It’s hard to believe, but up until a few weeks ago, RLR wasn’t even a figment of our imaginations. But once we got started, the game quickly took shape. The idea came on fairly quickly that RLR should not just be a simple twitch platformer with retro art and a cowboy twang, but a huge episodic 3-act tragic comedy.
We won’t even let you read the initial broad strokes! But clipart.
We threw some ideas around, and knew the very broadest of strokes for the story, and then let it sit. We finished up the first release and let our brains take some time off, which is one of the best ways to build up to another blast of creativity.
After a week of getting websites ready and working on Indiana, this weekend I took a few hours to take our broad stroke ideas and put some more meat on the bones.
A few outlines, lists, and a web of character relationships.
Obviously we want to be open about development here at hatchlight, but this story is so nuts we can only reveal it to you a chapter at a time. Thus, blurry images. The next step we’ll take internally is to develop our characters as much as possible, and get a more finalized outline of each and every major chapter the game will need.
Here are our goals for delivering the RLR story to you:
- The game is 3 Acts; a beginning, middle, and end.
- Each Act can have any number of Chapters that we might need to flesh out the story. Some chapters might just be for fun, but we’d find a way to tie them to the story anyhow.
- Chapters themselves might have minor subplots and “reveals”, like cliffhangers.
- At the end of each Act is a giant reveal that will shake up everyone’s idea of what the heck is going on..
- We will attempt to change the gameplay up over time, and build new features for the game in a logical way to support the story telling.
The cool thing with the way we are presenting story in Rescue Love Revenge is that we won’t have any extended cutscenes to keep you from playing the game. If you just want to beat your friend’s scores and ignore the story, then that’s fine too.
Gamecenter Challenges in RLR
More on Rescue Love Revenge:
Today I fixed the glitch by adding in some geometry to make that spot doable without doing a perfectly-timed double-tall-jump. This really just kicks the issue down the road. We plan to actually fix it soon by better explaining our controls in-game.
