets of tattered tarpaulin, swaying in the winds of a mid-summer typhoon... ...As I take the offices keys from the pocket of a trench coat, a woman shrieks nearby. She is struggling out of a half collapsed apartment building, bloodied and barely clothed. A man follows her out of the ramshackle residence and screams at her to get the fuck back inside. He waves a knife and doesn’t look afraid to use it. Before anyone has time to react, the mechHead lifts what can only be described as a hand cannon from its holster. It points at the shouting man and bellows a cursory “Hold it right there!” before blasting a hole the size of a baseball through his stomach. It fires a few times more for good measure, and the crowded street erupts in a panic, afraid the mechHead’s programming is malfunctioning... But it quickly sheathes its gun and growls out a “threat neutralized” before nonchalantly setting up a holotape around the man’s body, lying in a pool of his own blood and twitching out the last moments of his existence. A distant siren calls out, no doubt having received a crime-in-progress call from the mechHead’s automated systems protocol. The woman’s sobbing is drowned out as X8 block’s routine cacophony resumes, its denizens quickly forgetting another brutal murder on its streets. Only the detective can hear the woman’s pleas, that the man was her husband and unwell since be laid off at the local biomass facility. The mechHand doesn’t respond; it’s not programmed to handle person-to-machine dialogue beyond a few rudimentary commands. The lights of the street quickly bring me back into focus, filling the crammed alleyway with a riot of multicolored rays. As bright as they shine, they can’t ever quite reach the darkest corners of the street. I pull out the key from my pocket and tap it against the security lock, pretending I saw nothing as the automated bolt mechanism clicks and the door slides open. In Neo-Edo, it’s better not to think too deeply of such things." Welcome to NEON DARK
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