Hey everybody!

Today’s December 7th, a year ago we made public the development of “A Place for the Unwilling” and started our devlog.

(devlog’s first anniversary, yeah! :-D)

When you’re working full-time on a game it becomes a huge part of your life(like really huge), so as the year comes to an end, we can’t avoid getting a bit too sentimental about all that happened since we started: we launched a Kickstarter campaign, added more people to the team, learnt a lot, experimented with new tools, went to several events, met many cool people and even started working with an external team of writers. You get the point, many things have happened even though it feels we’ve doing this for a couple of weeks.

Updating our devlog every two weeks is an arduous task, but one that we intend to keep doing. Many would argue that it may not be worth the effort, but we think it’s a really nice way to stay in touch with the community, like a long regular “We’re alive” note that gives us an excuse to chat with you, report our latest progress and hear your thoughts and ideas about it.

Our devlog kinda feels like a personal diary. Making a game takes time and sometimes you need to take a look back and realize that, even if you feel stuck, the whole project is constantly evolving, something easy to forget when you spend weeks drawing roofs, balancing numbers or coding tiny effects that don’t appear on screen longer that a few seconds.

So yeah, it’s not Christmas yet but we’re getting nostalgic and doing the equivalent of sitcom’s recap episodes, going through some of our favorite updates :-P

During our Kickstarter campaign we were overwhelmed, to say the least. Some updates were quite short as we quickly jumped from one task to the next. “Update #6 - Artistic references” might not look too exciting, but there was one tiny detailed on it that made it special for us. It was the first time we mentioned “Over the garden wall”, a terrific show we adore and that was a great inspiration for our game. We don’t usually talk too much about it but we love when somebody sees our game and says “wow, this reminds me to Over the Garden Wall”.

On “Update #8 - A day in the city” we tried to convey the gameplay of our project, something that, as of today, is something we’re still struggling with. Hopefully once we get the game to more events and put the gamepad on people’s hands we’ll get a bit better at this. When you can’t use shortcuts like “walking-simulator”, “roguelike” or “point and click” the road to explaining gameplay is always winding (specially when you can’t quote games like “Kentucky Route Zero” or “Pathologic”).

“Update #12 : EGX, goals, plans, updates and more” was pretty big, we announced that the team would grow a bit more (Ángel joined us as our lead writer during our Kickstarter campaign) and that we were looking for a programmer (not too long after that Martín joined the team as well). We also talked about our decision to make the cast of “A Place for the Unwilling” more inclusive, if we were going to skip many historical facts on behalf of our story and narrative we might as well use the chance to create a more equal society.

We were pretty excited about “Update #14 : Meet the cast!”. We had reached a new milestone, the cast of characters was almost ready, the pieces were on the board. Just taking a look at all those portraits lined up felt good (it still does).

From time to time we work on something for weeks or months but we aren’t yet at the point where we’re ready to announce it, that’s what happened to our collaboration with the external team of writers that are helping us with the background lore. So after months of planning we released “Update #17 : The many voices of the city”, in which not only did we explain the whole thing, but also uploaded a few videos so you could meet the writers working on the project. This announcement also felt like a huge step forward.

But not every update is about production and the technical process of making the game, every once in a while we enjoy getting side-tracked and making a more narrative-focused text, like in “Update #20 : The origins of the City”. Or in “Update #22 : The sweet King in Yellow”, where we got out of the road once again and told you about a curious anecdote that happened to Ángel while doing some research for the project. There was some internal discussion about the decision to write these kind of updates, as they don’t speak directly of making the game, but we felt they were important for the project and, because of that, should have a place on our devlog.

Sometimes we reveal new stuff in between updates, though that’s not very usual. We did that with the new teaser we released in October. The only video we had before that was the one we made for Kickstarter, which felt really old and it was about time we featured some of the newer/flashier additions to the game. The project is still changing really fast and we’re considering releasing small videos here and there, not trailers or teasers, just short pieces of video that show different parts of the city, but that’s not among our top priority tasks at the moment.

And to warp this up we need to mention one the latest, “Update #27 : The city is dying”, in which we talked about how the city is dying and that’s going into the pitch, which brought some mixed feedback that we’ll need to go over later on.

Everytime you message us after releasing a new update you’re helping us a lot, we’re thankful for every comment! ;-)

These were some of the “bullet points” that sum up our last year. Tell us why do you follow our devlog, what kind of content are you interested in or what would you like us to write about next, we’re always open to suggestions!

There will be one last update before the year ends (in two weeks) but you know how this goes, we’re always around, leave a comment, find us on twitter or just write an email and say hi! :-)

Cheers!