Tidings from The World (of The Remainder)

Episode 1

Hi there, Ze here. Thanks so much for your support on The Remainder!

To be perfectly honest, we weren’t at all sure if anyone was going to care about our story when we put it online less than a month ago. We’d considered the possibility that no one was going to read it, in which case we might put it on the shelf and work on something else, then return later with fresh eyes to give it another chance.

Since then, the demo has gotten over 600 downloads, that's a lot more than 0, infinitely more!

The support and appreciation from you are making us extra happy that we decided to make this game and psyched to make more of it.

Thank you!

As part of that, I’d like to make a regular major devlog to keep you up to date with what’s going on, what we plan to do, and also what had been happening behind the scenes.

In this episode:

1. What’s in the latest version
2. What’s going on with our community
3. Behind The Scenes - How The Remainder and Ilar were created.
4. Future Plans and Survey

Version 0.16 is up!

-9 New pieces of artwork - some retouched old pieces, some brand new ones.

-A character is getting art for the first time - can you guess who it is?)

-Fixed a bunch of minor mistakes in the texts - and made a lot of dialogue easier to read. You’re already having to solve a mystery, so the text shouldn’t be making your life more difficult, right?

1. Community update

Our discord has 37 members! (Not all humans, but that’s ok.)

It was delightful to chat with people about the game, to hear their thoughts and ideas, and even occasionally theories about what’s really happening in the story. That’s what #theabyss channel is all about.

Discord is also where I asked about what you might want to hear us talk about and got the suggestion for the Behind-The-Scenes topic for this episode.

So join us there and have a vote on what we’ll do in the future with the devlog and the game! It’s also where we’ll start giving away some freebies and bonus items soon. You wouldn’t want to miss that, right?

Behind The Scenes – The Premise

Someone asked me –how the premise for the game, and how Ilar came about, which made me think because it was a weird process that borders on the amorphous and shapeless, so putting it into words was a fun challenge. You may have to excuse some liberties I’ve taken, memory being the gaseous thing that it is.

The premise started from a question—What’s the most interesting story you could tell with the absolute minimum. In our case, we wanted to tell a story within just one room, and with only one character(other than yourself).

This idea likely sprang from our love for simple, engaging stories. Two of these come to mind, an old sci-fi film - The Man From The Earth, and an even older drama called - Twelve Angry Men They both follow the same formula, one room, a few characters talking. No magic, no explosions, no car chases, and yet the stories kept us glued onto the screen and left us wanting more after the curtains fell. They’re easily among our favorite stories.

The other half of the experiment came from our love of gothic horror, real-world mysticism, and mysteries. Dark Souls, Lovecraft, and obscure folklore from around the world lent us ideas for creating a world that’s full of eeriness, mystique, and a feeling of the ancient, the forgotten, the unknown.

We don’t enjoy stories that spell out the answers for you but crave for a puzzle to solve, an adventure that we’re an integral part of. So we tried to glimpse a world where secrets are embedded within things and emanate from them as you walk and breathe. They don’t jump out or shout at you, but catch you from the corner of your eye with furtive glints, then invite you to lean in, peer close, gingerly touch with your fingertips, and feel with the back of your spine.

We married this world and the premise which transmuted into a new question—what if you woke up in a dark world, and forgot who you are or how you got there?

What if you woke up to something imminent and sinister? How would you be able to save yourself?

That was how The Remainder sprouted. Once it did, we kept watering it and pruning off bits that didn’t fit, so that it has room to grow into what it wanted to be. The more we work on the story, the more it does things that surprise us, and we love a pleasant surprise, so we’re looking forward to the next chapter as much as anyone else, I imagine. Maybe more than anyone else.

That also seems to prove one of our maxims—write stories you would want to read.

Origin of Ilar

The germ of the idea for Ilar was somewhat simpler than that of the premise, it was—Ghibli’s Howl, but older and darker.

If you’ve played the game, it’s probably not a spoiler that Ilar seems to be holding back with their words and actions. You get the sense that there’re depths to Ilar that can’t be easily seen from the surface. What’s in those depths? How is it affecting Ilar? How is it affecting you? Is it something that needs to be brought to the surface and released, or is it better sunken and forgotten?

On a more surface note, the visual design for Ilar was Nim and my attempt to make a person as non-binary as possible, in the sense that they possessed masculine and feminine qualities in similar measures, and felt comfortable with both. They could be proud of those qualities, or not care much about them.

You could call the design self-reflexive since we both share those feelings about our own gender.

Future Plans

Chapter 2 is already in the works, we’d like to introduce another major character who snuck into the story and insist on meddling with the circumstances. We’re somewhat wary of the consequences, consider yourself warned.

We’d also like to grow our community and reach more people who would absolutely love The Remainder if they knew about it but don’t yet.

At the same time, we want to give you something nice for being with us and supporting us.

The first things that came to mind were gifts – Artbooks, soundtracks, extra lore, discovered letters, or other stories from The World.

Click on this link and vote on which bonus you most want to get!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/BPYXJYL

We also plan to write a new series of short stories which take place in The World.

I can’t talk about them too much, save to say that they’ll have the same atmosphere as The Remainder and are related to it in some way. These will be made available to our patreon supporters along with other cool bonuses, which we plan to kick off very soon.

Ok, it’s back to the writing-pen with me. Thanks for checking out the devlog! Don’t forget to go vote for the freebie and see you next time!

Ze out.