Welcome To The Dark Place News

[p]Hello again, prisoners of the Dark Place![/p][p]It's finally out, after an extra five years! I'm thrilled to call Welcome To The Dark Place done, at long last. This game has been wandering in a no-man's-land for almost a decade; development started around 2017 as my first game outside Roblox. Then it was scrapped and restarted in 2019, and that version is the one I've been working on until today. The project became a Ship of Theseus as I continually learned from it and outgrew it, and now it's a collaboration between myself and many different, less-mature versions of myself. I've yearned to move on and leave them behind. Yet I did not want to throw it out and let it go to waste, so I've finally pushed this project through the finish line. I've had to accept that it will never be complete, and it will never be perfect. [/p][p]This game is a bit of a warning of what can happen when you do not place limitations on yourself creatively--although that was the whole point. I wanted to take advantage of the text-based genre to make a game unlike any other. And it has allowed me to try out bizarre ideas which I would never give a second thought otherwise. But it has also become such an unwieldy, tangled maze; working on it for long periods of time becomes disorienting and disheartening, as if falling into a coma, wondering if there's even a point. [/p][p]However, throughout the world of the Dark Place there are pearls of honesty--moments of sharp, lucidity among the dream-like madness. And the Dark Place has been the spawning ground for most of my other finished ideas, such as The Upturned. So it deserved a proper send-off of its own.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]I will be making improvements and bug fixes over the next week. Most improvements will be to make the game easier to beat and just a tiny bit more forgiving of mistakes, which is an area where I think it falls short right now. (If you are trying to complete it, I would not blame you for resorting to a guide or collaborating with friends.)[/p][p]Thanks for playing, and WELCOME![/p]

Lethal Company was one of last year's surprise horror hits. It was a brilliant dystopian scavenging sim in which you searched cellars for bolts while avoiding the attentions of creatures that hate being looked at, or which only move when they're not being looked at, or which look like your friends, from a distance. The developer's next game, Welcome To The Dark Place, is more about hearing. It's an "open-world, auditory text-based adventure" which mostly takes place in pitch blackness.

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If you've been following the development of Welcome To The Dark Place but not my other games, I have a good surprise for you. Near the end of March, I began working on something called IT STEALS. At the time, it was just a small side-project to Welcome To The Dark Place. But over the course of several months leading up to now, it exploded into a fully sized game of its own.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349060/It_Steals/


So... What has become of Welcome To The Dark Place--has it been abandoned?? (No!)

I think after having my head in the bent and looming spiritual world of the Dark Place for so many months, the wacky, arcadey horror It Steals has been a reprieve to work on. Especially in 2020, when the world has taken off its mask and given us a unblinking look at all its ugliness--I realized this was not the year for Welcome To The Dark Place, an experience that looks inward rather than outward. If that doesn't make much sense, hopefully you'll understand when you play it. Now is not the time for us to travel into the Dark Place.

Instead, It Steals will be the first game I officially release after four years. It's fun. I had fun making it. I hope you'll play it.

[h2]Hello, future captives of the Dark Place.[/h2]

This is just me checking in to note how things are doing with Welcome To The Dark Place, since the last time I posted about it was in February. I suppose a picture is better than words, so here's the map of the Dark Place that I use to keep track of everything in it--don't worry though, this is a heavily blurred version, so it won't spoil you on anything.

I've placed a red overlay onto the map to show my progress: the bright red is the parts of the world that have been almost fully developed. The darker red is the empty space I have yet to fill.


As you can see, a sizeable chunk is ready to be explored, but there's some work still left for me to do.

I've pushed WttDP's potential release date into 2021 to be safe, but it actually could be sooner than that; crazy things going on in the world of 2020 has suddenly allowed me more time than I've ever had before to sit at home and work on this strange game, and so I'm learning how to make the most of it!

[h3]Hello, future stowaways of the Dark Place.[/h3] The release date I planned for has been changed from early this year to later this year. That's not due to any technical difficulties (thankfully) but because I've been dealing with creative burnout. Hopefully I'll be able to put out more interesting updates soon as I get things rolling again.

I've also been realizing how ambitious this game is! The Dark Place is the first true open world I've ever created. I am not going to rush it. It's already great, belly-laughing fun to watch my friends wander through it and die in gruesome ways, but this will take time if I want it to be as expansive and terrible as I dream of.

In the meanwhile, I've posted a new teaser, hinting at just some of the wonderful things you will stumble upon (or will they stumble upon you?) while in your journey around the Dark Place's scenic lakes and forests.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

(For smaller updates on what I'm doing, follow me on twitter @ZeekerssRBLX.)