A Second RPG, and the First Look at It

The studio has a third project, and unlike the other RPG on this site it is not a concept. It is in development. Its project page went up today with the first concept art on it.

Two untitled RPGs is confusing, so: this is the second one

The Untitled RPG Project with the kid on the rooftop is still an early concept and has not moved. This is a separate game, and until it has a real name it is Untitled RPG Project II. We would rather carry an awkward placeholder than a name we have to take back.

What it is about

A man is looking for his family. All of them. They were together, and then they were not, and now every one of them is somewhere else in a place that will not hold still.

Something is doing this to them. Not weather, not bad luck, and not anything that explains itself. They cannot see it, cannot reach it, and have no way to ask what it wants. So they do the only thing left: they look for each other, separately, from opposite corners of a world that keeps moving under them.

That is the premise, and it is deliberately most of what we are going to say for a long while.

The first concept art

Four pieces went up, and they are not location scouting. They are about what it feels like to be one person inside this.

A man on a dark plain under a sky that has been torn open. A quiet green forest with a seam of white light running up through it. Two cliffs at night, a lantern on one and a small warm light on the other, and nothing at all in between. One ordinary house with its windows lit, standing untouched in a landscape that has no business containing it.

The man is small in every one of them, on purpose. The scale is the point: he is not a hero standing over this world, he is someone inside something much larger that is not explaining itself.

The first pass at this art was four beautiful, unrelated environments with nobody in them. They looked like four different games rather than one story, so they were thrown out. Worth writing down, because that mistake was much easier to see once the story got clearer.

The one mechanic worth naming this early

The world rewrites itself while you are standing in it, and you get a moment's warning first.

That warning is the whole design. Without it, a changing world is just something that happens to you, and being shoved around by a level you cannot predict stops being interesting almost immediately. With it, a rewrite becomes a decision: brace, get clear, or use it. Everything else is downstream of making that one moment feel good in the hands.

What is actually built

Not much yet, and we would rather say so. The engine is chosen and pinned to an exact version: Unity 6 with the 2D renderer, C#, Windows first, controller-first from the start. The project compiles, its code sits in its own assemblies, and the test harness runs.

That is a foundation, not a game. The next target is a short playable proof, a few minutes long, made entirely of placeholders, whose only job is to show that the warning-and-rewrite moment survives contact with a controller. Nobody outside the studio will see it. If it does not hold at three minutes it will not hold at forty hours, and that is much cheaper to find out now.

What we are still not saying

What separated them. What is rewriting the world, and why. Whether any of that gets an answer.

Those are the reasons this project exists, and they keep until the game can show them properly rather than have a website describe them.

No date, no store page, no promises. Just the work.

See you in the next world.