Devastated Dreams has been announced!
Posted: Wed May 27, 2015 11:01 am
(The text is pretty much stolen from the kickstarter update, so if you already read that, nothing new here.)
Here is a trailer for our next game, Devastated Dreams:
If you’d like to get an overview of our next game, check out this article about it on Polygon.com. I realize it may seem a little weird to send you a link to an interview rather than just talking about it myself, but I’ve actually found that having an interviewer or an editor going through my statements and keeping the ones with the most impact is really helpful. There are so many things I love about Devastated Dreams, but sharing it with someone else always help me refine my message.
With Neverending Nightmares, there were a lot of different aspects to it that were cool to me at least – the personal message, the art style, the audio, the branching narrative, etc. I didn’t know what the best thing to say about the game was since I liked all of it. After doing a few interviews, I learned a lot. The branching narrative didn’t really resonate with people, so I talked less about it as time went on, but the personal message did, so that became the focus of my future PR.
With Devastated Dreams, I feel the same way. There are so many things that appeal to me about the game. It is still very personal. My wife and I are expecting our first child, and it’s actually been quite terrifying. I’m not sure I can really describe how terrifying it can be – how powerless you feel to protect something you love so much that at least at the beginning – is a formless blob. Some pregnancies aren’t viable, and that is a terrible cloud hanging over the excitement of bringing a new life into this world.
Neverending Nightmares was about showing my fears to the world that I couldn’t express any other way, and this game is very similar. My fears now surround my child, which are perhaps more relatable. My OCD magnifies everything of which I’m afraid, and that will always be a battle, but I suspect I’m not the only expectant parent who is terrified that something could happen to my beautiful child. I say beautiful child, but from the ultrasound pictures we’ve seen, it’s kind of tough to tell that it IS a child, but the child is beautiful to me. It is crazy how quickly you feel attached to a tiny collection of cells.
Another aspect of the game that it really interesting to me is the settings in the rural Philippines. My wife is from the Philippines, so I would say I have more interest in the region than the average person. However, I’ve found that it is super interesting, and I think you’ll see when you play Devastated Dreams what I mean. In America, we have legends of vampires, werewolves, Bigfoot, and so on. In the Philippines they have aswang – which is sort of a blanket term for all the different types of monsters. The monsters are pretty twisted – most prey on children born and unborn, which makes them the perfect manifestation of fears for someone expecting a child.
I’m also very excited about the story and the world building we are doing for Devastated Dreams. The Philippines is a developing country, and being a sheltered American, I didn’t really understand how people live in other places. I feel embarrassed for being ignorant, but sometimes you really have to see something to believe it.
I visited the Philippines in 2013, and it was an eye opening experience. When we visited a rural area without electricity, I felt scared. I feel scared a lot, but it’s almost always mental fears tied into worries and catastrophizing. When we were riding in a van along a road in a rural area of Coron, there were no street lights, stores were lit by candles, and there were nipa huts (grass and bamboo houses that are common in the Philippines) in the middle of a dark forest. I imagined myself in one, and I felt a very visceral fear that I was unsafe. There was nothing threatening me, but the unfamiliar and dark jungle felt dangerous throughout every cell in my body. I knew then that it would be a great setting for a horror game. It is also one that would be unique and hopefully eye opening about poverty other places in the world.
The story of the game is a really important facet to Devastated Dreams. Some people were disappointed that Neverending Nightmares didn’t have more of a story. It was meant to be abstract and symbolic like a nightmare you can’t quite understand, but Devastated Dreams is going to be more story based. I love games with great stories, and I think we have a lot of interesting things to say in our new game. To me though, I think story by itself isn’t all games can offer. I want to create a universe that doesn’t fall apart to steal a phrase from my favorite author, Philip K. Dick.
Getting lost in the world of a video game is an amazing feeling. That’s why I am such a fan of Panzer Dragoon and Silent Hill. I feel like I could be in those worlds. That is especially impressive in Panzer Dragoon Saga (on the Saturn) and the original Silent Hill where they managed to create these worlds with polycounts in the thousands. World building can really help a story-driven game. Imagine what Gone Home would have been like without the Christmas Duck, the X-Files VHS tapes off of TV, and a world that really took you back to the 90s. My personal opinion is that it would have been a lot less compelling. I found what the residents in Metro 2033 had to say almost more interesting than the story of the game since it revealed so much about their condition. We want to create something that shows you what the Philippines is like and have a narrative that fits into that. This may sound ambitious, but I think we are creating something really special.
If you are excited about this project, fear not! There will be more information coming. We are looking at running a kickstarter for the game probably in July, and we’d love your support to help polish our kickstarter page, suggest what you’d like to see on the forum. Hopefully my commitment to the backers have shown that I take my kickstarter project creator duties seriously, so the next campaign will be even stronger than this one.
Here is a trailer for our next game, Devastated Dreams:
If you’d like to get an overview of our next game, check out this article about it on Polygon.com. I realize it may seem a little weird to send you a link to an interview rather than just talking about it myself, but I’ve actually found that having an interviewer or an editor going through my statements and keeping the ones with the most impact is really helpful. There are so many things I love about Devastated Dreams, but sharing it with someone else always help me refine my message.
With Neverending Nightmares, there were a lot of different aspects to it that were cool to me at least – the personal message, the art style, the audio, the branching narrative, etc. I didn’t know what the best thing to say about the game was since I liked all of it. After doing a few interviews, I learned a lot. The branching narrative didn’t really resonate with people, so I talked less about it as time went on, but the personal message did, so that became the focus of my future PR.
With Devastated Dreams, I feel the same way. There are so many things that appeal to me about the game. It is still very personal. My wife and I are expecting our first child, and it’s actually been quite terrifying. I’m not sure I can really describe how terrifying it can be – how powerless you feel to protect something you love so much that at least at the beginning – is a formless blob. Some pregnancies aren’t viable, and that is a terrible cloud hanging over the excitement of bringing a new life into this world.
Neverending Nightmares was about showing my fears to the world that I couldn’t express any other way, and this game is very similar. My fears now surround my child, which are perhaps more relatable. My OCD magnifies everything of which I’m afraid, and that will always be a battle, but I suspect I’m not the only expectant parent who is terrified that something could happen to my beautiful child. I say beautiful child, but from the ultrasound pictures we’ve seen, it’s kind of tough to tell that it IS a child, but the child is beautiful to me. It is crazy how quickly you feel attached to a tiny collection of cells.
Another aspect of the game that it really interesting to me is the settings in the rural Philippines. My wife is from the Philippines, so I would say I have more interest in the region than the average person. However, I’ve found that it is super interesting, and I think you’ll see when you play Devastated Dreams what I mean. In America, we have legends of vampires, werewolves, Bigfoot, and so on. In the Philippines they have aswang – which is sort of a blanket term for all the different types of monsters. The monsters are pretty twisted – most prey on children born and unborn, which makes them the perfect manifestation of fears for someone expecting a child.
I’m also very excited about the story and the world building we are doing for Devastated Dreams. The Philippines is a developing country, and being a sheltered American, I didn’t really understand how people live in other places. I feel embarrassed for being ignorant, but sometimes you really have to see something to believe it.
I visited the Philippines in 2013, and it was an eye opening experience. When we visited a rural area without electricity, I felt scared. I feel scared a lot, but it’s almost always mental fears tied into worries and catastrophizing. When we were riding in a van along a road in a rural area of Coron, there were no street lights, stores were lit by candles, and there were nipa huts (grass and bamboo houses that are common in the Philippines) in the middle of a dark forest. I imagined myself in one, and I felt a very visceral fear that I was unsafe. There was nothing threatening me, but the unfamiliar and dark jungle felt dangerous throughout every cell in my body. I knew then that it would be a great setting for a horror game. It is also one that would be unique and hopefully eye opening about poverty other places in the world.
The story of the game is a really important facet to Devastated Dreams. Some people were disappointed that Neverending Nightmares didn’t have more of a story. It was meant to be abstract and symbolic like a nightmare you can’t quite understand, but Devastated Dreams is going to be more story based. I love games with great stories, and I think we have a lot of interesting things to say in our new game. To me though, I think story by itself isn’t all games can offer. I want to create a universe that doesn’t fall apart to steal a phrase from my favorite author, Philip K. Dick.
Getting lost in the world of a video game is an amazing feeling. That’s why I am such a fan of Panzer Dragoon and Silent Hill. I feel like I could be in those worlds. That is especially impressive in Panzer Dragoon Saga (on the Saturn) and the original Silent Hill where they managed to create these worlds with polycounts in the thousands. World building can really help a story-driven game. Imagine what Gone Home would have been like without the Christmas Duck, the X-Files VHS tapes off of TV, and a world that really took you back to the 90s. My personal opinion is that it would have been a lot less compelling. I found what the residents in Metro 2033 had to say almost more interesting than the story of the game since it revealed so much about their condition. We want to create something that shows you what the Philippines is like and have a narrative that fits into that. This may sound ambitious, but I think we are creating something really special.
If you are excited about this project, fear not! There will be more information coming. We are looking at running a kickstarter for the game probably in July, and we’d love your support to help polish our kickstarter page, suggest what you’d like to see on the forum. Hopefully my commitment to the backers have shown that I take my kickstarter project creator duties seriously, so the next campaign will be even stronger than this one.