One from the Vaults - The Forest: Father - Part 1 (Patreon)

Back in 2009 I had an idea for a game.
Back then it was called "Father".
The setting was medieval fantasy. This is probably the first game I put real effort in.

This was Tusk, the main antagonist and the father of the main character.
The leader of a band of thugs that terrorise the area.

Another shady character was the warlock. I remember drawing this on a Nintendo DS.

And I also sketched a Knight for it.

Time passed and during some vacations that I stayed home I got a different idea.

I started a vote-driven story about a cat roaming a forest.

I had a lot of fun doing this. Letting people vote on what to "type" in the game. Mimicking the old Interactive Fiction games from the 80s.

If you are curious about it, you can read it here: http://theforestif.thecomicseries.com/ 

Incidentally, this is the complete collection of stories I finished:

                    https://comicfury.com/profile.php?username=CaesarCub 

The Father idea of the game was still in my head and at some point I thought it would be interesting to make a mix of both.

Why not just make a Visual Novel with some Adventure Game elements in that forest universe using an engine called Ren'Py.

Honestly I don't think I had any clear story.

I cannot remember it at all.

I worked on it on and off for several years, up to the point I had to update the resolution of the game (and redo the art) because not making the game widescreen seemed crazy.

By the time I stopped working on it (around 2013) I had moved to a different engine (Löve) and it was more of an adventure game hybrid that allowed mouse controls and a text parser.

Despite redoing the art and making a lot of the UI design, the story remained incomplete.
Because I took a "write as you go" approach, and only had some bullet points of things I wanted to happen in the game.

What I did do for this game was lots of backgrounds.

These are some examples of the backgrounds I did.

I decided on a flat style with a bit of geometrization on the shapes which I don't hate.

The game world was meant to be big. This is the map of the first area of the game.
And the colored parts are how much of it I had redrawn in the latest iteration.

I'll focus on the characters on a future post.
While I like the setting of this game, the lack of a clear story or goal is what made it a mess that was constantly getting rewritten and modified.

Hugs
CæsarCub.-