I am shocked and embarrassed to see that we haven’t written a blog post in over a month. Sometimes devs going quiet is a bad thing, but in our case Travelling At Night is really coming along! We’ve decided to slow down the Skeleton Songs podcast recordings to once per month to see if we can get back on our 1-2 blog-posts-a-month ideal. Let’s see if we can make that work.
Firstly and most importantly: we have a release date for Travelling‘s first ever public demo. It’s coming to Steam, and will include all of Antibes and the Sanitarium Aujourd’hui, now all filled and shiny with people you can talk to, items you can craft and innovative ways to annoy Mathis. We’ll announce the specific release date in the near future, but I can tell you now that it’ll be this summer and we’ll be looking for beta testers to try it out in June. We’ll be selecting randomly from our tester list, so if you’d like to be in the running and haven’t signed up yet, do so here!
In the meantime, have a grab bag of things that have been happening while we haven’t been telling you about them. This is a screenshot from our task list last sprint – see! We really haven’t been kicking back and going to the beach. (I don’t go to the beach. I was once heckled by a mime for being too white. A mime.)
We also now have a completed soundtrack for the game, courtesy of Public Service Broadcasting’s John Willgoose, Esq. Excluding diegetic music (like Django Reinhardt playing from a radio), the soundtrack comprises just over thirty compositions called things like ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Fiaker at the Centrale’ and ‘Dinner in the Dark’. With the proviso that none of these tracks are yet mastered and completely finished, I’d love to give you a taste of the soundtrack. So here’s the opening 60s of one of my favourites, ‘The Ministries’.
AK’s creative direction for the track was: “Russian! Orgulous, mighty, ponderously confident, with a metallic or alien shimmer. Menacing but magnificent. Bright-browed workers carry the emblems of a burning red and silver future into the sunrise.” (This is what it’s like working with AK.) John did a brilliant job turning orgulous into audio, I think – the track really gives me chills. Can any of you cultured souls tell me which famous Russian piece he used as transposed inspiration for the opening?
Art has also been busy, getting on with our major locations (Adrien is currently working on Craców, while I have been painting our Convent of the Order of St Sophia Liminal and Mimata’s boucherie and Auberge du Chêne cutaways.)
Finally, for BOOK OF HOURS players, we can share a first look at Travelling‘s isometrified Hush House! You can explore the whole of Brancrug Village, though the war has had a profound impact on this little hamlet since the halcyon days of BoH. And, as you can see, something has happened to the Earl’s Yew, meaning Hush House is not as open as it once was… Anyway, this is Adrien’s work, and it’s totally beautiful:
AK, meanwhile, has been working on all sorts of things that I can’t put in a blog post for him. He’s been writing more of the game, as anyone following his Friday snippets on the subreddit will know. He’s also been reworking outfits so they’re a much clearer and powerful system, adding status effects based on Spencer’s clothing and Troubles, and allowing Spencer to die if he doesn’t address a variety of danger-states like ‘Agonies’, ‘Despair’ and ‘Chrysolepsis’. He’s also been working on code that lets me make our NPCs – let me use a technical term here – pootle about in the world, which will allow me to populate Travelling‘s world with moving, breathing, real-life people for you to interact with. But more on this when the system is ready!
Stay tuned for our announcement for Travelling‘s debut public demo. I really hope you’re going to like it. :3