Thicker Than Water is about escaping the clutches of a cult, forcing you to literally harm yourself to work towards a goal that you don’t agree with. The idea stemmed a bit from my prototype, with the movement mechanic for spells now turned into a grid based drawing system for casting spells. The idea being to draw symbols on your hand instead of walking around, to cast the spells you want. It’s simpler, but more approachable.
I also stepped away a bit from the procedural dungeon idea, I’ll come back to that some other time. I decided i was now going to make actual levels with setpieces, and allow me to focus a bit more on a plot of sorts, to fit with the narrative. Part of the reason this project took much longer was simpyl just going through this prototyping phase and experimenting with what felt fun for something short. I don’t know if what I’ve made is exactly fun for everyone, but I had hoped to hit a certain vibe at least.
Play it here: https://gorp900.itch.io/thicker-than-water
2024-10-18:
Thicker Than Water finally got released. I’ve spent more time pushign stuff on social media, reddit, twitter, bluesky, discord. Managed to get more people to check it out than i thought, which is nice. I don’t have much to add to this at the moment as I totally forgot to write this up until like a week after i released it. Really enjoyed making the trailer for it though. I got some help from a friend of mine to make music for the game for me too, his site is at https://synchropoly.com/
Overall, TTW took abot 3 and a half months to make, not including about 3-4 weeks of prototype stuff i did beforehand. This was way way longer than i wanted to put into this. I enjoy where it got to, and i definitly hit some of my initial goal of “doing somethign with 3D to get abck into that groove”, heck i spent so long just redoing 2D art near the end of development that I think i also improved there, or at least found a system for making animations.
2024-09-09:
Thicker Than Water is still under development at the moment, but I wanted to wrtie a bunch of thoughts and my process with it so far. It has currently taken me about 2 and a half months of development, way more than I initially planned for a project like this, but it has me doing all sorts of work I needed to improve upon.
I didn’t have much of an initial idea, other than I know i wanted to mess around with a 3D environment next for a game. I felt like it could be neat to dabble a bit in procedural generated environments too, so I messed around a bit with modular 3D dungeon tiles and made a small prototype of a generated dungeon with some rules on layout and placements of things. I had to next think of what could be interesting to create for this, I needed a cool mechanic for the player. I decided to step away from the procedural generation and make some fun looking dungeons whilst I brainstormed, and an idea hit me. I’ve played a bunch of TTRPG’s in my time, one of my current favourite systems is Mage: The Awakening. In the lore for it, the city of London has a literal labrynth of leylines all across it, mostly made up of weird paths and strange symbols that people don’t notice. The book mentions how Mages in the city tend to follow paths or routes in the city to encounter strange effects. So all of a sudden an idea hit me. What if the player was a mage, and moving across tiles is how you cast spells. The act of navigating the dungeon itself is how you complete your tasks. It was a neat idea, and definitly fit the vibe of a puzzle game. Though the more i dabbled in a prototype for this, the more i became uncertain if it was a fun mechanic or just frustrating. After changing up my idea’s a little bit, I eventually settled with what is now called Thicker Than Water.